Posband History and Changelog

Version 0.9.9 17-Oct-05 Alexander Ulyanov

New features:

• Invisibility. Invisibility != high stealth; it doesn't prevent monsters from waking up, but makes their melee and ranged attacks very random. Some monsters (including spiritual beings and those who don't use eyes to see), and high-level uniques are unaffected by invisibility. Invisibility is innate to some races, and is granted by some items and artifacts; some spells/items may grant temporary invisibility. Invisibility effect can also be achieved by standing in fog, and (much weaker) in water or fire.
• As a consequence, monsters can be blinded now. (Perhaps make light/darkness blind them, too? Would be nice to make ?oDarkness useful.)
• All monsters are now invisible in fog. Elementals and vortices are invisible in their native terrain. You can't see through this kind of invisibility.
• Slots are not hard-coded any longer. Creatures with e.g. 20
bodies are possible now -- the only limit is total 23 equipment slots (to fit on the screen).
• Multiple weapons/bows wielding is possible now!
• Possessing a human (e.g. Novice rogue, Swordsman, Patriarch) will now give you all the abilities of his class.
• Fighting/Shooting skills split to Barehanded, Edged weapons, Hafted weapons, Polearms, Axes, Slings, Bows, Crossbows, Throwing.
• *Identify* service now available in the Guild (costs 4000gp).
• Experienced monsters now regenerate faster.
• Abyss grids are more dangerous now. By stepping on it without levitation, you will fall ~7-10 levels down, causing up to 40d8 damage. (No, you cannot fly past levels 99 or 100 that way.)
• Some new "exotic" base item types (Swords of Balrog, Poisoned Darts, etc.).
• Dark Elves now start game with a stack of poisoned darts (many players reported difficulties in early game, before the "specialisation" choice)
• Player gets full monster memory information for his own body.
• It is possible now to invoke help from new form selection screen.
• New splash screen (yes, again -- old one was rather silly). Splash screen and tombstone now have color.
• Linux binary packages for Red Hat and Slackware.
• Ported autoconf scripts from Vanilla (heavily modified).
• Savefiles are now compressed with zlib (if it is available).
• Character notes are now stored in the savefile itself.
• Starburst rooms, new pit types from NPPAngband 0.4.0.
• Maybe other minor changes.

Front-end changes:

• Added "lfb" (Linux framebuffer).
• Removed "ami", "cap", "dos", "emx", "gtk", "ibm", "sla", "vme", "x11" and "xpj". "ros", "crb" and "mac" are unmaintained at the moment -- I may try to rework the display system in the future. Minor changes to "gcu", "vcs" and "xaw" front-ends.

New races: Needs to be filled in

Bugfixes:

• 'C' screen (barely) squeezed on 80x24 terminal. The game should now work properly with small terminals again. Character dump is also fixed. Note that 'C' screen is now 6 pages long :).
• Reforging or randart generation could crash PosBand in randart-only games.
• Skills were calculated incorrectly for all monster/possessor races. Ugh!
• "gcu" front-end has correctly working pseudo-graphics now. Well, in theory at least :) Code from Vanilla 3.0.5.
• Acid/disenchanment couldn't affect items in some slots.
• Randarts which activate for illumination every turn were sometimes generated.
• Tailored rewards fixed. Should now work as expected (that is, give you Really Neat Items Which You Actually Need).
• Randarts' price is now equal to the price of template artifact. Rather crude decision, but selling randarts for ridiculously low prices made the Guild trying to replace all your randarts with the standard artifacts, whether they were actually better or not.
• "Heal Pet" power worked only on neutral-aligned pets.
• The game could try to reward a monster race with a spellbook; since monster races have no spellbook, the game would fallback on random reward.
• Ice and rock squares were nearly invisible. Changed ice to while ` (admittedly not the best solution), and rocks to dark gray :.
• Reforged light sources could be refilled -> pval +15000.
• Rods of Perception could be used without recharging.
• "Decayed" levels removed. They looked ugly, and were not particularly playable.
• All monsters in pit/nest will have the same alignment now, preventing immediate spectacular combats between pit inhabitants (you could wait until most of monsters are killed, teleport or banish the rest, and collect *tons* of loot)
• Descriptions of posions of resist acid/electricity/poison incorrectly referred to fire resistance.
• Removed help file manual.txt. Extremely out of date.
• MICoMorgoth pval reduced to +50, which is for all practical purposes equal to +125. 18/1000+ stats wouldn't fit properly.
• Monster-monster nether bolt attack affected player.
• Monster recall now lists monsters by level by default. Can't imagine why player might be interested in the order of monsters in monster.txt (that was the default behavior).
• Narya/Nenya/Vilya/One activation damage increased to plasma/360, water/600, storm/750 and mana/1500-3000.
• Monsters cannot lash with a whip or throw boulders when in webs.
• Potion of Resistance actually granted only temporary acid resist.
• Randard DSMs had no activation.
• Some randart objects that would be squelched couldn't be picked up.
• Tomb screen didn't show monster race.
• Some other typos and minor bugs fixed.
• Help updates.
• Some bugfixes from NPPAngband 0.4.0.
• Massive code cleanup. Many source files renamed or splitted. Removed unused things; removed things that are needed to support ancient systems. Honestly, I don't care much about DOS.

Version 0.3.0-alpha2 10-Oct-04 Alexander Ulyanov

New features:

• Unique corpses can now be sold at the Adventurers Guild.
• Added option "Turn off quick messages on low HPs" (low_hp_careful).

New races:

• Hydra

Bugfixes:

• The game hanged at birth if the cursed item was accidentally generated.
• Monsters who past walls could push past monster standing next to wall, causing it to be pushed in wall.
• font-x11.prf split to two files. If walls and floors don't appear properly in X11, just delete feat-x11.prf file.
• File randart.txt moved from lib/edit to lib/file directory. Files in lib/edit are pre-parsed to binary lib/data files so they can be removed. randart.txt is parsed on the fly, and therefore does not really belong to lib/edit directory.
• Slightly redesigned Adventurers Guild interface.
• Boots of Slow Descent renamed to Boots of Levitation. Items of Wizardry base depth increased to 30. Boots of Wizardry max pval lowered.
• Morgoth got some resistance holes.
• Outer permanent walls were not displayed (unless you bumped into them, or quaffed potion of enlightemnent)

Version 0.3.0-alpha1 02-Oct-04 Alexander Ulyanov

New features:

• New terrain system. There are now four kinds of elemental terrains, each one consists of two varieties: water/ice, fire/lava, fog/abyss, sand/rocks...
• New themed levels (forest, volcano, rivers etc.) NOTE! These are *off* by default. Set the option "birth_themed_levels" to "yes" if you want themed levels.
• Water elementals can now heal with potions of water (heals 1/6 max hps). Also, fire now blinds w/elems for 2 turns (unresistably).
• Three new demons (Familiar, Torturer, Ice demon) to fill the gap between quasits and bodaks, for Demonic Qs.
• Flasks of oil, torches, lanterns, food (any), arrows, scrolls of Word of Recall are now always generated in stores.
• New artifacts and ego-items by Ceilti OCahill.
• New option "no_race_char" -- makes the player always show as "@", regardless of race.
• Major changes of non-unique Ainur.
• Added the Valar -- for the fun of it! They are always friendly and extremely powerful. They can attack uniques, unlike pets. They cannot be normally met; you can summon a Vala either by activating the Silmaril (new artifact -- with the same rarity as the One Ring). They disappear after 100 turns (they can be re-summoned after that).
• New randart generator by Chris Carr and Chris Robertson.
• Added some OAngband vaults.
• Finished LAWFUL/CHAOTIC definition.
• Starting equpment is now race-specific.
• Neither monster nor player receive any extra experience for killing experienced monster.
• Redesigned web site.

New races:

• Ainu
• Fire Elementals

Bugfixes:

• A long awaited fix of breeder problem. Now they simply freeze when you're outside their scanning range -- just like the old times :). Also, breeders can now attack each other when bored.
• Pets don't use teleportation and saving-throw spells by default.
• Group pet summons are now much smaller.
• Quest monsters could evolve!
• Age is now 16-bit, so that the age is more appropriate for the Ainur.
• Very stupid bug -- draconic quylthilgs evolved to greater _demonic_ quylthulgs. Time to go to sleep :-/.
• Player could evolve into strange monsters by pressing shift+key at new race selection screen.
• Pets no loger pick up items.
• Pets no longer drop treasure when killed.
• Monster casting an orb of draining on another monster was automatically hasted.
• Fixed an old bug -- elemental rings had no activation description. Thanks to Polarhound and Netbrian for useful feedback!

Internal improvements:

• Code cleanup.
• Body powers code is generated now from a single source (which is preprocessed with GNU M4 macro processor in several include files). This makes adding new powers easier and faster.
• Added a simple makefile in the root directory.
• Some hacks removed.
• Some other hacks introduced :).

Version 0.2.0-alpha3 26-Jul-04 uav

New features:

• New races: Shadow Dragon, Skeleton
• Monsters no longer receive items, which they cannot wear, as quest rewards (neither as great, nor as tailored rewards)
• When a monster sleeps, confuses or scares another monster successfully, it tries to choose different target for itself, as his former target is temporarily unable to fight. Especially makes sense with sleep (monster could sleep another monster, then attack and awake him at once).
• New pet control menu item: 'Set enabled spells'. Allows to set spells which you want your pets to use. There are six groups: innate ranged attacks (various missiles and breathes, do not use mana), offensive spells (various bolts and balls, use mana), teleportation spells, spells with a saving throw (scare, confuse, paralyze etc. etc.), summoning spells and mass summoning spells. Typically you want to turn off teleportation spells to avoid stupid teleports, blinks on the other side of walls etc. Turning off spells with a saving throw also makes sense at depths >1500ft, since most monsters completely resist them, and those who don't have good saving throws anyway.
• New news.txt file. No fancy ascii-art, but more vivid and informational
• Monster race spoiler data are now automatically generated with Python script. As a result, monster race spoiler will be now always accurate and up-to-date.
• NOTE! Web site moved to "http://orthanc.chat.ru/pos/"

Bugfixes:

• Bugfix: Chaos Dragon's exp penalty was 350%, causing byte overflow to ~95%. Changed to 200%.
• Bugfix: "Failed a quest to kill 0 <player>"
• Bugfix: Screenshots were created with "NPPAngband" generator field. (Thanks to Jeff Greene for pointing this)
• Bugfix: main-ros.c contained references to NPP -- anyone dares to compile Pos for RISC OS?
• Bugfix: "Create darkness" monster spell always created darkness near player.
• Bugfix: When pets killed monsters, experience fractions were not taken into account, leading to 0 exp for pet kills worth less than 10 exp (2 exp for Qs). (Reported by Hugo Kornelis)
• Bugfix: The message "You sense the presence of the greatest ... alive" was sometimes issued even without actual king unique being generated
• Bugfix: Rings with +0 to searching etc. were possible
• Bugfix: Player's height and weight are now 16-bit values, so no more 50lb giants
• Exp cost of The Guardian of Chaos lowered -- he was worth more that Morgoth! Although he is certainly tough :)
• SP are not displayed now if the player has no powers
• Monsters can now teleport away each other Thanks to Polarhound for reporting many bugs.

Version 0.2.0-alpha2 08-Jun-04 uav

New races:

• Dark Elf. A typical humanoid races. Starts without much specialization; has confuse, MM (expensive) and detect chaos. At cl15, though, he must choose between Dark elven warrior, Dark elven mage or Dark elven priest.

  Dark elven warrior has special attacks:
  powerful attack with +10 to-hit and +(plev*2/3) to-dam, far reaching attack with polearm, allowing to hit monster one grid far (like in ToME), whirlwind attack, allowing to hit everything nearby. All attacks are available as powers; power stats is STR. Gets "examine object" power, which instantly pseudo-ids object, at cl30. Becomes a dark elven lord at cl35, with elemental bolt spells (like real Dark elven lords), heroism, berserk and haste.

  Dark elven mage (Dark elven sorceror at cl35) is a typical spellcaster. Gets MM, blink, stinking cloud, frost/fire bolt, teleport, detect monsters, identify, teleport away, summon elementals, detection, frost/fire ball, resistance, acid bolt, ice bolt, summon demon, recall, dark storm, ice storm, word of destruction and dimensional door. Powers stat is INT.

  Dark elven priest (Dark elven druid at cl35) gets three "curse" spells ("You point at it and curse"; pure damage, resisted by nobody, but monsters get a saving throw and damage doesn't increase with level; if the monster is killed with this spell, he is considered to be "sacrificed", and consumed by a ball spell with significant damage), darkness ball, summon spiders, healing, death orb, blink, summon undead, *healing*, detection, restoration, remembrance and summon greater undeads. Powers stat is WIS. As you see, this is actually necromancer-like form (or "dark priest", if you like).

  All dark elves start with RDark, get RPois at cl15 (first evolution) and one more resist at cl35 (second evolution).

• White Dragon. Much like Red Dragon. Very wise, good stealth and saving throw. Unique feature is "breathe freezing": Non-uniques have 1/30 chance of instakill (freezing solid and shattering); Reptiles (including hydras, nagas and dragons) and insects of any kind have their metabolism slowed, resulting in -(5+d5) speed, up to -40, and take full damage regardless of their cold resistance; All other creatures take standard cold damage.

New features:

• Corpses generation can be disabled now (in squelch menus)
• Stone-to-mud wands are now sold in General store (no_wield monster races suck at digging)
• Added "difficulty" field to monster race selection screen

Bugfixes:

• Bugfix: inventory slot disappearing after reforging service
• Bugfix: souls are now better with magic devices, so that player doesn't get bored trying to activate wand of MM
• Bugfix: equipment "matrix" was a bit mangled in chardump
• Bugfix: quest monsters could be polymorphed. Not sure whether this is actually bad (JG is opposed to idea of "protecting" quest monsters in any special way)
• Bugfix: pets killing uniques (for Q's only) were handled incorrectly. Also, uniques couldn't be killed by pets via ranged attacks
• Bugfix: RF5_BOLT_NETHR spell issued messages "It cast a nether bolt at you." in monster-vs-monster combat.
• Bugfix: 'command pets' command had no key in roguelike keyset ('[' -- all the best keys are already reserved...)
• Bugfix: regular priest's bless prayer worked indefinitely long
• Red dragons no longer get INT/WIS/CHR sustain at cl45
• Blue yeeks base level changed to 1, so that Qs can actually summon anything at dlvl1
• 'I'nspecting weapons no longer issues "It gives you N attacks..." message if player's body has no weapon slot
• GChromWSM now has all basic immunities
• Spider progression modified: tarantulas were worse that giant spiders. Changed melee attacks, base level and xp/kill for giant spiders, giant tarantulas, araneas and elder araneas
• Pets levelup is now 2.5 times slower
• Fixed/partially rewritten racial histories
• Source cleanup. Now it compiles without horrible warnings

Version 0.2.0-alpha1 20-May-04 uav

New features:

• Added possession in basic form. The first monster race is now 'Soul', which also has special class 'Possessor'. Soul starts with no equipment slots, no attacks, hit die 1, no powers (it has SEE_INVIS and PASS_WALL, though). It is given a wand of magic missile so that you can kill some townsmen and find a humanoid corpse for you. Monsters have 35% chance of dropping corpse (or other 'remains') after death, 65% for possessors. By pressing 'N' you can incarnate into any corpse and use its powers just like monster race; note, though, that possessed corpse will not grow. By pressing 'N' while possessing a corpse you can leave it and become a soul again... note however that soul is very vulnerable and you should leave a corpse only in safety; also, when you leave a corpse, it decays!
• Added pets, companions, monster experience, level-up and evolution. Needs testing.
• Added some items to make pets (Scrolls/Staves of Summon Pet, Wands of Charming).
• Added monster companion (from dl10-15) to some normal races. Funny, though probably owerpowered.
• Added "king" monsters for monster races. "Kigns" are uniques with your race (e.g. Lich -> Vecna, Red Dragon -> Glaurung, Water Spirit -> Waldern). You get 3x exp, permanent blessing and heroism and a special artifact for killing king. If there is an artifact associated with a unique, it can be retrieved by any character but only with 1/15 probability.
• Added few new monsters (more water elementals to summon, uniques for some races).
• Added some new monster flags (e.g. summon water elementals).
• Added new, fourth flags field for objects/player, for all the new stuff such as cold touch. Actually unused yet.
• Added a possibility to "theme" some powers, to avoid adding far too many new PWR_*. For example, Chaos Dragons have "Identify" power with the name "Chaos Knowledge".
• Added bodies and corpses for some monsters from low dlvls, just to test possessors :). If body/corpse is undefined for a monster, it simply won't drop the corpse.
• Added "lawful/chaotic" alignment for monsters. Lawfuls will attack chaotics and vice versa. Somewhat funny to see mercenaries killing beggars and lepers in town :). The flag is set only for few monsters now.
• Added new monster races:
  • Soul - possessors; see above.
  • Chaos Dragon - breathes chaos, disenchantment and confusion; some nice high-level powers (wonder, teleport, summon chaotic (elemental) dragon, detection, identify, alter reality, summon chaotic (elemental) ancient dragons), but high exp penalty.
  • Ethereal Dragon - breathes light and darkness. Can absorb light to heal itself, cast small but powerful light orbs, cast huge but relatively weak darkness storms, and shift planes - temporary immateriality).
  • Giant - humanoid monster. Limited to large weapons (>= 18 lb., has large penalties with lighter ones), large armor (at least metal brigandine). When digging granite walls, can create boulders - heavy to carry, but excellent damage when thrown. Resistant to confusion; quickly gain new forms and resistances. Aggravating at high levels. Huge STR and CON.
  • Kobold - mostly duplicates "normal" kobolds. Weak race.
  • Spider - +5 speed, good DEX, unique webbing ability. (All monsters stuck in the webs cannot move or attack in melee until they tear the webs. Chance to tear is 10-66%, depending on monster native level). Weak, fragile. At higher levels, they can become phase spiders (+15 speed, phase door, teleport, teleport away, dimension door; as weak as normal spiders) or araneas (large and tough, fire and mind spells, summon spiders).
• Dummy "Monster" class is not shown in most places. Instead, the race name, which can be rather long, takes two lines.
• Additional info for "l"ooking on monsters. For all monsters - level, XP for kill. For pets (or in wizard mode) - precise experience, HP, SP, AC, spell power etc.
• Added infinite randarts.
• Added support for themed vaults. Only two actually available ("Greater Altar of Water" - Waldern's lair, with assorted water and ice elementals; "Treasury of Nagas" - red and guardian nagas, spider naga and some treasures in centre).
• Added "reforge artifact" service in Adventurers Guild (need fame of at least 50 - in 'excellent' range). It takes existing artifact (not a randart!) and some money (artifact "power" ^ 2 * 75) to make a randart from existing item. Buggy, but interesting to play with :-). Potential use for worthless artifacts.

Bugfixes:

• Code updated to NPP 0.3.4
• Bugfix: NPP 0.3.1 slowing bug fixed, thanks to JG
• Bugfix: innate attacks did not damage monsters in walls
• Bugfix: innate attacks 'to hallucinate' would yield chaos attacks in previous versions; chaos would polymorph, which would render innate attacks unusable. Changed to disenchant.
• Bugfix: all innate elemental attacks damage is now multiplied by 2. Hopefully will solve the problem when the dragon's fiery bite was generally much worse than normal attacks, because many monsters resist fire.
• Bugfix: monsters with no_wield, but without any innate attacks either (Qs, soul) didn't show any message in 'innate attacks'.
• Bugfix: evasive monsters had double chance to evade innate attack
• Water elementals changed a bit (ice elementals are now not stronger than water; added water vapor and greater water and ice elementals.
• Many other bugfixes. Mostly just annoying things.

Version 0.1.0 22-Feb-04 uav

• The game is migrated to NPPAngband 0.3.1 code base. 0.0.x savefiles won't read. All the 0.0.2 features are migrated; hopefully cleanly. Some things adapted for NPP.
• Added new Dragon Scale Mails. Ideas from rgra by J.R.Dunson and Neodymium. Makes all DSMs way more interesting. Maybe needs some balancing, but generally ok.

Version 0.0.2 13-Jan-04 uav

• Some bugs fixed.
• Three new flags for 'weird bodies'. COLD_TOUCH: shatters any potions or flasks of oil in inventory. NETHER_BEING: immune to cold, poison, darkness, nether, time (cold, darkness, nether attack heal some damage actually), but very susceptible to fire and light. PASS_WALL: immaterial, like Sprites or Spectres in other variants, can pass through walls (NOT through impenerable, though), but takes 1 hp every turn in the wall (NOT below 0 hp - walking in walls weakens but not kills).
• Two new races: Water Spirit (COLD_TOUCH), Lich (NETHER_BEING, PASS_WALL at Archlich stage). Water Spirit is a typical warrior; very poor INT/WIS, but can cast cold, water and ice bolts/balls. Lich is an INT-based spellcaster, has nether attacks, dispelling spells, various forms of beguiling and healing. Weak; very ugly. Both races are humanoid with normal slots. Note that I'm going to add Water Vapor and more other elemental forms in future (currently 3 forms, not many)
• Monster races can now have arbitrary main stat (for powers); this reflects ideas I had at first
• More powers for new races - still have to add many...
• monraces.txt help file about monster races. I plan to keep similar monsters (say, undeads) in one section, with some general description, including background (from Tolkien, probably from AD&D).

Version 0.0.1 29-Dec-03 uav

• First version. Based on Vanilla Angband 3.0.3. Very basic things.