Friday 2 November 2007

And then, a deafening silence...

Any freeware author thrives on feedback - it's basically the equivalent of money for them. This is doubly so in the highly competitive world of Angband variants. And you see, I haven't had any. So what do you think of the latest Unangband release? Too easy? Too hard? Too boring? Too interesting? Overwhelming? Comments below please...

14 comments:

tormodh said...

Hey, what do you expect? I got it to compile! Er...

I haven't got time to actually try it out - other than that I didn't like the mouse thing (windows).

I'll see if I can dig up a numpad'ed keyboard and kill of a few characters this weekend.

Gavin said...

Like I've sad before I'm a total noob. So I'm dying often, on level one. I've worked out that I need food and light. Now I'm trying to kill for money so I can get better stuff and die less. It's not very successful because I often run into things that kill me in one or two shots. That reminds me.. when I 'x' a monster and hit '?' it tells me target.txt is missing. I'm guessing that's the thing that tells me how strong the monster is ?

help!

Unknown said...

I have just started to play Un. I used to play ToME a lot and had a couple of winners there. My impressions are:

1. Un is harder. But I like that.
2. I like the "areas" as opposed to the full map - I know that you mentioned somewhere that you liked the Z wilderness, but I did not. It was pretty but not fun.
3. Magic realms are confusing. I select "Wizardry" as a specialty - what effect does it have? Seems like I can still learn everything. Which books are wizardry books? But I really like how there are different spellbooks with different emphasis, just I can't figure out which I should study.
4. Please don't implement specialities for monsters. If we're going to have a black orc mage, I'd rather have it a different monster so I can visually see that it's different. Otherwise it becomes extremely dangerous to approach any group without 'looking' at every monster in it. Very tedious.
5. Maybe I'm really slow, but I can't figure out how to use bags...
What's the command for that?
6. Unangband is now my roguelike of choice. Lots of flavour and interesting things. Good job!

Mikolaj said...

Ben,

3. magic realms just determing the books in the shops (and your starting book).
5. 'I'nspect your bag. 'd'rop things from your bag, etc. The bag will always be empty if there are not objects that fit its description
6. me too. :)

Andrew Doull said...

Gavin: ? is the help text which I haven't written yet, that tells you that 'r' is the key you want to press to learn about monsters you are looking at ;)

Andrew Doull said...

Ben: Mikolaj has answered most of these.

3. You only get restricted from which magical realm if you specialise in magic books of that realm, not if you just pick the school. As for figuring out what you should study - pick spells that match your play style, and from no more than 8-12 books - note that the same spell will appear in multiple books. And you might want to check song books that you encounter as well...

5. Anything that fits in the bag will go into it automatically.

In general, though I've written lots of tips and help files, I still need to write more ;)

Andrew Doull said...

Gavin: Oh, and if you're having problems getting started, choose to use warriors, make sure you buy plenty of ammo for your sling, go to Bree and explore the dungeon underneath Bree ('>' when you are in Bree).

jagwio said...

It compiles for me on OS X, but I had to change the type of a variable (I believe - it's late on a Friday and I am going out in a bit - otherwise I would go look at what I did).

I couldn't figure out how to get out of the first town... that may just be me... I haven't had much time to play video games the last few weeks.

It sounds really cool and I enjoy reading about your theories involving rouglikes a lot. I look forward to checking Un out more thoroughly.

humpolec said...

I've played a bit of Nethack and have much experience in ADOM. I guess Unangband would be a good place to start with Angband-likes, as I'd love to play something Tolkien-related.
I have a question though. Where are all the messages? The "xxx hits you" and effects of stepping into a trap? Or reading a scroll? Or what is lying on the ground you step on (e.g. a corpse)? Did you intentionally remove them or is this just some setting, or a bug?

Andrew Doull said...

jagwio: Press < in the starting town.

humpolec: The messages should all be there. Are you playing on Windows? If so, please let me know, and check whether switching easy_more and/or auto_more off in the options menu affects this for you.

humpolec said...

Yes, it's unangband-062-wip7a-win binary.
I turned easy_more off (auto_more is off by default) and still nothing. The only messages I see are prompts asking me about something ("Pick up the xxx?"), also one time I saw a room description.

I found an option to open another window with messages, so I can see them there, but I don't know how to make them appear in the main window.

humpolec said...

Hmm. I turned "Track mouse movement" off and it works now.

tormodh said...

humpolec: In (at least) windows you can turn other game windows (other than main) from the menubar (MSWindows menubar). By going into (un)angband options (press =) then the Window menu (press W) you can set those windows up to show some information all the time (i.e. you can set a window to show messages at all times.)

Andrew Doull said...

humpolec: This was a bug, that should be fixed in wip 7b. There's still problems with the occasional message getting lost, but it shouldn't be nearly as bad.