Urk. I don't know why I thought this one was going to be a quick and straightforward update, but I think I've finally got it all nailed down (famous last words…
). We Apologize for the Delay™:Release 0.2.7 "Equivalent Exchange"
As promised, this release is mostly about Alchemists and the Alchemy skill. Alchemists get the talents Forge Item, Add Ego to Item, Recharge Wand/Staff, Extract Essences and Detach Rod Tip at skill level 1, and can buy the Artifact Creation ability (which has a prerequisite of Alchemy skill 40) to gain the Forge Artifact talent. Assorted notes:
- As in T2, trying to create a high-level item at a low Alchemy skill level has a chance of (literally) blowing up in your face, and as in T2, you can add gold to the process to reduce that chance. Unlike in T2, we provide an estimate of how much that chance will reduce for a given amount of gold; doing otherwise seemed mean.
- I've gone to some effort to prevent the infamous T2 "corpse-ordering" bug, in which the custom artifact finishing process could pull ingredients out of your inventory in the wrong order and make a hash of your inventory (for instance, pulling your dragon corpse for the Slay Evil flag and then pulling something completely wrong for the Slay Dragon flag). To solve this, we have the player explicitly specify the ingredient(s) to use for each flag if there's any ambiguity:Attachment:
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select-ingredient2.png [ 77 KiB | Viewed 3195 times ]
- As part of the preceding, artifact flag ingredients are pulled "live" out of your inventory as you choose the corresponding flags, and put back into your inventory if you change your mind. (I was going to try to clone the player's inventory and juggle that, but I realized that taking one ingredient from a stack of objects would "bleed through" to the real inventory anyway.) Of course, this brings with it the worrying prospect of erroring out of the create-artifact dialog and losing your selected ingredients to the ether, so I've made an effort to be extra-paranoid about covering my bases, including beefing up the ActorTalents:talentDialog() infrastructure to allow a dialog to have an on_error() method to clean up behind itself in case of error.
- The artifact creation dialog also allows "exploratory" testing — which is to say, it won't stop you from selecting flags or setting a pval for which you don't have enough experience or ingredients, it just won't let you finish the artifact in that state. This is a handy way to answer questions like, "How much more experience would I need to bump the pval up another step?" [This is a serendipitous side effect of having to retool the dialog yet again after my travails with atempting nested :talentDialog() calls… ]
- We also borrow the StatusBox UI element from the T4 module for some status messages; I'm pretty sure that's legit license-wise…
For even more fun: Those of you with long memories may remember my ToME:Arcanorum T2 module, which starts Alchemists with an Alchemic Arcanorum that can store essences and disgorge them later for use. Well, that turned out to be massively convenient for my T2 Alchemist characters, so I've reincarnated it as the Alchemic Arcanorum addon.
Also the usual batch of bugfixes, as tracked down by our intrepid bug finders:
- The Inertia Control configuration dialog was just never going to work the way I had it coded.
- Small typo that would have wrecked the Phase Door Spell.
- Was apparently generating Shadow Blades with no pval, which made their stealth flag useless (and potentially buggy if the code assumed the pval was present…).
- I think I was clobbering learned monster info on alertness by blindly resetting it every time the player learned anything about it.
- Further attempts to get wielding items from the floor working.
- Several object categories weren't appropriately flagged as being destroyed by various damage types: arrows and bolts by acid, bows/crossbows/slings by acid and fire, torches by fire, skeleton junk by acid, and empty bottles by cold.
- Uncursing objects was badly broken…
- When you use a void jumpgate and there's a monster standing on the other endpoint, it's supposed to be swapped back to where you came from. Well… it wasn't.
- Cleaned up some detritus from the artifact definitions that was leading to things like artifact weapons being displayed as though they had a base AC like armor.
- Also, it turns out that most artifact definitions don't actually specify the unharmed-by-fire/cold/acid/lightning flags, counting on the definition parsing code to add those in at load time. Which, needless to say, I wasn't doing.
- Was getting stacking badly wrong, as it turns out.
- "Ripple" effects from skill points (like the small boost in Magic skill you get from spending points in Sorcery) weren't being properly applied by the levelup dialog.
- Was botching the check for wielding 1-or-2-handed weapons with shields — specifically, I was assuming there would be a weapon there, which doesn't work if you're only wearing a shield.
- A few activateable ego items were missing crucial bits of activation-related infrastructure, notably Spectral weapons, weapons of the Thunderlords and Dragon horns.
- Thaumaturgy view spells were botched; I wasn't passing the damage type through properly.
- Was messing up knock-back handling from e.g. Tidal Wave or force-based thaumaturgy spells.
- We now make sure we can see an Actor before showing a tooltip for it.
- Was messing up application of the special extra-might racial flags for Hobbits (slings) and Wood-Elves (bows).
- Morphic Oils were slightly broken (by which I mean looking at their description at all threw a stack trace…)
- The "Clear settings" button on the character creation dialog now actually does something useful.
- Exploding ammo was just not not gonna work like that…
- Stores should no longer stock cursed items.
And unrelated extra features:
- Well, possibly not entirely unrelated: while implementing activations in Alchemy artifact building, I noticed I had left a lot of object activations unimplemented. That won't do. Notably, dragon scale mail breaths are now implemented, as are Rings of Acid, Flames, Ice and Lightning (and Teleportation, which I didn't even know about), Amulets of the Serpents, and the last of the tricky fixed artifact activations. Yes, even the One Ring.
- This in turn gave me the various infrastructure bits I need to implement some other tricky things: Rod Tips of Havoc, Scrolls of *Destruction*, earthquake junkarts the various enchant-armor/weapon scrolls, the Music spell Ambarkanta, Dwarves' Find Secret Passages talent, and the Probability Travel effect.
- And as long as I was in the neighborhood of Music spells, I really should have been able to implement Clairaudience before now…
- Also in the area of spells, turns out my check to prevent casting spells that aren't yet implemented is neatly skipped over by wands and staffs. Fortunately, the only unimplemented spell that can appear on wands and staffs was Magelock, so that's now implemented. (Well, mostly; glyphs of warding don't actually do anything yet… ).
- Also among my massive sweep of picking off unimplemented activations was the Rod Tip of Home Summoning. As a courtesy to the player (and to make implementation easier), the rod tip will access the home you've most recently visited, rather than the home in the town you've most recently visited. Not that dungeon towns are likely to have a hidden home in them when I eventually get around to implementing them, but still…
- Implementing the Crown of Numenor's activation revealed that I wasn't populating monster memory for what a monster can drop, which in turn revealed that I wasn't including that information in the monster tooltip.
- The 'identify' and '*identify*' damage types weren't implemented to affect objects on the floor; since *identify* is kind of important for learning alchemy recipes, that's now covered.
- Some race-based and object-conferred talents can be cast from hit points if you don't have enough mana; the talent description now mentions this, and you will be prompted to cast from hit points if you try to use the talent while low on mana.
- Quest monsters now use the same faction markers as uniques (so be sure to update your "Show faction markers" and "Show health bars" option settings accordingly) and include a "(quest monster)" note at the top of their tooltip.
- Un-ID'd wands and staffs with no charges will now pseudo-id as {empty} when you try to use them. This was picked up as part of fixing stacking; {empty} wands/staffs should now stack with ID'd wands/staffs with no charges.
- Objects will now be ID'd when you sell them to stores or donate them to a mathom house. Also, stores, homes and mathom houses should now sort their stock in the same order as player inventory.
Unsurprisingly, this update has a lot of moving parts, and I've got a really bad feeling that it's gonna break messily (especially after the second or third time retooling the artifact creation dialog…
). As always, here is a good place to report the inevitable bugs.And as always, the .team file for the release is available from my site, along with the Subversion repo and WebSVN front-end thereto. And for those of you following along on SVN, the 0.2.7 release branch will get bug fixes for all the aforementioned inevitable bugs.
As for the next release, we have various requests from Steven Aus covering several things not yet implemented, including in no particular order:
- Carrying capacity.
- Runecraft, Necromancy, and the last of the spells that aren't yet covered.
- DeathMold movement and anything else DeathMold-related that I haven't covered yet.
- LostSouls and the Halls of Mandos.
- Various bits of missing map generation handling.
