jedi

Since the last post was entirely about coding, this one will be entirely about concepts for the game.  The psion was the first idea I had for a new role in the game.  Since that flash of creativity hit me, brainstorming about the psion has brought me in many directions.  I've come up with several ideas that would affect game play for all roles.

I view the psion as being the brother to the monk role.  Penalties would be given for wearing armor and wielding weapons, however, eating corpses wouldn't make you feel guilty.  Instead of gaining intrinsics like poison/fire/cold resistance at increasing experience levels, psions would gain mental abilities.  I'll lay out the monk's abilities first, then my psion's abilities.  Note that the psion abilities are all, very much, subject to change:

Monk in Nethack:
XP Lvl 1: speed, sleep resistance, see invisible
XP Lvl 3: poison resistance
XP Lvl 5: stealth
XP Lvl 7: warning
XP Lvl 9: searching
XP Lvl 11: fire resistance
XP Lvl 13: cold resistance
XP Lvl 15: shock resistance
XP Lvl 17: teleport control.

Note that, in slashem, fire, cold, and shock resistances are now techniques, not intrinsics.

Psion in greghack:
XP Lvl 1: intrinsic telepathy (like you get from eating a floating eye corpse)
XP Lvl 3: see invisible
XP Lvl 5: extrinsic telepathy (like you get from wearing an amulet or helm of ESP)
XP Lvl 10: flying
XP Lvl 15: detect monsters (like the blessed potion, but always on)

Detect monsters is pretty powerful, so I'm up in the air about that.  I used to have phasing at level 20, but that's WAY too powerful.  I'm thinking of maybe making that a limited-time ability from invoking the psionic quest artifact, which I have not implemented nor spent much time thinking about.

Psion Techniques are similar to monk techniques at the moment, with some exceptions.  The main reason behind getting rid of chained blitz is that I still haven't quite figured out how it works.  psi strike and psi healing are the same as the monk's chi strike and chi healing.  See what I did there?  Changing "chi" to "psi"?  Brilliant.

Monk's techs:

XP Lvl 1: pummel, dash, chained blitz
XP Lvl 2: chi strike
XP Lvl 4: chi healing
XP Lvl 6: elemental fist
XP Lvl 8: draw energy, telekinesis
XP Lvl 10: ground slam
XP Lvl 11: ward fire
XP Lvl 13: ward cold
XP Lvl 15: ward electricity
XP Lvl 17: spirit bomb
XP Lvl 20: power surge

Psion's techs:
XP Lvl 1: pummel, dash
XP Lvl 2: psi strike
XP Lvl 4: psi healing
XP Lvl 6: elemental fist
XP Lvl 8: draw energy, telekinesis
XP Lvl 10: ground slam
XP Lvl 15: psychokinesis
XP Lvl 17: spirit bomb
XP Lvl 20: power surge

Telekinesis is taken from the Jedi patch.  I actually like the author's implementation.  With telekinesis, you can pick up objects from a short distance and you can interact with traps (disarm and trigger them).  Psychokinesis is different.  You'd be able to move a monster, item, or yourself from an arbitrary location (within a limited range) to an arbitrary location (within a limited range).  Another option would be, instead of moving the object to an arbitrary location, you would pick a direction in which to move it, though I prefer the former.  There is already code in place to handle "hurtling" monsters and yourself through the air.  Of course, they are in two different functions, hurtle and mhurtle, and I'd have to code a third to manage the hurtling of items through the air (ihurtle?).  I'd like to combine all three functions into one, because that would only make sense.  Anything with coordinates (i.e., a location on the map) should be able to be hurtled by the same function.

Moving on... so I want to be able to hurl monsters through the air.  I followed that thought to its logical conclusion, and decided that I should implement a system of picking up, and throwing, monsters.

Out of retirement!

I had given up on writing a variant.  The usual excuses prevailed: work, the code is insane, I discovered Kerbal Space Program, etc, etc.  But, I'm taking a break from Kerbal Space Program because of an ATI graphics driver bug that has been driving me crazy.

But, I'm out of retirement!

I was in the middle of a solid game, playing as a female human rogue, and had stumbled across some very good luck: two magic lamps (both resulted in wishes), two bags of holding, etc, etc.

Then I ran into a bug that almost resulted in my character's death (by starvation).  I was very lucky to be saved by a puma's attack, and quickly #prayed (I was fainting at this point), killed the puma, then saved the game.


The main reason I was lucky about surviving is that I was able to save the game and copy the save file so I can reproduce the bug easily.  Whatever your feelings might be when it comes to copying nethack save files, I guarantee I'm more passionate about having solid test cases for bug reproduction and bug fix verification.

Anyway, a while back I blew away my Arch Linux installation because the folks over at Arch started doing crazy things that broke everything for me, so I switched to Debian.

I've never successfully built the nethack-3.4.3 code on any OS other than Arch and FreeBSD.  I'm running Debian now, and I can get the source with a simple apt-get source nethack, but unlike the OS's with ports trees, it doesn't come ready to rock.  I still have to figure out all the crazy config options and, traditionally, I get frustrated and give up before working through all the errors (please leave a comment if you have easy steps for compiling in Debian).

So I dusted off my old piece of junk $110 desktop computer (brilliant buy, I love this thing) that has FreeBSD installed and will work on the fix there.  Yes, I did actually have to dust it off, please don't make fun of me for that.  I'm updating the system now, and then I'll work on the fix.

Once I have a fix, I'll write up and post my root-cause analysis along with the patch and the saved game that triggered the bug so others can verify the fix.

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Update: I figured out how to build nethack in Debian.