Powder 0.81

Powder 0.81

February 27th, 2007, 22:44 Posted By: wraggster

Brandon has released Powder for the DS, heres the info:

First, this release has full DS support. The annoying issues of the borders of the screen have been fixed. Save game support should be present. I have mapped X & Y buttons to Start and Select as those buttons are a bit out of the way in the DS. As an added bonus, there are character dump files generated and the second screen is used as a message history! Admittedly, this is not as good as I'd expect a roguelike designed ground up for the DS to be. However, as a port, I feel it is now possible that DS owners may prefer it over running the GBA version.

Second, this release should fix the late game crash bugs! Yes, bugs, because I found quite a few of them. I ran extensive stress tests by creating a late game character, randomly creating a map, and running it for a hundred moves with the standard mob AI controlling the avatar. I then simulated a few hundred THOUSAND games this way. As you'll see from the bug descriptions, some of the found errors were very esoteric.

Third, I also managed to sneak in some features (which, no doubt, have introduced new bugs :> I am very happy with the addition of the Dark Ritual spell that I feel fits well with the goal of the Necromancer: spells that are situation dependent and require controlling your environment to gain full effect.

* [DS] Save game support works if your card supports libfat (which should be most cards). The save game is stored as POWDER.SAV so should work across platforms. Doing a character dump on the DS will also save a NAME.TXT file of the dump, just like it does in the SDL build.
* [DS] Screen is now centered around DS actual screen, giving you a half tile extra visibility in X and a full tile in Y.
* Fireballs will always hit those in their range of influence when they explode. The spell version has been nerfed in damage while the red dragon variant has been boosted.
* Casting reclaim soul on oneself no longer can get the unusual message "Yourself is not in control of you." Instead, one is referred to the laws of thermodynamics.
* New spell: Dark Ritual.
* A new room.
* Zapping wands of Create Monster has a chance of creating a tame monster.
* Living Frosts have a better death message.
* Maximum AC bonus for artifacts is +99 to avoid possibility of infinite loop.
* Maximum enchantment for generated items is +/- 50 to avoid possibility of infinite loop.
* Add a stress test mode to try and track down rare occurences.
* Semantic error meant that creatures would wake up and you would wake up whenever any noise occurred, not just 10% per noise level. Sleep is made even more powerful.
* Fix crash & possible infinite loop in the code to find if one mob is a tamed creature of another. I'm hoping this was the late game crash...
* Fix crash if a creature died due to teleport during its heartbeat or died due to automatically searching during its heartbeat.
* Fix crash due to buffer overrun with the message: "You parry the very scary creature's poisoned silver dagger with your holy +2 flaming sword Whizshock." I had to increase the global temp buffers as well. One would think I would have learned by now not to use fixed buffers?
* Fix crash when someone zaps a wand of ice, killing themself in the process, but then hitting someone else.
* Fix corruption of mobref tables if you died of poison, but your life was saved by an amulet, but you suffered from a temporary intrinsic that is cleared by death (strangle, aflame, etc), but you had another intrinsic that timed out that very turn and occurred immediately after the cleared intrinsic. How is that for a rare edge case?
* Fix a crash where you die due to worn silver damage, but your life was saved, but your life was saved by the very item that caused you silver damage.
* Fix a bug where if you had life saving by carrying an item, life saving would not be granted as I'd fail to find the item to delete.
* Fix a bug where if you died due to falling into the pit created by a greekfire potion, one would still be affected by the actual greek fire itself.

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