Shadow of the Wyrm v1.7.2 "Michelagnolo Galilei"(formerly Savage Lands)

[jcd748]

Yeah, the lack of content in the centre of the world is something that's going to need to get slowly addressed over time.  It's something that bothers me a lot, but I keep it there, and empty, as a reminder that I need to fill this in.  My hope is that by v1.0, there will be a lot more to do in the middle.

Was there a .dmp file for that crash?  If so, can you provide it to me? (dropbox link, google drive, whatever)

Ah, so it's just awaiting content, not intentionally designed that way? No rush then. I don't doubt that it will arrive in good time.

As to the .dmp, I assume it must be this one.

It is, but it's 0 bytes, so I wonder if there's something preventing the dump from saving correctly - kraphead seemed to have the same issue above.  Do you remember what you were doing when it happened?

[Samildanach]

No, I've played a few more times since. I don't remember the details.

[Samildanach]

Found some other quests at last.

[jcd748]

Okay, I found the cause of the deities not triggering their death scripts properly in the cosmos.  It was a fun scripting bug: it worked when the function it referenced had already been loaded (by some other script), but failed (e.g., in your case) when it ran after a load and the function it loaded hadn't been exposed yet.

Fixed.

But I found a fun bug, when I stunned Celeste: "Celeste smites himself!"

[jcd748]

Back to monthly updates for a bit!  Thanks to kraphead's diligent work, I was able to find and fix a number of issues.  I'm pretty sure that I haven't caught everything, though, so keep copies of your savefiles and provide me with any dumps you get that generate successfully (> 0 bytes).

The endgame should be much more dangerous now - the combination of changes to cap passive training of Str/Hea/Cha and the change to remove friendly creature generation based on Cha will mean that other strategies will be needed to get through Telari and the cosmos.

Good luck, and please report any issues you run into!

Shadow of the Wyrm v0.7.1 "Neusiedler"
- Version declared October 23, 2017.  Version finalized November 25, 2017.

- Automove now stops on staircases.

- Explosive damage now has an animation.  It also no longer deals
  additional damage to the targetted creature (just the adjacent ones),
  but will now be triggered on any amount of damage, not just non-lethal.

- Dungeons can now have crafting rooms - these contain a tannery, a forge,
  a jeweler's workbench, and a wheel and loom. 
 
- The symbol for tanneries and wheels and looms used to be '^', but this
  made the features look like traps.  With the placement of these features
  in dungeons, the symbol for both of these has been changed to ';'.

- Boats are now less common in the item generation algorithm, wands
  slightly more common.

- Akojo in Stonewall now loads with a coracle, and moves a bit quicker,
  so he can chase you.

- Stonewall and the Far Shore now have a few more missile-based creatures.
  Stonewall has a few goblin pelters and alchemists, and the Far Shore
  has some ogre hurlers.  This makes it harder to grab a pile of rocks
  and tackle these areas unopposed at level 1 (kraphead).

- Offering on an altar no longer trains charisma (kraphead).

- Passive, timer-based ways of training stats (carrying heavy items,
  wearing jewelry, etc) no longer can train the stat to 99.  The new
  maximum is 20 more than the stat's starting value (kraphead).

- Multiple satisfied win conditions (e.g., slaying Amaurosis and doing the
  Godslayer ending) are now tracked properly in the high score file.

- High Charisma no longer generates creatures as friendly.  Instead,
  a combination of Intimidation and Charisma can cause an attacking
  creature to draw back, thereby wasting their turn.

- If the player is an archer, or has otherwise focused on ranged weapon
  skills over melee, The Smith will now give out a gift based on the
  highest-trained skill.

- Fields and cairns now have a chance to generate huge rocks, in addition
  to rocks and stones.

- Victories are now recorded in character dumps.

- More stanzas for "Tel and Floridel".

- Huge rocks are significantly more powerful.

- Poison darts and the various bombs are now shown as ammunition.

- Changed the tile for void to ' ' (space) from '?' so that the screen
  wasn't overwhelmingly ugly when playing in mono mode.

- New creatures: goblin alchemist.

- New items: arrow of ancient magics, bolt of ancient magics, tooth of an
  ancient sea-creature, spine of an ancient horror, massive ferric
  meteorite, Elysian throwing-axe, Elysian throwing-blade, throwing axe,
  throwing blade, titanic heavenly pillar, chaos bomb, antimatter shot.

- Bug fixes:

  - The teleport effect would cause a crash when used on a tile where a
    creature was not present (kraphead).

  - Fixed up some other instances of effects not safely checking pointers.

  - Two-handed weapons can no longer be wielded off-handed (kraphead).

  - Various typos in bestiary descriptions (kraphead).

  - A script bug was causing deities in the cosmos not to spawn the next
    in the sequence in certain cases. (kraphead)

  - The release-Sceadugenga ending can't be triggered if Sceadugenga has
    already been killed.

  - The repop message in the cosmos was clearing the message buffer,
    removing messages about hitting/killing the current deity.

  - Creatures were described as male or female in the bestiary but didn't
    have the sex explicitly set (but defaulted to male), allowing a
    stunned female creature to potentially "hit himself".

  - Certain conditions could cause creatures' statuses to become
    permanent.

  - NPCs' FOV maps could sometimes be accessed before they were supposed
    to be, resulting in null maps and unsafe pointer checks.

[Legend]

Gas clouds suck. 

Other than those annoying buggers, I was enjoying this one for a good bit tonight.

[jcd748]

Gas clouds are there as a challenge - once you know they explode, you start needing ranged options.  On the plus side, their explosions can damage other creatures.

If you don't like gas clouds, you're going to hate goblin alchemists!

[jcd748]

So last night I passed some time compiling SotW for Debian testing (stretch). It was mostly just a question of following the instructions in README.build.linux.

AgingMinotaur, I just got a Raspberry Pi and decided to see if I could get SotW built.  It was surprisingly easy - after installing the various libraries I needed, and remembering that you posted some Debian instructions, I was able to do a full build!  This is my first Linux build outside of my Fedora VM.

Thanks for your previous assistance!

[jcd748]

Small monthly release.  Merry Christmas!  I've been busy with a number of things, but when I've had time for game dev, I've been working on making more classes viable as starting choices.  This time around, I worked on minstrels, who can now pacify enemies with music.  Pacification makes NPCs turn from hostile to dislike, which means that they're not friendly, but won't attack you.  In terms of mechanics, this means that you can still attack them if you want, and not draw the ire of your deity, if you follow a nicer one.

Not sure what I'm going to do with the next release, but I'm thinking about maybe thieves with stealth/hiding/backstab, or something like that.  Suggestions welcome!

Shadow of the Wyrm v0.7.2 "Takemitsu"
- Version declared November 26, 2017. Version finalized December 23, 2017.

- There is now a configurable option to always receive a prompt when
  picking up stacks (Legend).

- In winter, fresh water becomes frozen and becomes safe for movement.

- Minstrel is now a viable class: the Music skill has a basic
  implementation.  Creatures can be pacified - this will cause them to
  stop attacking the player.  They don't become friendly, though.  Their
  hostility is just reduced below a certain hostility threshold.  The
  item status of the instrument can help or hinder the performance -
  vocal performances aren't affected by this.  If the creature isn't
  pacified, it has a 75% chance of being unimpressed (no ill effect),
  with a 25% chance of becoming enraged.

- Certain instruments are more effective for pacifying certain races.
  Vocal performances don't have bonuses for any races, but have the
  advantage of not requiring an instrument.

- Defined a new hostility threshold, "dislike".  Values below this
  threshold that exist within a threat map are not considered for
  attacking, spellcasting, and movement decisions.  This allows NPCs to
  stop attacking while not being considered actively friendly towards the
  player.

- Created a new effect type, Rage.  This provides a melee bonus of +2
  damage (melee), -1 evade, and +1 soak per level.  It also
  prevents spellcasting, reading, and evocation.

- Oracles now have a chance to start out with a spellbook of Rage.

- More stanzas for "Tel and Floridel".

- New items: potion of rage.

- New spells/spellbooks: rage (Mystic).

[ssteam]

Quick feedback:

Just killed Amaurosis on a GiWa. Not bad for an alpha game. I liked the lore books. The world does feel a bit empty, and the dungeons are either too long (almost infinite, if not actually infinite) or too short (just 1 level).

Bugs:
- Avernal bats drop quills. This is... probably not intended.
- After accidentally robbing a shop, all shopkeepers in the world became hostile. I tried to pacify one of them in one such encounter by dropping the unpaid good and chatting to him, and was prompted to pay some ivories. However, after I paid the ivories the shopkeeper was still hostile. When chatted to again he says "Have yourself a look!" as if he's friendly, but he was still hostile. In the end I was forced to kill the shopkeeper.
- All shopkeepers are human. I understand that this is probably less of a bug than more of a "I haven't gotten around to this yet".
- Monsters fight each other too much. Notably, one of the four avernal giants fired an AoE spell as soon as I came into his sight, which promptly aggroed all his brothers and they immediately started killing each other which was highly amusing. Another example is the old dwarven town where the lich kings just pissed off their friends and got killed. Perhaps change it so that monsters aren't quite so easily angered by friendly fire? Personally I would advise removing this feature altogether.
- There's a locked door floating in open space on the level 2 map of Wintersea Keep. It can only be found through scroll of mapping or flight and doesn't seem to do anything.

Suggestions:
- Add w> and w<. Seriously, navigating the dungeons is such a pain.
- Make the hotkeys more like ADOM. This is good for muscle memory as most of your players are probably from ADOM. One particularly bad offender is the "look" key, which is used all the time but requires upper case input. I changed it to x (from Crawl).
- Add the ability to "descend" with >, when flying over open space. Might be a little tricky to implement though.
- Add more secrets! Something like an secret area in the mountain elf village that can only be reached through flight, or a secret chamber on Siriath's level that can only be detected with mapping. (I do realize there are already secrets in the game. I still haven't found the cosmos stone or the key to Zaeda's tower. And I still have to dig around Cithriel...) Also, consider making your changelogs a bit less spoilerous.
- Why don't shopkeepers block doors like in pretty much any other roguelike? This might be a conscious design decision but I really hate it, it's too easy to accidentally piss off a shopkeeper and once that happens there's no going back.
- The whiteflowers quest should be made a bit easier. Currently it takes MUCH longer to get 20 whiteflowers than to get enough corpses for crowning which is pretty silly. Never acutally completed this quest.
- Doing outdoors maps during dawn/dusk/night is super annoying since everything is the same color, making it difficult to tell what is what. It's particularly maddening if you're trying to do the whiteflowers quest. Not sure what you can do to address this problem, though.

[jcd748]

Hi,

Thanks for the feedback!  I really appreciate it!  Often I go months or more without really hearing from anyone, so it's great to check the forums and get a big list of things to work on.

Bugs:

- Bats are currently defined as birds, as flying is defined only at the race level.  I'll change these to animals and allow a creature-level override of flying.  I never noticed this before because I added the feature after I added avernal bats, and they only appear in the Caldera.
- I'll look into the shopkeeper bug.
- Varying shopkeeper races and working shopkeeper racism into item pricing is something I plan to do at some point, definitely.
- Spellcasters are smarter in the next release.  They'll consider the total level of non-hostiles vs hostiles in the area of effect when casting offensive magic.
- Re: Wintersea, thanks for the catch - I'll update that.  The two areas north and south of the staircase were meant to be behind locked doors.

Suggestions:

- I'll add the suggestion to autowalk-to-stairs.  At some point, I want to add a word of recall spell/scrolls to allow you to go back to the last level you visited in a particular dungeon.
- Look has been rebound as e'x'amine.
- Some sort of z-level representation has been on my to-do list for a while.  Specifically, when I get around to implementing Carcassia (the central city) I'd like to have multi-maps: not just NSEW, but also up-down, allowing descent like this.  Very much a long term thing, but would be great fun in terms of puzzles, etc.  The city is on my "must be implemented before I call the game 1.0" list.
- Definitely like the idea of more secrets!  There's also a couple of different endings from the main one - you can either release Sceadugenga from his cosmic prison, destroying the universe; or ascend to the heavens and become the Godslayer.  But ludicrous amounts of secrets are what make games fun, so I'll be sure to keep thinking about adding more.
- I'll adjust the number of whiteflowers required to complete the quest.
- Shopkeepers should be more obvious about the consequences of leaving with unpaid goods.  I'll look into that.
- That's part of the point of dawn/dusk - it becomes hard to differentiate things.  You can always wait an hour or two and then come back at 8am or whatever.

You're definitely right that the world seems empty.  It is.  It's one of the great problems with the game right now.  There's the pre-set stuff, the random stuff that's mostly just a placeholder and not particularly useful, and...yeah.

Thanks a lot for all the reported bugs and suggestions.  I'll add you to the credits file.  Do you want to be credited as ssteam or something else?

[ssteam]

Thanks for the quick reply and good luck with your development.

Word of recall sounds like an excellent idea. So does Carcassia.

I know there're secret stuff out there that I haven't discovered yet. I still have my save after killing Amaurosis, and I plan to play some more once I'm done playing in the Crawl tourney.

The consequences of leaving with unpaid goods are fairly obvious, but the problem is that the shopkeeper makes no attempt to actually stop you from doing that so it's easy to slip and forget to pay before leaving. It's almost as if the shopkeeper was more interested in obtaining an excuse to kill you than actually doing business (which might actually be true? lol).

One issue I forgot to mention yesterday is that artifact weapons seems a little too biased toward long blades. Bloodsinger is a sword, one of the two artifacts in Wintersea Keep is a sword, the Exile's quest reward is a sword, Heart's Fury is a sword, even the warrior crowning gift is a sword. I would suggest making the different weapon types more balanced.

Speaking of the Exile, this is strictly personal opinion but I think his reaction should be stronger when he learns that [spoiler]his sister had landed on an ogre-infested hellhole and was brutally murdered and eaten. (I believe that's what happened, anyway)[/spoiler]

Also, may I ask what prompted you to make amulets # rather than ' as in most roguelikes? Makes them rather hard to spot in cavernous dungeons since they look like walls.

On hotkeys: thanks for remapping look to x! But there's another one that I found really annoying. The inventory (not the equipments screen) can be accessed to via i -> Y or I, but both requires holding down shift which is quite obnoxious considering how often you need to look at your inventory. In ADOM the inventory can be accesssed by i -> v which is a lot better.

Yes, I'm fine with being credited as ssteam.

[jcd748]

Shopkeepers were something I added a few versions ago and which I keep meaning to flesh out.  The problem with being a one-man dev team with a lot of different interests is that while I make time for SotW, I have maybe 5-10 hours of dev time per week.  As a result, a lot of stuff sits unfinished.  I don't feel particularly bad about this, because I'm slowly making the game I want to make, but I do recognize that it's a pain for players (sorry!).

Amulets matched something - I can't remember exactly what?  I changed it a while ago, I think because having amulets as ' or ` was confusing because of the similarities to open doors.  It's now the same symbol as walls, but there aren't many cases where walls are within rooms, so it's never bugged me that much.

With regards to the Exile, he was set adrift to a tiny little rock that's barely sustained him over the course of too-long life.  He's dead inside; he barely remembers the life he had before.  And if it's any consolation, in my mind, I always pictured her at landing at her own island in the far west, dying at some point, and the ogres are a more recent development.

For the inventory screen, you can actually do i -> y.  You don't have to hit shift.  Both y/Y work.

Artifacts are a little biased towards towards blades at the moment, yeah.  I'll add a note to rebalance at some point.

[ssteam]

Oh, no need to rush. I was worried that you intentionally made shopkeepers not block doors just to screw the player over from time to time. If that's not the case then it's ok

There's usually no walls in dungeon rooms, but in cavernous dungeons walls are all over the place so spotting amulets become difficult.

Thanks for the tip on inventory hotkey. Didn't know i -> y worked too. Although i -> v is still easier to input.

[jcd748]

I would've thought that amulets were generally defined to be made of gold, which should make a yellow '#' and easily visible.  I'll take a look and see what material I've got them listed as.