Angband 3.0.4

Background

Version 3.0.4 was released on 6th March 2004 by Robert Rühlmann.

This release had another go at improving game balance, by tweaking some rarities, artifacts, stat/ability tables, and so on. It also incorporated the rod, staff and wand stacking system previously tested in NPPAngband and OAngband, where these items can stack with similar ones even if they have different numbers of charges left.

As well as this, there were all sorts of bugfixes, UI and platform-specific improvements, which are all detailed in Robert's changelist, reproduced below.

Changelist

   Made the water vortex immune to water-based attacks.
   Chaos resistance protects against confusion by chaos based attacks.
   Smoothed out the tables for extra mana-points per level, hitpoint bonus from constitution, "spells per level" vs. "spell stat", and INT/WIS dependent failure rate adjustment. The old steps have been replaced by a steady increase, so small stat improvements are more useful. Please note that this will also affect characters imported from older versions, so these might gain or lose some spells, mana, and hitpoints when imported into Angband 3.0.4.
   Gave the 'thanc daggers a 2d4 damage dice instead of 1d4 and made them more common. (Jonathan Ellis)
   Gave each of the Paur* gauntlets a single minor power (slow-digestion, regeneration, permanent light, feather fall) and made them more common. (Jonathan Ellis)
   Rods, wands, and staves with different charges can now be stacked. (based on the NPPAngband version that in turn is based on Leon Marrick's rod/wand stacking in OAngband.
   Rods can't be recharged anymore, but can be vulnerable to electricity.
   Rods of Recall, Perception, Curing, Healing, Restoration, and Speed will not be destroyed by electricity.
   Made Raal's Tome of Destruction more, and Kelek's Grimoire of Power less common. (Timo Pietilä)
   Heavy crossbows no longer can get the 'of the Haradrim' suffix and 'light crossbows of the Haradrim' get a smaller damage bonus. (Timo Pietilä)
   Removed fire brand from ammo 'of Holy Might'. (Timo Pietilä)
   Give the short range teleport effect from gravity attacks on monsters an additional 1 in 3 chance to teleport the monster away. This should make abusing the Rift spell a bit harder.
   Added a level dependent chance to resist the teleportation effect of gravity attacks for monsters and the player. (suggested by Jonathan Ellis)
   Junk items like broken sticks, empty bottles, and rodent skeletons are no longer generated in the dungeon.
   Removed the old haggling code. The auto-haggling code is now permanently active and will give the normal price of items without the 10% "sales tax".
   Replaced the old screendump code with HTML screendump code that handles graphics, bigscreen, bigtile, and other display oddities much better. (based on the htmldump-patch by Darkgod).
   Added support for artifact and ego-item descriptions. (with help from Hallvard B Furuseth)
   Added artifact descriptions. The texts are mainly taken from OAngband and other variants. (Jonathan Ellis)
   Added object descriptions assembled by Hallvard B Furuseth. The descriptions are mostly copied from obj-long.spo version 3.0.2 by Hugo Kornelis, Stephen S. Lee, Leonard Dickens and Craig Lewis.
   Added ego item descriptions for some ego types. (Hallvard B Furuseth)
   "Easy open" ignores broken doors now when trying to close doors.
   Added the equipment flag matrix to the character dump.
   Added new 8x8 tiles and tile definitions provided by "Dawnmist".
   Added the player's maximum depth in the dungeon to the character display and the dump.
   Removed several broken tile definitions for the 32x32 tiles.
   Use the proper monster flags instead of workarounds for various resists and immunities. This also allows the reporting of these flags in the monster recall and the spoilers. (pointed out by Leon Marrick)
   You can now use either 'm' or 'p' to cast spells or pray.
   Allow direct melee attacks on visible monsters in walls. You still have to tunnel into the wall if you are trying to attack an invisible monster. (suggested by Greg Stark)
   Show infos like "It cannot be harmed by the elements." when 'Inspecting' books, just as for other item types.
   Changed the behavior of the 'auto_more' option, so that it automatically skips '-more-' prompts instead of not displaying messages on the top line. (Tom Houser)
   Changed the "Do you really want to quit?" prompt to "Do you really want to commit suicide?".
   Added a 'show scores' command to the knowledge menu.
   Changed the wording for the scores display a bit.
   Added the kill count of non-unique monsters to the knowledge menu.
   Added a modified version of Mogami's macro trigger patch. This patch modifies how macro trigger keys are displayed on screen and written in .prf files. The trigger keys are no longer displayed in ugly key code style, such like ^_FFBE\r or ^O_FF53\r, but in more smart style, such like [F1] or [alt-Right].
   Added a better character selection screen with support for using the cursor keys, display of info about the various race and class choices, and context sensitive help. The code is based on the EyAngband's birth screen that again is probably based on ZAngband's birth screen.
   Select the sex, race, and class choices from a dead character as defaults for a new character.
   Added a stripped down version of Takeshi Mogami's "auto_dump" feature from Hengband. Automatic pref file dumps from the game are now marked, so that they can be replaced when dumping to the same pref-file again.
   Allow the banishment spell to be aborted at the "Choose a monster race to banish" prompt without using up a scroll or charge.
   Added John Rauser's monster list patch that allows the user to display a list of the visible monsters in a window.
   Improved the navigation in the help files.
   Recharging wands or staves that have been fully *identified* before will now automatically reveal the new number of charges in the device. This fixes a bug where an already *ID'ed* wand or staff couldn't be *ID'ed* again after recharging (but plain ID works), despite the number of charges being unknown. (bug reported by Eddie Grove)
   texttoascii() didn't check that the characters used in \xAB sequences represent real hex characters. Invalid hex sequences are now converted to the '?' character. (reported by Kieron Dunbar)
   Improved the handling of incomplete '\x' sequences in macros. The old code could skip the final NUL-byte of the string if it ended with '\x', leading to a potential buffer overflow.
   Fixed a typo in the description of the "wild cat". (Jay McAbee)
   Monster groups ignored their fear when the smart_packs option was turned on. (reported by Eddie Grove)
   Rods and staves of probing are no longer automatically identified when used without a monster nearby. (reported by "someog")
   Prevent the player from being hit multiple times by area effect spells and breaths that can blink the player (nexus, gravity).
   The player can now get a level feeling when entering level 1 without spending 1000 game turns in town first. (Tom Houser)
   Branding ammo or weapons will now automatically try to combine and reorder the resulting objects, even if the enchantment of to-hit and to-dam fails. (reported by John D. Goulden)
   Try to output minor warning messages (such as "illegal option choice" when selecting a non existing item for a command) as soon as possible. (reported by "Mogami")
   Show all minor error messages immediately in the message window.
   The effects of light spells are only obvious if you aren't blind.
   Wands and rods of light don't give a message and aren't automatically identified when using them while blind. (reported by Steve Kroon)
   Refilling a lantern from a stack of lanterns will now only use the oil from one lantern, not from the whole stack. (reported by Jay McAbee)
   Prevent earthquake/destruction spells from working in town. This prevents inappropriate messages (like "The cave ceiling collapses!").
   Automatically try to load the "Kobold.prf" file at startup if the player is a Kobold.
   Improved the output of item and monster descriptions in spoilers and character dumps. In some cases punctuation and spaces were wrapped to the next line.
   The basic object spoilers only reported the prices for unidentified items. (reported by Hugo Kornelis)
   Only print the "You feel (less) resistant to ..." messages when not immune to the specific element. (reported by Jeff Greene)
   The cursor keys in the X11 ports behave the same way now, no matter if num-lock is on or off.
   Change colors in main-gcu.c. This is Dominik Grzelak's patch to change bright white from blue back to bright white. (Ed Cogburn)
   Added a workaround for a bug in the curses version with USE_GETCH. The news.txt screen was erased by the first call to the getch() function. (Frank Palazzolo)
   Angband consumed 100% of the cpu while waiting for a keypress in the GTK port. (Sheldon Simms)
   Allow text to be copied from the game window in the X11 port. (modified version of the code in Kieron Dunbar's sCthangband 1.0.10)
   Added transparency support to the 32x32 tiles in the Windows port. This requires a modified tiles bitmap and a new transparency mask originally created by Andrew Doull: ftp://clockwork.dementia.org/angband/Extra/graf-32x32-304.zip
   Removed the hackish 'Show scores' menu entry from the Windows version. Use the new knowledge menu entry instead.
   Applied lots of Mac specific patches by "pelpel".
   Allow initialization of the game to continue, even if the lib/data/*.raw files can't be written. In that case the data parsed from the lib/edit/*.txt files stays in memory and is used instead of the *.raw data. This currently wastes some memory, since the text arrays are not resized to the minimum required length.
   Added a performance tweak for the Angband Borg.
   Increased the data-type of the shopkeeper purse limit from signed 16 bit to signed 32 bit. This will allow shopkeepers with a higher limit than 32768 gold to be added.
   Added a compile time option to store the savefiles and scores in the player's home directory (under ~\/.angband\/Angband/) on multi-user machines.
   Use a different delay function in the DOS version that works around the restricted 55ms resolution on Windows 2000 and XP.