Almost two months since the last release! There's a little more heft in here than the usual monthly releases - creature AI is improved (creatures can pick up and use weapons, wands, armour, etc, appropriately), you can use ivory to acquire hirelings that will follow and fight for you, and Leadership both allows you to get progressively more experience for your followers' kills, and also makes their attacks more powerful.
I'm hopeful this will open the game up to new kinds of strategies and playstyles!
https://www.shadowofthewyrm.org/downloads.htmlFull details:
Shadow of the Wyrm v1.2.2 "Borrono"
- Version declared July 17, 2020. Version finalized September 12, 2020.
- More name combinations.
- Added support for curses-only configurations in both Visual Studio and in
the premake configurations. These exclude SDL when building, resulting in a
smaller, asset-less build that has no dependencies on SDL (Larzid).
- NPCs may now pick up items if they consider them "good". This depends on
the item type, but in general, NPCs avoid cursed and autocursing items.
- NPCs can now evoke wands, equip weapons and ammunition, and wear rings and
amulets. They can also pick up and wear armour.
- Nobles now start with a higher starting leadership value (40).
- The Music skill now gives experience for pacification, like Beastmastery,
and sets the no-exp flag.
- Pacified/Tamed are now displayed when examining a creature.
- Pacification still works on many creatures, but not constructs, undead,
or the divine.
- There is now a narrative_mode setting in swyrm.ini that restores you to full
health and removes negative statuses at death, allowing you to play for as
long as you want.
- You can now give 'o'rders to your followers, and they'll follow you between
maps if adjacent to you when you left the previous. Your followers will get
a bonus to their attack damage based on your Leadership skill, as long as
you're in their line of sight.
- When NPCs gain levels, they now get extra HP, AP, and damage dice in line
with the progression used in the game data.
- Starting location is now included in the synopsis on the naming screen.
- Hirelings can now be found in a few fixed areas (Isen Dun, Carcassia, Yew,
Gnordvar). Hirelings will follow you - for a fee - and can be ordered around
using the 'o'rder command. They have an enchanted set of initial equipment,
and have improved versions of their initial race and class skills.
- The quit message now references that the game won't be saved (Echo38).
- Villages can have orchards as well as vegetable gardens.
- When unstacking wands after use, the new wand now goes to the front of
the inventory (Echo38).
- Added a bit more heat resistance to Forger, toned down Goblincrusher's
damage a touch.
- The ranged animation is now a little faster (Grond).
- Wands now show the total as well as the current charges, which makes it much
more clear why they don't stack (Echo38).
- Merchants now start with full knowledge of the game's items.
- Pilgrims now start off with 100 Lore, meaning they will always know an
item's B/U/C status.
- Tradesmen are now bold red.
- New poem fragment for the title screen.
- Now that creatures can put on armour, created a new, common weapon (whisper-
thin dagger) that is slightly better than a normal dagger, and has the
piercing flag set.
- Added info on updating the sprites to howdoi.txt
- Max score is now 100000000.
- Reworked the code around applying status identifiers. This is more
sophisticated and can now have multiples of the same status in effect at
once (eg, poisoned by creature/spell, wearing a poison ring) and the game
will correctly undoing the status only when 0 instances of that status
remain in the set of active modifiers. Undoing eg the creature's poison
won't undo the permanent poison associated with the ring (until that's
taken off), and so on.
- The character synopsis now shows modifiers, which are time-based effects that
modify stats or apply statuses. These can include spells, statuses applied by
creature attacks, and those added by wearing certain pieces of equipment.
- Urchins now start with a sling and a handful of stones.
- Stanzas for "Tel and Floridel".
- New items: narcotic amulet (speed penalty, a little soak), voiceless amulet
(mutes the wearer).
- Bug fixes:
- When evoking a stack of wands, the new wand had the old stack size set,
effectively creating a way of duplicating wands.
- Animations (for spells, wands, etc) could be drawn offscreen even if none
of the tiles were in the player's FOV.
- The "seen for automove" flag wasn't being set on initial items, so
there were issues when comparing items and multiple stacks would form
when they shouldn't have.
- The free hidden actions counter could get out of whack. Capped that so
the player couldn't get lots of free actions while safely hidden (Grond).
- Drinking potions off the ground was buggy (Echo38).
- The examine command was giving too much information when the player was
blind.
- The unarmed combat improvement message wasn't firing properly (Grond).
- Various typos in the bestiary and "Tel and Floridel" (Echo38).
- The messages for special in-game days were broken (Grond).
- When plazas were generated, fountains could be generated on wall tiles
(Grond).
- Entering an invalid pickup quantity was causing the turn to advance
(Echo38).