General > Off Topic
Working on a roguelike...
Sereg:
30 MAR 2019 - Alpha 0.1.2.5:
Save and Exit now also responds to Ctrl-S in addition to Ctrl-X. Improved contrast in several game interfaces. Spell Reagents are now condensed in Inventory, and appear in full detail in the casting menu. Rebalanced amulet rarities and split protection, resistance, and speed into tiers. Increased the power of Partial and Total Eclipse spells, and significantly increased the root duration. Doors which are closed or locked are now highlighted in memory. Added several extra checks against certain bugs.
Alright, got a lot of that done sooner than I anticipated. As far as the bugs, as the changelog says, I added some extra checks, but I was not able to reproduce either of them, so I cannot be certain I addressed the true cause. As always, do please let me know if they persist.
Tormuse:
I haven't played the new version yet; these notes are still for version A0120. (It should probably say the version number in the autopsy to avoid confusion) I was doing fine up until I got overwhelmed in the last room. I tried using an offensive spell from my grimoire, (can't remember what the spell was called) but it didn't seem to affect the Necrocrat. I died while using my starting medicine. (Which I thought was supposed to act faster; at least according to the description; oh well...)
Spoiler: Autopsy (click to show/hide)Autopsy: 30 Mar 2019 23:52:12
Game time played: 0 days 05:34:16.278
Killed by Lemurian necrocrat on level 14
Total XP: 17369
Equipped Items:
an ancient falchion (+2, 4d6+4) [Slightly Damaged]
a blue-tinged grimoire <R>[Har - 100%]
an oil lamp <lamp oil:30%>
a Lemurian noble cuirass [Heavily Damaged]
an amulet of precision
Carried Items:
<315> an ancient falchion (+2, 4d6+4) [Undamaged]
<195> a heavy stone hammer (+1, 10d1+0) [Moderately Damaged]
<105> a text of alchemical wisdom <R>[Lat - 100%]
<330> an ancient chestplate [Slightly Damaged]
<12> an amulet of protection
<9> an amulet of focus
<30> 3x flask [sacred oil] (94%)
<40> 4x flask [fire water] (100%)
<8> 1x vial [medicine] (3)
<96> 6x clay jar [healing ointment] (16)
<80> 10x ancient vial [clear elixir] (20)
<30> 1x clay jug [healing ointment] (8)
<21> 7x vial [mercury] (225)
<44> 11x pouch [bone dust] (425)
<40> 5x casket [Lemurian incense] (60)
<21> 7x vial [scarab ichor] (136)
<56> 14x pouch [sulfur] (341)
<40> 8x cluster [foam-scoured shells] (120)
<66> 11x sac [worm bile] (192)
<42> 6x beaker [cobra's milk] (96)
<25> 5x hourglass [prismatic sand] (110)
<27> 3x satchel [whalebone] (12)
<24> 6x oyster [moon pearl] (96)
<24> 2x menorah [corpse candles] (6)
<14> 2x pouch [frost mushrooms] (14)
<6> 1x shard [splinters of obsidian] (6)
<4> 1x brace [basilisk's eye] (2)
<4> 1x sheaf [manticore spines] (12)
Kills:
75x giant red rat
24x cave worm
5x grave worm
3x corpse leech
31x tomb serpent
11x swarm of tiny scarabs
4x albino tiger
2x vitriol serpent
5x mummified swordsman
3x mummified noble
1x spectral remnant
[checksum: 7200f7b4]
Notes:
Typo in description of "Third Eye" spell, "hopefully, the insight gainedwill prove worth..." (there should be a space between "gained" and "will")
I tried reading a Harappan grimoire while having 100% grasp of the Harappan language. It used up 50% of my lamp oil, even though it showed the message, "You know everything there is to know about the Harappan language." It probably shouldn't take the time (and lamp oil) if you've already mastered the language.
Hey, I successfully used the Mercurial Font spell! Go me! :D (Used it next to an active fountain and it turned clear elixir from the fountain into mercury; previously, I wasted it by trying to use it on a dry font)
I can't figure out how the Transmute spell is supposed to work or what it's supposed to do. It won't let me use it on spell reagents at all and it failed while wasting my mercury when I tried using it on one of my weapons or on my sacred oil. Also, it generated an error message when I tried using it on my ancestral pendant. (And the pendant vanished from my inventory) EDIT: Ah, okay, I figured it out; it turns jars of healing ointment into ancient vials, ancient vials into jugs of healing ointment, and jugs of healing ointment into crystal decanters. EDIT2: Or... maybe not? Now I'm trying it on those same things and this time, it's failing consistently. :( Perhaps you have to not have any of the item you're trying to transmute to? Either I have to experiment more or I need spoilers. :P
EDIT: Oh yeah, I should probably attach the error message. (From trying to transmute the Ancestral Pendant)
Sereg:
I'll fix that typo for the next release - thanks for catching it.
Grimoires must still be read to access the spells contained, even if you already know the language, and this will still take a while - but perhaps it would be interesting to modify total reading time with the player's level of understanding of its language. Of course, the intuitive way of doing this would make studying unknown grimoires take much longer, and known ones the same as current - the base time to read a grimoire, if memory serves, is about 20 minutes of game time, which is really fast proportional to reality. Probably in the interest of gameplay I could scale the time from 10-30 minutes or so alongside 100-0% language knowledge.
Glad you figured out the Mercurial Font - another one of those pseudo-puzzles that isn't meant to be *too* hard for the player to solve, but since I wrote it and know exactly how it works, I don't have a good sense of exactly how easy it is for anyone else to understand it =P
Transmute is intended to take a base item and attempt to improve it to an item of a higher rarity tier. Since recent modifications to the loot system, it no longer behaves as it originally did, and will need a review and rework to force it to behave as intended again. Thanks for including the error message - it's part of the misbehavior from the changes, but it's actually a very specific failure I'll need to address differently from the general problem, and may not have recognized without the error, so I'm glad you sent that.
Tormuse:
The funny thing about the Harappan grimoire in that case was that it was a second copy of the same grimoire I already had with the same spells in it I had already studied... so it made even less sense for it to take time to study it. :)
Sereg:
It also makes no sense to study it in the first place, if that's the case. Studying does two things - first, it gives a chance to learn more of the language the grimoire is written in. If you already knew the language at 100% proficiency, you will not gain any benefit from this effect. Second, it unlocks the ability to cast spells from the grimoire. If you already had a read copy of that grimoire, you already have access to those spells. Note that negative effects, such as sanity penalties that can occur for reading certain particularly eldritch grimoires, can still occur, so studying such a grimoire in this situation is not only pointless, it's dangerous without any compensating benefits.
Currently(and probably permanently - this type of effect annoys me, so I am unlikely to add it to my own game), inventory items cannot be affected by external effects(for example, fire burning scrolls or cold shattering potions, as in Angband and its variants), so keeping a backup of a non-degradeable equipment item like a grimoire does not convey any benefit I can think of. Studying it when you already know the language and have access to its spells is just a slow way to get rid of extra oil =P
All that said, I have introduced knowledge based scaling in the development version along the lines I specified before - half an hour for a totally foreign language, down to ten minutes for a perfectly fluent one. Actual times will probably be faster, since casting speed is the base modifier for the studying action - however, you'll definitely still be consuming appreciable quantities of oil, so there will still be an advantage to studying under permanent light if you have access to it.
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