MAngband

Today I implemented 2 new stores:
* the Library: sells basic books for all magic users
* the Expensive Black Market: sells items of great value for 7 times their base value (remember: the regular Black Market sells items of good value for 3 times their base value)
This means that shops 4 and 6 don't sell books anymore, instead they sell more scrolls, potions, wands and staves.

Hey, those are some cool sounding ideas PW. Awesome!

I made some changes again today:
* the Black Market and Expensive Black Market now apply a factor of x4 and x10 (instead of 3 and 7) when calculating the price of items (since they sell better items)
* the discounts applied in the Expensive Black Market have been changed to 10%, 15%, 20% and 30% instead of 25/50/75/90 (the items sold are too good to be greatly discounted)
* if allow_artifacts_hoarding is set to false (as it should be), kings can't generate true artifacts anymore (since they cannot pick them up)
* e_info.txt has been changed to allow ego rocks

More changes:
* minor bugs fixed (status bar display bug, townies in the tavern, vaults)
* mages protected by GoI are now displayed in purple (same as sorcerors protected by manashield)
* added some obvious resists and abilities for player ghosts (dark, blind, poison, cold, confusion, shards and feather falling)
* items with an extra ability now only have 1/16 chance of providing full ESP (instead of 1/8), and 1/16 chance of providing ESP_EVIL
* randarts have been made more common for kings (since they cannot generate true artifacts anymore)
* all references to "electricity" have been replaced by "lightning" to be coherent with spells, object names...
* major source cleanup

Seems that the upgrade will be delayed a lot... got too many changes in mind and too little time to implement them. Working on the following atm:
- new artifacts, changing the power/price/rarity of current artifacts
- changing the power/price/rarity of current ego items (+ maybe one or two new ones)
- changing the power/price/rarity of current base items
- new pricing routine with more value for pval and hidden powers (mainly because items in shops are now fully identified... so an amulet of Terken with ESP should cost *much* more than one with feather falling)
- new spells for mages (ideas will be taken from vanilla Angband 3.0.x)

No rush Powerwyrm, we are all patient and understand that real life comes first =). Just take your time.

Alright... the new pricing routine, new objects, new egos and new artifacts are done. Today I started to implement all the vanilla 3.0.8 mage spells with the help from the angband spoilers magic.spo and books.spo. I plan to change all current mage spells and replace them with the vanilla ones. Only GoI will remain from the current Mang set of spells (plus of course all the spells that are common to both sets, although some of those will be located in different books), but in a slight different form: the shield will become stackable, but will only absorb (charlevel)% of damage inflicted instead of 100%. This is a really experimental change and will need a bit of testing to see what's the effect in multiplayer...
As soon as the mage spells are reworked, I'm gonna do the same to priest spells. This will have much less impact since priest spells didn't change much in years in vanilla...

Yeah, the post 3.0 changes seem to be focused largely on the mage side. For the priest books, the changes seem mainly to be just removing prayers for Paladins.

In general, it seems like the idea was to get each class back to its roots.

The vanilla 3.0.x mage and priest spells are now implemented. And since I'm now in vacation for 11 days, I'll have a little more time between xmas/new year holidays to work on the last two things I want to implement:
- rework the sorceror class to make it a little more challenging
- correct bugs/implement some of the changes from main Mangband 1.0 source code (I hope the source diffs will be available from the SVN repository soon... this would help a lot)
Once this is done, I'm gonna release PWMangband 1.0.0 with a new client that will be - hopefully - compatible with the vanilla Mang server...

The work on the Sorceror class is now done. I changed the following:
* CON penalty increased from -1 to -3 (sorcerors are the weakest class after all)
* Mana bonus decreased from +40% to +25%, this should give 1500 mana to level 50 meditating sorcerors using +10 mana gloves which is more than enough
* Ethereal Eye spell split in two spells Sense Surroundings and Detect Invisible
* Wraithform spell pushed at level 30 (being available at level 10 was much too powerful)
* Disruption Shield spell available at level 35, but with a higher fail rate
* The damage of most mid/high level spells has been decreased... Tidal Wave and Anarchy Force should be the ultimate spells now
* Many level/mana/fail rate/exp earned changes to match mage spells
* Many spells are now in different books