root/trunk/changes.txt

Angband 3.1.0
=============

This is an Angband development version -- it may be buggy, so be warned!

Thanks for this release go to: Eytan Zweig, pelpel, Kenneth Boyd,
J.D. White, Eddie Grove, Rowan Beentje, Nick McConnell, Gabriel
Cunningham, Shanoah Alkire, Alexander Philips, mikon, Antony Sidwell,
and all the alpha- and beta- testers who downloaded the game,
sometimes in an extremely shaky state, and played it anyway.

Noticeable up-front UI changes
------------------------------

 * Add EyAngband-style quickstart option.
 * Notes, like NPP and FA, except with brand new code by J.D. White.
   (#10)
 * Add a trap detection indicator.  Also, colour the edges of trap-
   detected areas green. (#19)
 * Make status bar display all timed effects, left-to-right, which
   involves moving the dungeon level to the bottom of the left-hand
   display. (#191)
 * Add show_lists option, which is the same as always_show_lists in
   Ey. (#25)
 * Auto-wield birth items (#24)
 * Change the object information screen quite a bit: (#214, #26)
   - Show average damage for weapons and ammo (#26)
   - Make descriptions a fair bit terser (#399)
   - Show breakage chance for ammo
   - Track item origin, so every item has a tag telling you where it
     came from (#149)
 * Recolour the monster recall: (part of #152)
   - Monster's depth is in red if it's beyond maximum depth, light
     green otherwise.
 * Add how many items the player already has when buying something at
   the store.  (closes #151)
 * Allow use of the space bar to advance a screenful in all
   menus.  (#244)
 * Make all menus wraparound at the top/bottom.  (#244)
 * Monster recall display now cycles through monsters in level order,
   not in the order that the monster definition file is written
   in.  (#302)
 * Add an indication of maximum capacity in the inventory
   display.  (#358)
 * Menus should use 1234567890 as little as possible for "tags".  (#292)
 * Remove the "depth_in_feet" option, instead displaying both the
   dungeon level and the depth everywhere.
 * Ensure that store-bought and birth-given torches have the same number
   of turns for stacking purposes.
 * Death screen now uses scrollable menu. (#416)
 * Drop squelched items
 * Append {tried} to tried items in the object browser (r606)
 * Put {tried} items before untried items in the object browser
 * The monster list display has a little more colour-coding
 * Death menu now uses a scrolly menu.
 * Preserve mode has a sensible description again.
 * Try and differentiate the level feelings more.
 * Add the moderately well-tested "lazy movement" patch which allows a 
   movement delay to be set, during which it is possible to choose a
   second direction.  This means that up and left in quick succession
   can be translated to an actual diagonal.  This may improve some
   people's laptop playing experience without resorting to the
   roguelike keyset.
 * Add bigscreen support to the self-knowledge screen.
 * Make inscriptions like "!k!k!k" prompt multiple times again.  (#492)
 * Make monster XP and native depth always known, even without
   kills.  (#596)
 * Rejig social status a bit -- it rises with level from a certain baseline.
 * Display various skills numerically on the character sheet, rather than
   with text.  This is like Eddie's patch, but a bit more polished.


Gameplay changes
----------------

There are some pretty big gameplay changes.

The object list has been reworked quite a bit.  It is a bit more
varied and has less duplication.  Some items have been removed and
others added.  The new items have had relatively little testing and
may be gone again next release.
 - The number of items that monsters drop has been reduced drastically.
 - Potions tend to appear in stacks now.
 - The range of food items has been reduced.
 - Healing heal a proportion of wounds, not just a set value-- this
   makes all the potions useful.
 - Add a selection of "gain one, lose one" stat potions to replace the
   old stat loss potions-- they guarantee a stat to raise and reduce one
   randomly.
 - The Elven Rings have a variety of healings, at the suggestion of
   Timo.  Also, apply some other changes from the TV-patch (r428)
 - Replace the sustain {stat} rings with sustain mind and sustain body,
   providing three sustains each.
 - (#543) Make ammo of slay evil/venom apply to Mithril ammo too.

Gold drops have also been reworked.  By the end of the game, there is
about 3.6x less gold per drop than in any earlier version or Angband
or Moria, but the amount per drop at the beginning of the dungeon 
is quite similar to pre-existing levels.  You may be interested in
looking at http://rephial.org/research/avg_gold_drop.pdf for an
illustration.

Magic mapping and detection use the same-sized rectangular area around
the player regardless of screen size.

Birth:
 * Make point-based points worth less gold.
 * Minimum starting gold is 200AU.
 * Add an option to start the character with 500AU but no equipment.
 * Point-based character generation is now equivalent to best available
   from the autoroller.  (Eddie Grove)
 * All characters start with WoR.

Stores:
 * Phase Door is now a staple item.
 * Start stocking deeper items as the character descends.
 * Rewrite the rules for shopkeepers
   - Remove individual-shopkeeper and race-based price changes from the
     store code, to make it easier to balance pricing.
   - Adjust adj_chr_gold[] values upwards to represent the average-110%
     inflation usually applied by the individual-shopkeeper greed
     values.  This should really be applied to the object.txt file
     instead, though.

ID:
 * Make ID reveal all powers of an object, and remove *ID*.  (#158)
 * Make pseudo-id not occur whilst resting, but also make pseudo-ID
   lengths shorter (by a little over half) to compensate.
 * Some items, when worn long enough, get automatically ID'd
 * Items pseudo-id'd as {average} are automatically ID'd, and thus will
   stack properly
 * Make wands/staffs stack even when un-ID'd
 * Remove "good" pseudo-ID, replace with "magical" -- for non-cursed
   non-average non-ego non-artifacts
 * Add "strange" pseudo-ID, for when items have mixed blessings
 * Stop automatically cursing all bad weaponry
 * Make weak pseudo-id notice the difference between magical and
   excellent
 * Allow any/all rings/amulets to be cursed if the game wants to
   generate a "bad" item.  This is liable to be rethought in the future.

A small selection of other changes:
 * Remove autoscum.  (#365) -- really?
 * Add minimum depths for each kind of trap.  As such, only teleport and
   confusion traps occur at dlev1.  This should help some people.
 * Make the rogue slightly better at combat than the ranger, based on Timo's sugges
   tion.  (Message-ID: <651vknF2cvjl2U1@mid.individual.net>)
 * Lower the distance missile weapons can fire into the 10-14 grids range.
 * Make monster arrow attacks sometimes miss.  (#537)
 * Some improvements to monster AI.


Port
----

 * X11: Add -x commandline option for choosing the location of the
   settings file (#333, patch by morth)
 * GTK2: Continue work; add term windows, graphics, etc. and also some
   special dedicated display windows, like "messages" and "monster
   list". (shanoah)
 * OS X: the OS X version is now a universal binary, and runs faster,
   better, quicker, and with more sound than before.  (Rowan Beentje)


Code-level
----------

Monster HP is now specified as an average value around which to
randomise, instead of using a "12d5"-type calculation.  Uniques always
have the number of HPs specified in the monster.txt file, like before.
This is copied from Ey.

A lot of code-level cleanup has been applied to this release, much of it
still in flux.  Many new files have been split out of existing files,
which should now have much more self-explanitory names.  The player/, 
monster/ and object/ subdirectories have been created, to aid seperation
of code.

There is also a new generic effects handler so that all item activations
and use abilities share the same code; this replaces use-obj.c and a lot
of descriptions from lib/edit/object.txt. (#234)

Memory handling has been reviewed.  Now, all code should assume that
allocation will succeed, just like it did already.  There is also a
realloc()-style function along with its own hook.  string_make() has
been modified to no longer return a "const char *", and so all the code
now only uses "const" when it means "const".  Some macros have been
removed.

"Elly" rewrote the message and quark packages, previously in util.c,
and in the process split them out into their own z- files.  The z-msg
package is now much more understandable but marginally less "efficient",
and certainly less "optimised".

Option definitions have moved to option.h, and the names and
descriptions for options have moved to option.c.  Option data is now
stored in a much more visually compact way, much more suitable for
editing than the old system was. (#64)

Additionally, a new file API has been introduced which combines the
previous mishmash of fd_*() and my_f*() calls into a simpler, better
documented interface.  (#137)

Store stocking is specified in lib/edit/store.txt now, in a reasonably
flexible format.

A fair bit of work has gone into allowing item names to be used in the
edit files rather than the tval/sval numbers.  For example, see the
new store.txt file; but also the lib/pref/ graphics files, and the
starting items in the p_class.txt file, amongst others.  This is a
fairly easy thing to do and is a massive massive usability enhancement.
It means that invalid item references are caught much sooner, since if
an item is removed, all references to its name become invalid.

Set up an event system for UI display updates, where the game
communicates with the UI by sending messages saying that something's
changed that the UI might be interested in, rather than deciding that
specific things should be redraw.  The main screen updates all use this
system now.  Amongst other things, this system should help things like
the borg and graphical frontends, because they can hook right into
changes in state.  (#348)

object1.c and object2.c have been split out into a series of files,
obj-{desc,make,ui,util}.c.  This makes it much easier to remember what
is where.  Also, object_desc() has seen a rewrite, so hopefully it's a
lot more hackable now.

The beginnings of an organised code documentation scheme have started,
using doxygen.  Makefile.std provides an easy mechanism to generate docs
(try "make docs").

Other assorted changes:
 * Remove a whole load of useless or unused configuration options from
   config.h.
 * "make -f Makefile.inc depgen" will output "Makefile.new", which then
   contains up-to-date dependencies for the project.
 * Add "flags" back to object_type, removing the need for the hacky
   "xtra" bytes.  This paves the way for e.g. fireproofing scrolls
   later. (#120)
 * Makefile for MSVC/NMAKE command-line build.  Currently works with
   MSVC 6+; flags could use tweaking for MSVC 8+.
 * Clean up racial and class skill values into arrays.  (Kenneth Boyd)
 * Use header file guards in all header files, and use a consistent
   naming scheme for them ("Elly")
 * Add a very basic test harness for "unit testing" of the game's code,
   though this is barely used at present.  Thanks to Fennec for cleaning
   this up a bit.
 * Introduce the one_in_() notation to the game, for percentile dice.
 * Move to using randint0() and randint1() for random numbers.
 * Add proper transparency to the PNG files.  (fixes #270; thanks to Rowan Beentje
 * Move to using flags[6] for monster flags rather than individual flagsets.