nlarn

More than a year has passed, every minute well spent bringing forth the evolution of NLarn. Thus it is my pleasure to announce a new release of NLarn, awaiting your download on a mirror close to you.

The changes in this milestone on the long and winding road to the perfect roguelike are:

• A monastery in town can heal, remove curses and cure the most common diseases for a little fee. Some special items are available in the monastery’s shop.
• Implemented a “storage room” at the player’s home. It is now possible to store items at home and take them later. The value of items stored there is added to the player’s score when the game ends.
• Scribes in the school of Larn can write any scroll on blank scrolls.
• Stop automatic movement or resting as soon as a monster enters the field of vision, not only when it is on a field next to the player. This should give the player more time to react accordingly.
• Spells that cause effects to the player now extend the effect amount or duration up to (spell knowledge level * base value). Messages are displayed to reflect that an effect has been extended or that the maximum has been reached.
• Added an intelligence requirement to learning spells and extended the requirement for casting spellst to 3 * spell level.
• Implemented raising taxes:
  For every difficulty level above zero the player has to pay 5% of the income, i.e. money deposited on the bank, item sale revenue and interest as taxes. The maximum tax percentage is 20%.
  Added statistics about paid taxes to the obituary.
• Added traps to containers. Every generated container has a 33% chance of being trapped. Trap effects are:
  • itching (forces the player to remove the armour),
  • sickness (reduces the chance to hit)
  • clumsiness (forces the player to drop the weld weapon)
  • slowness
• Implemented searching for traps on the ground or on containers.
  Searching is also useful to examine the surroundings while blinded.
• Containers known to be trapped are displayed as e.g. “trapped bag”.
• Enhanced targeting mode:
  • target the closest monster if no previous selection has been made.
  • switch between visible monsters with SPACE.
  • remember the last targeted monster for subsequent targeting.
  • remember the monster last hit with a direct attack.
• Added ranged weapons and ammunition (fire with ‘f’).
• Added new item slots: secondary weapon and quiver.
• Enabled swapping primary and secondary weapon (‘x’).
• Implemented a “paperdoll”, a list of all equipped items (‘TAB’).
• Implemented thwrowing of potions (‘t’).
• Most potions now work on monsters.
• Made the potion of holy water dangerous for undead monsters.
• Thrown or fired items will be picked up automatically regardless of autopickup settings.
• Added a command (M) to cast the previous spell again.
• It is now possible to pay with money stuffed in carried containers.
  The leprechaun can now to steal money hidden inside carried containers.
• Tweaked the behviour of the townsfolk. They will no longer walk around like drunk, do important town people business and only talk when the player is outside a building.
• Started to work on summoned monsters:
  • summoned monsters can follow the player,
  • do not impact automatic movement,
  • its possible to swap positions with them,
  • they disappear after some turns,
  • and killing them gives no experience points.
    This is a work in progress and not at all completed.
• Added monster’s weapon to monster’s description.
• Implemented a mana drain trap.
• Added dynamic help to the inventory dialog.
• Messages and dialogs can now be coloured, some already are.
• Spell rays or blasts now have differen colours.
• Modified effect list display on the right side of the screen:
  • unique entries only
  • positive effects coloured cyan
  • negative effects coloured magenta ** fading effects coloured red
• Door glyphs now depend on the position of the door.
  For closed horizontal doors, it is ‘-’, for vertical doors ‘|’. Opened doors are displayed as ‘/’, but for double doors they become a pair of ‘/’ and ‘\’.
• Reduced availability of rings in store at game start.
• Generate amulets starting on level 6 and do not generate a ring every time generating an amulet failed; choose a random item type instead.
  This should reduce the excessive amount of rings (“ring spam”) available in the game.
• Toggling the visibility of the entire map in wizard mode with ^V.
• Redefined quite a lot of keys, the most important being:
  • ‘S’ -> ‘CTRL-S’ (save)
  • ‘Q’ -> ‘CTRL-Q’ (quit)
  • ‘T’ -> ‘V’ (travel, silly memory hook: voyage)

As usual, some bug squashing included in the process of bringing forth this version:

• Purge dead monsters after player’s extra moves (fixes a nasty crash bug that would occur when the player is faster than an attacked monster).
• Only curse-id blessable items when dropping them on an altar.
• Fixed weight calculation for stackable items.
• Do not mention stationary object on tiles entered while blinded.

With such great changes comes sacrifice: games saved by previous versions on NLarn are no longer valid with this iteration. Also some knowledge about the game might be obsoleted, as numerous key bindings have changed. When in doubt, consult the builtin help.

We are happy to announce a new version of NLarn. After the last version was quite crash-prone, this release fixes all the bugs we could find and also incorporates a lot of fixes for minor issues. Thanks to everybody who provided feedback. We really appreciate your help!

Get it from Sourceforge.

Saved games from versions 0.6 are compatible with this version. If you have installed a previous version with the Windows Installer package you can simply run the new installer and install over the previous version.

Changes

• Several improvements to auto-travel.
• Permanently display the item description in the inventory.
• Modified behaviour when picking up items: ‘,’ just gets the item ‘g’ asks for the amount to pick up Reported by Xecutor.
• Use shortened weapon names for the wielded weapon display.
• Added an option to disable automatic saving.
• Show spell level in book description.
• Set native end-of-line characters for nlarn.ini-sample. Reported by R. Alan Monroe.
• Show a popup message when loading or saving the game.
• Display the message when selecting a position in an popup window. Return the cursor to the player with ‘@’.
• Disable auto-pickup for the player’s position after the player has chosen to abort picking up an item.
• Added a message when aborting a spell or hitting an unseen monster with a spell.
• Blessed scrolls of teleport always take the player to town.

Fixed bugs

• Recognize keypad enter on Windows. Reported by Xecutor and Michael Ax.
• Allow using numpad direction keys for fast movement with num lock off on Windows.
• Offer only items that can be blessed or cursed for curse removal or blessing.
• Delete the player’s memory of the map when successfully casting ‘alter reality. Reported by Michael Ax.
• Fixed the scroll of genocide monster. Reported by Michael Ax.
• Interpret ‘j’ and ‘k’ as mnemonic letters in the spell casting dialog when another letter has been entered before.
• Abort spawning new monsters when a map is fully crowded. Recalculate number of monsters on a map when restoring a saved game. Previously, an unlimited number of monsters has been created when restoring a game frequently. Reported by Peter Casey and Michael Ax.
• Added missing monster effect descriptions. Without this, the monster description returned “An uninjured elf, fleeing ().” for an elf affected by “phantasmal forces”.
• Fixed a very frequent random crash, a very rare crash, and some pieces of code that potentially could have caused crashes.
• Make aborted spells not cost turns.
• Fix an assertion when aborting phantasmal forces and an information leak in that spell.
• Initialize wizard_mode game property before creating a new game. This is necessary if we want to stock the DND store differently depending on whether a game is started in wizard mode or not.
• Remove notes from items sold to the trade post.
• Fixed many memory leaks.
• Fixed a typo.

It’s our pleasure to announce a brand new version of NLarn for this years ARRP. This is a major release which adds tons of new features.

Download your copy from Sourceforge and we hope you enjoy playing NLarn. We are looking forward to hear from you!

Changes in this version:

General

• Changed the flow of game time management and made actions interruptable. The result of an action that takes multiple turns is revealed after elapsing the required number of turns.
• Stats are now chosen from one of four fixed stat packages with high points in strength, constitution, dexterity and intelligence, respectively. At game start, the player is prompted to choose one or a random character stat set. This choice can be defined on the command line or in the ini file.
• Nuked the charisma stat.
• Added an auto-travel feature which allows to select a target with ‘T’ (features can be selected by their glyph) and to continue travel interrupted by e.g. a monster with ‘C’.
• Automated saving points allow continuing games after crashes.
• Integrated Lua interpreter into the game. Moved monster data to external lua file.
• Movement speed is reduced when burdened. When going down a level while burdened, damage may be caused.
• Give a warning if the effects levitation, wall-walk or protection are about to time out.
  

• Use inverted colours to highlight stationary objects or traps with items on them.
• The statistics which are collected during the game play have been enhanced. A new statistics counter, “acts of vandalism”, has been added, which counts destruction of walls, statues etc. via vaporisation, and also all those looted thrones.
• Added some new fortune/speech phrases.

Spells

• Make spell casting success depend on Int, spell level and knowledge.
• Magic missile is now a single-target spell, and sonic spear has been upped to level 2.
• Lightning deals double damage against flying monsters. Player also takes double damage from lightning while levitating.
• Make finger of death less likely to succeed against undead or demons.
• Make polymorph less likely to succeed the higher the monster level. A polymorphed monster that can’t survive in its current place gets killed.
• Tweaked the spell “alter reality”.
• Redesigned the spells “phantasmal forces” and “scare monsters”. Phantasmal forces affects a single monster, scare monsters affects all monsters that surround the player.
• Flood effect areas shrink as they time out.

Monsters

• Overhauled to-hit calculations, now takes into account monster/player speed ratio. Saner AC values.
• Modified the monster generation to have a more interesting mix of monsters on a level, including out-of-depth monsters.
• Made some monsters significantly more rare.
• Tweaked monsters’ gold property to make gold drops less reliable.
• Added ranged attacks: hell hounds and red dragons breathe bursts of fire, the green dragon spits poison and the platinum dragon can use its psionic attack at a distance. Gaze attacks are now possible at a distance with one third of their base chance.
• Xorns can pass through walls, water lords can swim.
• The ziller now has a random stat loss attack. The assassin beetle now has the poison attack. The green urchin and the lama nobe can now cause blindness.
• Hell hounds, red dragons and demon princes are resistant to fire, some monsters have sleep or poison resistance.
• Make monsters regenerate more often.
• Adjust some monsters’ colours, get rid of dark grey monsters.
• A nymph will only steal a random amount of an item when the player has a larger number of that item.
• Populate the town with town people. Eradicate fortune cookies in favour of the talkative town people.

Items

• New amulet type: reflection. Reflects breath and gaze attacks.
• Add new potion “recovery” healing stat drains, including dizziness.
• Added a “potion of levitation”, which allows to float over water or lava.
• Implemented a “potion of power”, which restores MP.
• Always show wielded weapon in the main view.
• Give blessed items a 50% chance to resist erosion/disenchantment.
• Blessed weapons do 50% bonus damage against undead and demons.
• Blessed potions’ effects last longer.
• Blessed potions of object and treasure detection detect items carried by monsters.
• Improved blessed scrolls of magic mapping and potions of instant healing: a blessed scroll of magic mapping now also reveals all traps on the level, and a blessed potion of instant healing also heals poison, confusion, and blindness.
• For blessed genocide scrolls, allow to choose out of same-glyph monsters.
• Blessed scrolls of enchant armour/weapon now repair damage and may give a bonus enchantment.
• Uncursed identify scrolls allow identifying up to three items, averaging at two. Blessed scrolls affect all carried items, as before.
• Improve the scroll of “create artifact”: now only generates amulets, rings, books, potions or scrolls.
• Life protection is only permanent with blessed scrolls.
• Blessed time warp scrolls are more likely to go farther back.
• Change potions of plain water to holy water, which enables the player to bless items.
• Refuse to use books, scrolls and potions which are known to be cursed.
• When wearing cursed armour, its curse status is identified immediately.
• If a carried container is destroyed, its contents spill on the floor.
• Added a more detailed item description for some item types.

Levels

• Added rivers and lakes. Spells can now be cast across water and lava, and flying monsters can cross it. If a monster is killed over water/lava, all carried items get destroyed, except for the unique items which get teleported elsewhere on the level.
  

• Overhaul altar prayer. Make altar donations also cure poisoning and other afflictions, including stat loss other than strength or dexterity.
• Added some special effects when vaporising fountains or altars.

• Display remembered traps in their colour, now different by type.
• Pits actually trap player and monsters and restrict vision while trapped.
• Cause damage by falling through trap doors.
• Make trap poisoning less likely on the early levels.
• Make dexterity influence the likelihood of evading a trap.
• While burdened, increase the chance of triggering a trap.

Fixed bugs:

• Store auto pickup settings in the saved game.
• Expire effects correctly when doing a time warp.
• Disallow using stairs while paralysed.
• Fix area effect spells not working under certain circumstances.
• Fix poisoning not scaling correctly with difficulty.
• Fix various information leaks about unknown mimics.
• Fixed remove curse scrolls leaking cursedness information for items of unknown curse status.
• Fix walk-through-walls not working when blind.
• Fix genocided monsters sometimes still being generated.
• Fix flickering inventory.
• Don’t let books too difficult to understand increase Intelligence.
• Display correct count of items a nymph steals.
• Disable showing an item bonus in the identified items list.
• Changed many messages to present tense.
• Fixed lots of typos.

I’m exited to announce another maintenance release for the 0.5 series. Download your copy from Sourceforge.

The highlights of this version are:

• Fast movement.
• Speed.
• Many user interface enhancements.
• Many bug fixes.

Many of the changes in this version have either been coded or suggested by Johanna Ploog, also known as jpeg.

Unfortunately, saved games from previous versions of the game are not compatible to this version. Unlike the previous versions, this release will not crash when it attempts to load an old saved game.

Changes in this version:

• Implemented different speeds for monsters and the player. Reenabled the scroll of speed and the spell “haste self”.
• Implemented the spell “time stop”.
• Modified keys for open/close and magic:
  • ‘o’pen (instead of ‘O’)
  • ‘c’lose (instead of ‘C’)
  • ‘m’agic (instead of ‘c’ast)
• Add fast movement command that uses the following (direction) input for running (g).
• Implement a long-rest command: (w)ait which will ignore adjacent floating eyes und umber hulks.
• Added functionality to ®ead/(q)uaff/(e)quip/(t)ake off/(d)rop an item quickly.
• Remember visited landmarks. A list of these can be shown with (D).
• Rearranged hp/mp/xp display to be more consistent with other stats.
• Display carried item weight in inventory header. Removed the command previously used to display the pack weight.
• Display the bank account balance in shop windows.
• Added item description popup to inventory.
• Allow equipping items in the trade post.
• The message history is shown reversed and the entries are prefixed with their turn number. Truncate the message log to 100 entries.
• Enhanced the dialogue to get a number: set overwrite mode as default; accept ‘y’, ‘g’, ‘d’ and ‘p’ as the full amount and ‘n’ as 0 to speed up getting and dropping multiple items.
• Ask for the player’s name and sex during game creation if not set in .ini file or by command line parameters.
• Prompt if a fireball is going to hit the player.
• When autopicking up stuff, give a message if there are more items there.
• In yes/no prompt, always highlight selected choice in red. Generally allow the initial letters of the button captions as shortcut.
• Mention command help (’?’ command) at game start/reload.
• Use block cursor when asking for a position.
• Display items and stationary objects which are not in sight with their colour to make finding them again easier. New display order: stationary objects > items. New item display/memorizsation order: gems > gold > topmost item.
• Made containers ask for the amount when putting things into/taking things out.
• Open doors by walking into them, though not on shift-run.
• Modified some monster glyphs.
• Make the potion of cure dianthroritis expensive. This is a simple flavour change: If you attempt to sell this unique potion, you should get more money for it than for a corroded dagger. Remove the potion from the player’s inventory when winning the game.
• When magic mapping, only map non-floor tiles.
• Sometimes flip custom maze maps when generating levels. Should keep things more interesting even if you keep seeing the same levels again and again.
• Notify the player of stationary objects when entering a tile.
• Allow the player to deliberately jump through trap doors with ‘>’.
• Explicitly name the item a nymph is stealing.
• Make leprechauns steal gold the player is standing on if none carried.
• Give a warning when the disenchantress reduces an item to -3.
• Give a message if an unseen monster died and the player got xp for it.
• Allow to auto-id all ring types.
• Made the uncursed variants of the scrolls gem perfection, identify, remove curse and spell extension less powerful and added a blessed variant with the original power. Let the player decide which gem to make perfect, wich item to identify or to uncurse when using the uncursed variant.
• Improved messages given when interacting with stationary objects. Show a message when a monster has been generated.
• Replace splash screen backstory with a new text that makes more sense.
• Improved save file compatibility handling.
• Added a change log file to the distribution.
• Various wizard mode enhancements.

Fixed bugs:

• Fixed level draining attacks which could lead to a crash.
• Fixed a crash when casting sleep at an already sleeping monster.
• Fixed a crash when buying a single item which is too heavy to be carried.
• Fixed a nasty crash in building_item_sell() that occured when the player bought the entire stock of a stackable item that already existed in the player’s inventory.
• Fixed a crash when experience level 1 got drained.
• Fix off-by-one-error preventing generation of the scroll of genocide and the potion of see invisible.
• Make sure stationary objects are moved out of treasure rooms.
• Fixed item bonuses.
• Fixed many information leaks about invisible monsters.
• Reduced the information leak about unidentified mimics.
• Fixed some monster plural names in the vanquished list and the message given by the scroll of genocide monster.
• Don’t identify cursed potions or scrolls on using them.
• When blind, don’t id curse status of items dropped on altars.
• If an item becomes uncursed, its curse status should be known.
• Sort same-type shop items alphabetically by their identified names.
• When using alter reality in the tenth dungeon level or the third volcano level, the unique items amulet of larn and potion of cure dianthroritis will be regenerated. Never ever destroy the potion of cure dianthroritis by erosion.
• Vampires would never use their bite attack. Now there is a 20% chance that they will do so.
• The ziller and vortex can now attack again.
• Store monster AI state in saved games.
• Prevent uninjured monsters being displayed as “slightly injured”.
• Honour time usage when doing auto-pickup. Call autopickup when entering a new level.
• Disallow opening/closing doors while paralysed or overstrained.
• Fixed the calculation of bank account interest when doing a time warp.
• Fixed “charm monster”. Now it affects only a single monster which has to be targeted by the spell.
• Fixed moving items from a container in the players inventory to the players inventory and vice versa.
• Mute pointless messages when going from burdened to overloaded and vice versa.
• Fixed lots of message glitches.
• Fixed some memory leaks.

Once more a bug-fix and refinement-only release of NLarn is available, fixing all the issues known with version 0.5.2. Get it from Sourceforge.

I have disabled all unimplemented spells and scrolls in this release. Once again – unfortunately – save files created by the previous version will not work.

Changes in this version:

• Lots of colours!
• GFX for ray and blast type spells.
• The display is updated while sleeping.
• Updated the fortunes.
• When examining a position, the monster on it is described with more details.
• Display additional information for unique weapons, like damages, bonus or curses.
• Added the ability to display the bank account balance with ‘B’.
• Modified item generation: only blessed items have a bonus, only cursed items have a malus.

Fixed bugs:

• Item stacking sometimes did not work. This has been fixed. Properly returned split items to the originating inventory when adding to the target inventory has failed.
• Some effect descriptions are broader than the available space and were wrapped around. This has been fixed. Duplicate effects are no longer listed in the effects list. Added some missing effect descriptions.
• Fixed stacking of effects, e.g. it is no longer possible to become paralysed when already paralysed.
• Invalid movement counts as a move when confused (i.e. running into a wall).
• The inventory is not displayed in obituary when empty. The map is hidden in the obituary if the player is in town. Fixed an issue with the statistics in the obituary.
• Burdened state gets recalculated when the player’s strength value changes (reported by Nick Genthner).
• A crash in the spell selection dialog has been fixed.
• Fixed a rare crash bug that occurred when a monster stepped into a poison trap twice.
• Fixed two bugs with restoring saved games.
• Some animals dropped money. This has been fixed.
• The chance to gain intelligence by reading books was way too high and has been significantly lowered.
• Fixed some message glitches.