Release 0.7

Posted on November 5, 2011 by Joachim de Groot

More than a year has passed, every minute well spent bringing forth the evolution of NLarn. Thus it is my pleasure to announce a new release of NLarn, awaiting your download on a mirror close to you.

The changes in this milestone on the long and winding road to the perfect roguelike are:

• A monastery in town can heal, remove curses and cure the most common diseases for a little fee. Some special items are available in the monastery’s shop.
• Implemented a “storage room” at the player’s home. It is now possible to store items at home and take them later. The value of items stored there is added to the player’s score when the game ends.
• Scribes in the school of Larn can write any scroll on blank scrolls.
• Stop automatic movement or resting as soon as a monster enters the field of vision, not only when it is on a field next to the player. This should give the player more time to react accordingly.
• Spells that cause effects to the player now extend the effect amount or duration up to (spell knowledge level * base value). Messages are displayed to reflect that an effect has been extended or that the maximum has been reached.
• Added an intelligence requirement to learning spells and extended the requirement for casting spells to 3 * spell level.
• Implemented raising taxes: For every difficulty level above zero the player has to pay 5% of the income, i.e. money deposited on the bank, item sale revenue and interest as taxes. The maximum tax percentage is 20%. Added statistics about paid taxes to the obituary.
• Added traps to containers. Every generated container has a 33% chance of being trapped. Trap effects are:
  • itching (forces the player to remove the armour),
  • sickness (reduces the chance to hit)
  • clumsiness (forces the player to drop the weld weapon)
  • slowness
• Implemented searching for traps on the ground or on containers. Searching is also useful to examine the surroundings while blinded.
• Containers known to be trapped are displayed as e.g. “trapped bag”.
• Enhanced targeting mode:
  • target the closest monster if no previous selection has been made.
  • switch between visible monsters with SPACE.
  • remember the last targeted monster for subsequent targeting.
  • remember the monster last hit with a direct attack.
• Added ranged weapons and ammunition (fire with ‘f’).
• Added new item slots: secondary weapon and quiver.
• Enabled swapping primary and secondary weapon (‘x’).
• Implemented a “paperdoll”, a list of all equipped items (‘TAB’).
• Implemented throwing of potions (‘t’).
• Most potions now work on monsters.
• Made the potion of holy water dangerous for undead monsters.
• Thrown or fired items will be picked up automatically regardless of autopickup settings.
• Added a command (M) to cast the previous spell again.
• It is now possible to pay with money stuffed in carried containers. The leprechaun can now to steal money hidden inside carried containers.
• Tweaked the behaviour of the townsfolk. They will no longer walk around like drunk, do important town people business and only talk when the player is outside a building.
• Started to work on summoned monsters:
  • summoned monsters can follow the player,
  • do not impact automatic movement,
  • its possible to swap positions with them,
  • they disappear after some turns,
  • and killing them gives no experience points. This is a work in progress and not at all completed.
• Added monster’s weapon to monster’s description.
• Implemented a mana drain trap.
• Added dynamic help to the inventory dialog.
• Messages and dialogues can now be coloured, some already are.
• Spell rays or blasts now have different colours.
• Modified effect list display on the right side of the screen:
  • unique entries only
  • positive effects coloured cyan
  • negative effects coloured magenta
  • fading effects coloured red
• Door glyphs now depend on the position of the door. For closed horizontal doors, it is ‘-‘, for vertical doors ‘|’. Opened doors are displayed as ‘/’, but for double doors they become a pair of ‘/’ and ‘'.
• Reduced availability of rings in store at game start.
• Generate amulets starting on level 6 and do not generate a ring every time generating an amulet failed; choose a random item type instead. This should reduce the excessive amount of rings (“ring spam”) available in the game.
• Toggling the visibility of the entire map in wizard mode with ^V.
• Redefined quite a lot of keys, the most important being:
  • ‘S’ -> ‘CTRL-S’ (save)
  • ‘Q’ -> ‘CTRL-Q’ (quit)
  • ‘T’ -> ‘V’ (travel, silly memory hook: voyage)

As usual, some bug squashing included in the process of bringing forth this version:

• Purge dead monsters after player’s extra moves (fixes a nasty crash bug that would occur when the player is faster than an attacked monster).
• Only curse-id blessable items when dropping them on an altar.
• Fixed weight calculation for stackable items.
• Do not mention stationary object on tiles entered while blinded.

With such great changes comes sacrifice: games saved by previous versions on NLarn are no longer valid with this iteration. Also some knowledge about the game might be obsoleted, as numerous key bindings have changed. When in doubt, consult the builtin help.