A find so late by me that I thoroughly hope to be hitting on this just before another meaty release any day now, but this is what happens when people don't yet keep a Roguebasin page going or use Announce in the Newsgroup for whatever unfortunate reason and it falls to my very random checking of a huge bookmarks folder:
http://variaz.proboards.com/index.cgiHi everyone, and happy Halloween! 
As promised, 0.5 alpha patch 2.2 is out, and is one step closer to stop being considered an alpha. Really, it's getting pretty good now!
First of all, I must apologize for the long delay between this patch and the last one. It's been a much larger time gap than I had realized, and I must admit that I'm feeling a bit guilty here... especially since I haven't been doing much, besides playing other games. I've tried many other games, and spent much time playing those. Add this to the fact that I've been busy with work, and not much time has been spent on Portralis. Got tired with the prospect of having to code some annoying parts of the game(some of which didn't need any changes and/or didn't turn out to be difficult at all, like the Bard...), so in the end, I didn't do much.
But now, I do want to return to Portralis. I want to add new quests, and make the game more fun and have a lot of things to do. Some 0.4 classes like the High Mage or the Kensai have yet to return. And some new content desperately needs to be added. I will look forward releasing at least a new patch by the end of the month, not to mention a highly probable "hotfix" patch that will fix what will be broken in the 2.2 release.
So for now, here's a small patch to the game to get things started again. Small patch, but there's three new classes, so that should keep you busy, and give you time to rediscover the game that you may have stopped playing for the last six months, just like I did.
CHANGES
---------
Gameplay:
- Three classes are back: Priest, Bard and Elemental Lord. They have almost
been entirely redone, and they play out differently that they did in 0.4.
So be sure to try them out!
- Music has been tweaked for 0.5. Overall, Charisma cost has been increased,
but the Bard class has plently of Charisma-enhancing abilities, so everything
should work out.
- Charisma and stores discounts works differently. In the previous version,
it was a fixed reduction that could eventually reach 100%, and was applied
to everything, except high end items, like scrolls of instant leveling.
(in other words, it didn't apply to what you'd want charisma for...)
Now, the way it works is that it compares your Charisma to the item's depth
level to get a reduction. You need more Charisma to get a good discount on
high level items than you need for low level ones, but it can now work on
any items. The early game benefits of Charisma should now be much more
visible and significant. However, to get a significant discount on the
scroll of instant item leveling, you will need a LOT of Charisma, and you
probably won't have much choice but to use the Bardic Reputation ability
to help you out.
- An old relic of 0.4 made Magic Blocking counters of enemies MUCH less
effective than Melee and Ranged blocking ones, because Magic Defense was
still lowering the chance of countering. This has been removed, so don't
be surprised if high level enemies blocks your spells more often!
Bugs fixed:
- Fixed an issue with high level boss monsters that caused an infinite loop
and crashed the game. Happened frequently at dungeon levels 60+.
Known bugs:
- Unfortunately, the crashes issues for self-projections(potions, effect songs,
water, lava, etc...) are not completely fixed. I've still encountered a few
intermitently. Just when I thought I finally had a save with the crash,
attempts at debugging it have been futile. The crash goes away with irrelevant
changes to the code, like adding a debug message, and comes back when taken
out... for a while. Then they all went away. I wonder if it's some kind of
memory addressing issue, or something with the way the lua files are
processed... in any cases, this one remains a mystery. Feel free to post save
files that you have with the bug, and I'll take a look at them.
The download place is the same as usual:
https://www.assembla.com/spaces/Portralis/documents
Have fun!
Variaz
For those unaware, Portralis is a special case in that it went so far from Angband that it became something else entirely, which has happened a few times now. Far less common, however, is that it got so....incredibly....over-wrought with Mathematical thinking vs logic that the game got a total reboot after a large step back was taken for gameplay/coding perspective, which this release continues the slow wrangling of----pretty much the only cautionary example of such that I know of in the entire realm of Roguelikes. I recall reading stories of monsters with 4-5 figure+ HPs and multiple lives and all kinds of craziness....
