Unangband 0.6.2-wip7 has been released

Hi,

I was hoping to make this a beta release, but there's been enough significant platform changes that will need ironing out before I can confidently call this beta.

Having said that, this version is almost feature complete. I just need to decide how to address some game balance issuses raised by Mikolaj Konarski and Matthias Rudolf. Continued thanks as well to Mikolaj for constant feedback, bug reporting and patches to the code base.

Source code is available at http://prdownload.berlios.de/unangband/unangband-0.6.2-wip7-src.zip

[Edit] A precompiled Windows executable is available at
http://prdownload.berlios.de/unangband/unangband-062-wip7-win.zip
Many thanks to Nick McConnell, maintainer of FAAngband, for compiling this for me.


A precompiled OS/X executable is available at http://prdownload.berlios.de/unangband/unangband-0.6.2-wip7-osx.dmg

Please report any bugs to http://developer.berlios.de/bugs/?group_id=331

### Game Play ###

- Implemented the remaining spells in the player spell lists. Add and update a few spells borrowed from Sangband.

- Druidic monsters now regenerate mana from water and health from living terrain.

- You get additional blows with your weapon while charging: one if you'd
normally get three blows, two if you'd normally get five, and so on.
Only the first blow gets the charging bonus, but all are effective
against huge monsters.

- Huge monsters can now be easily attacked if you are standing on
rubble, trees, vents and other terrain that requires two turns to
climb onto.

- Allow player to select sneaking using the hash key. This currently only prevents your allies from attacking 'unaware' monsters.

- Prevent allies eating too much while they fight.

- Fix allies spying.

- Fix monsters not fighting whilst hidden.

- A large number of other fixes to the allied monster AI.

- Archers now share ammunition between themselves to ensure that the majority of the group has ammunition.

- At the Battle of Five Armies, you should now be accompanied by allied troops. This should make battlefield locations more interesting to fight in; a further revision will occur next version.

- Invisible monsters now 'dance' around the player in melee to avoid being too easily guessable as to where they are.

- Fix long outstanding bugs where you would incorrectly guess flags on items you have.

- Fix long outstanding bugs where monsters would talk about incorrect player resistances.

- Revert to old inaccessible Hobbiton layout. In general, you won't run into any high level uniques in towns, like you used to, until certain key conditions have been met. Similarly, there are very few dungeon uniques you are required to fight. Certain events have much more wide-ranging consequences - hopefully the dungeon descriptions will provide enough of
a warning.

- Allow food / wands / staffs / rods and some rings to appear in piles.

- Decrease the relative frequency of drops of items that appear in piles.

- Allow crowns to appear in the dungeon with a much higher bonuses.

- Armour appears in the dungeon with better bonuses.

- Decrease overall frequency of wands.

- Added 'sub-ecologies' which are collections of rooms which share a common part of the monster ecology.

- Made slowdown at negative speeds smaller. As before, -10 to speed makes normal monsters twice as fast as you are, but no longer -7 does (Mikolaj Konarski).

- Only restock and shuffle shops of the home town, to prevent shopping scumming
(Mikolaj Konarski).

- Beefed up HAFTED a little bit for priests --- with free constant Bless it was too weak
an advantage (Mikolaj Konarski).

- Make Smeagol a more interesting opponent.

- There's no point having monsters that cast invisible never be seen - they may as well just
have INVISIBLE flag. Likewise for blessed etc.

- Significant bug-fixes and improvements to the dungeon generation code to the point where
its pretty much feature complete. "I've just played current V (Farm dungeon) and the dungeon
generation is so much better after your recent work. Rooms, tunnels and even monsters are much
more interesting and not just random, but with a nontrivial pattern that you start to grasp
after several levels."

### User Interface ###

- Limit the player from specifying an amount greater than the number of items that they think
they can purchase in a store (using the listed price).

- Added 'easy_more' option to minimise the number of -more- prompts you have to go through.
Please note this is initial work only and may need some testing / cause some messages to be lost.

- Reverse mouse buttons. Left-button now aims, right button now clicks.

- You can now press 's' while looking/targetting a monster to cycle between monsters of that
race only. You can press 'a' to assault a location with any allied troops.

### Bug Fixes ###

- Fixed bug with weird identification issues with Tom Bombadil's house etc.

- Fix bug with monsters not appearing in towers.

- Fix bug #12237 by requiring a guardian to be killed in order to visit the Paths of the Dead or Lothlorien.

- Fix bug where you could wound monsters with NO_CUTS flag.

- Fix bug where monsters could pick up money.

- Fix bug on OS/X platform with user directories not being created.

- Fix monsters not generating ammo using ADD_AMMO flag.

- Please see the online database for other bug fixes.