[Spork] Weekly (ok, 'ish') Update

And here we are about to hit 2008. Hopefully everyone had a good
holiday; I certainly did, which is why there was a huge gap in updates
for a week or so. Real Life(tm) routinely wins out over Spork when
there's a conflict, though. I did manage to get some time to make
changes recently, though.

There are only a couple major changes in the recent batch; the first
doesn't affect the game _directly_ at all, but only the server. The
version of dgamelaunch on sporkhack.com has been upgraded to the latest
from the svn trunk; this doesn't have any direct effect on gameplay, but
will allow me to support potential multiple versions... say, a 'stable'
and 'development' version, with frequency of change being more limited
on the 'stable' side. I'll dig more into that in January.

The second is that hpmon has been replaced with statuscolors. The old
hpmon patch was originally selected for compatibility with players
coming from NAO, and its "always on" made it a bit easier. But it also
couldn't be turned off, and had some display issues with painting, so I
finally got round to wrestling with statuscolors, which is noticeably
more robust anyway. There is an important difference here though: while
statuscolors is on by default, there are no automatically defined
STATUSCOLORS= lines in your .rc -- in order to get Hp/Pw/status
coloration, you'll have to add some. There are some defaults in the
webpage's example .RC file, however, that can be cut/pasted from.

The final change also isn't exactly to do with the game, but affects it
indirectly: Pasi Kallinen has joined the Spork development group. The
upshot of this is that the Spork truck factor[1] is now increased to 2;
also, as you can see, he's already jumped in and started adding more
enhancements to his level compiler (and some of the levels as well).

I still don't expect to break save anytime soon, so there are no worries
there. While there was some noise made about a tournament in January, I
don't think this will happen at this point (it being all Dec 31 and
all); by and large, I'm not satisfied with the balance yet. But it's
getting a lot closer.

I'll update the Windows binaries sometime this evening.

Change log follows...
---------------------
12/30:
DR: Make teleportitis and teleport control somewhat more rare
-- The alterations to the intrinsics FUBARed the consumption probabilities
a bit, making both of these far too common.
PK: New command: GEOMETRY; allow submaps to be placed at explicit coordinates

12/29:
PK: New engravings, hallucinatory critters, and epitaphs
DR: If you leave bones, your killer will have gone through your possessions
by the time the next person reaches them.
-- Demon princes/lords will tend to both take the 'good stuff', and also have
a chance of returning to their home plane.
DR: SPILL level command enhanced to support non-random locations and more
controlled direction of spills
PK: REPLACE_TERRAIN level command added; allows random alterations in a
region's terrain.
-- Many unique levels are a bit different now
PK: EXIT flow control command added to level compiler. Guess what it does?

12/28:
PK: TERRAIN level command added: allows single-square generation-time control
of level terrain
-- Some special levels may not look quite the same anymore...
DR: Interface improvement: Statuscolors patch added to replace hpmon
-- This one is generally more flexible, plus it can be turned off.
-- I have updated the default rcfile with a set of "good default options" that
can be copied into your own and used right away; for players who want to know
the details, the README file distributed with the patch gives a full
explanation of them. (http://sporkhack.com/README.statuscolors)
-- Note: you will NOT get hit point coloring until you update your .rc with
at least some appropriate STATUSCOLORS= lines!

12/27:
DR: Bug fix: chosen ranged weapons that were also wielded weren't being dechosen
when bagged
DR: Bug fix: Items under a tree will now be _under_ that tree, not that this will
matter til next year
DR: Grammar fix: Dipping multiple items into a greasy potion now says "are",
not "is"
DR: Interface improvement: hpmon removed (too-erratic display)
Pasi Kallinen has joined the Spork development group. Truck factor increased to 2

12/25:
merry christmas! developer laziness during vacation.

12/16:
Potion of gain energy's Pw recharge abilities enhanced
Tinfoil hat/Psi bolt/MR bug fixed
Christmas trees added for appropriate date ranges

12/15:
Gender-neutrality achieved in "enrage" spell
"most common wishes" tracker added to website
Walking over kelp (or other underwater objects) with WDSM will no longer bring it
to surface
Putting on hat of clarity should update display properly for immobile
seen-via-telepathy monsters
GDSM should now properly return 'dead' on fatal poison so corpses aren't left twice

----------------
[1] "Truck factor": the number of people working on a given project who would
have to be hit by a beer truck before the project goes all to hell.

--
Derek

Game info and change log: http://sporkhack.com
Beta Server: telnet://sporkhack.com
IRC: irc.freenode.net, #sporkhack