Powder release 107 changelog

Homebrew coder Jeff Lait has released a new version of Powder, a "roguelike" multiplatform homebrew game that involves different gameplay element like tactical play, hack and slash, dungeon crawlers and the likes.

Developer's note:

The 10x10 and 12x12 tiles are now enabled on the non-iPhone versions. I'm pretty happy with the 10x10 now, but the 12x12 still need lots of touch up. For those wondering why I did 10x10 first: I've found portrait mode is the way to play.

iPhone users will also be happy that the native keyboard is used. Hardcore POWDER fans will lament that I didn't instead revert to the original GBA keyboard input method. Would be a good excuse for multitouch as you try to chord four virtual buttons plus an direction arrow :

Help menus are no longer off by one. (Patrick Don't have one, Matt_S, Sam Spencer, Alex Marsh, Robert Barber, mattock)
Remove potential crash when zapping wand of invisibility off map.
Items are no longer revealed by hostiles searching.
Status message "Searched" when you search to make it more clear you did something by searching.
Correct lighting tests for giant mobs along with looser LOS requirements to see them.
No longer crash if a rolling boulder kills the caster and then fills a hole.
You can click-drag on display text to scroll it.
Chris Lomaka's tiles have been updated with some nice new additional icons.
Help menus are platform specific, so GBA users should no longer be taunted with stylus help, etc.
The Akoi Meexx 10x10 and 12x12 tilesets are enabled in SDL builds. The 10x10 has had a round of manual smoothing applied to it.
Status bar on iPhone now rotates and is hidden in landscape mode.
iPhone now uses native keyboard controls.
If you start the game in a room with only secret exits, you are explicitly told that there are secret exits to search for. (Eisel Mazard)

POWDER is a roguelike originaly developed specifically for the Gameboy Advance (GBA). It is not a port of an existing roguelike as the controls of the GBA are very different from the traditional keyboard, and the screen imposes some additional limitations. It is built around replayability and long term ergonomics, not short term learning. It uses actual graphic tiles (16x16) rather than the traditional characters.Changelog: * Your tame creatures now have a heart badge beside them to identify them as such. * Switching to a different tile res will no longer cause a crash. (Inu) * Building the tile choice list now comes from the internal allbitmaps.h rather than being hardcoded, so Ibson the Grey's tiles will show up as expected. (Inu) * Entering a level with active lava/water from a level which has no active lava/water, when the new level is already created and previously visited this game, will no longer stop the updating of said lava and water. (Nathan Bogue) * Hopefully backspace will work on OSX. (Nathan Bogue) * Jumping in space prohibited if you lack spacewalk. (Nathan Bogue) * Jumping when buried prohibited. (Nathan Bogue) * Kobold thieves are pluralized properly. (Nathan Bogue) * Living frosts are now bloodless. (Nathan Bogue) * Digging upwards on special levels has more sensible results. (Nathan Bogue) * Remove the console window on Windows. * Shattered trees will drop their occupants. (Nathan Bogue) * Items that fall down holes will no longer be mapped. (patch by Richard Quirk) * PSP Makefile should be happier with newer devkits. (patch by Joe Buck) * Left and Right on menus will scroll fast, just like L and R do, but this also applies to the command menu where L and R are the quick bind keys. (patch by Joe Buck) * [SDL] Shift-arrow will swap with a critter, Alt-arrow will jump. (patch by Andreas Bohm) * ctype.h is included in map2c.cpp now. (Ben Hjelt) * New tileset from Chris Lomaka. * One new room. * Load game shows up first in the menu if it is available to make it harder to accidentally choose new game. (Enrique Garcia Cota)

from Jeff:A long delay can only mean one thing. A long delay. The feature I most look forward to is the highlights for unique monsters and artifacts. Hopefully this increases the coolness associated with encountering them. * Further Makefile clean up, using $(RM) and other niceties. (Zasenko Sergey) * Applied WinCE compatibility patches. (Ilya Kasnacheev) * Ibson the Grey's tileset is now built into the SDL builds of POWDER rather than requiring you to use the From Disk... option. (It is not in the DS, GBA, WINCE versions) * Unique monsters have a ! badge to distinguish them before you engate in battle. (Andreas Bohm) * When fully charged spells will get a yellow glow so you can tell 99% charge from fully ready. * Tameness should no longer expire while you still live. (Tobias Pierce) * Tame creatures whose masters die will go wild after five turns and be also confused. You now have a good reason to go after the leaders of rooms first. * Kobold Assassins can inflict bleeding wounds, as was always intended. (Tobias Pierce) * Radius of the burst when bottles break is dependent on curse/blessed status. * Poisoned smoke potions are more useful. (Tobias Pierce) * Smashing potions will interact with existing smoke. (CYBER_Aeon) * Tridude on the keyboard is now a proper tridude. (Bunnyriffic) * Artifacts have an overlay to distinguish them and are always above mundane items in piles (Stefan O'Rear) * New POWDER icon thanks to Sam Goldfield! * Crash when you load the game on a level with more than 32 active smoke tiles fixed. (Lawrence T. Levine) * Iron Golems and Stone Golems have the proper second attack, and hence hit much harder. (Nicholas Young) * Spells and skills are listed even if you are amnesic in character dumps. (Meddyan) * Vampire bats should ignore bloodless targets. (CYBER_Aeon) * Vampire bats gain food when they suck blood. (Tobias Pierce) * Creatures will be more careful in what they eat, especially familiars. (Tobias Pierce) * Being poisoned by something more powerful will properly clear the weaker poison. Note: While the highscore is kept, save games are never preserved between versions. Please wait until your current character dies before upgrading.

Two useful UI improvements. Spell icons now grey out if you are unable to cast them. Inventory slots are recoloured depending on the known curse status of the items. This should reduce the note taking required to start playing an old character again.Most other changes are devoted to cleaning things up, to finally support the 4.3 gcc compiler and to fix up the broken source of 109.You may be interested in reading my book, Menoetius. * A 65535 enum added for TILE_NAMES to placate the gcc 4.3 compiler. (Malte Helmert, Joe B, Magnate) * >string.h< is the correct header. (Joe B) * Clean scripts improved to clean more stuff so I don't release with a broken support directory again. (Joe B) * Executable bit removed from CREDITS.TXT and LICENCE.TXT. (Malte Helmert) * Animated Trees no longer randomly generated in the dungeon, they are meant to only exist as a result of summons. (Kayvon, Gwazi01) * If Baezlb'b's heart grants life save, he will no longer have his life saved, and, more importantly, the heart will no longer be destroyed. (Stefan O'Rear) * When you convert a flesh golem into a stone golem it will no longer report both names. (Lim-Dul) * "You stop over concerns of your safety." now has an r in concerns. (eilu) * Spells you don't know now show up greyscale in the action bar. Similarly, if you can't cast it due to not enough mana, it is greyed out proportionaly to how much mana is needed. * Inventory background is coloured according to your knowledge of the item, making it easier to separate out cursed/holy/regular. This also distinguishes between items you have tried on (so you know they are not cursed) vs ones you haven't tried. (Irashtar) * You can mark items as favorite. This causes them to get a yellow background in the inventory and always be sorted first. (Pikadude No. 1) * Weapons have the e in them when you forget the dual wield skill. (Joe B) * Text for animate forest spell and creature tweaked to better align with the normal English speaker's concept of grammar. * Did I mention I finished a book, Menoetius? I did? Well, I'll just bury a reference in this wall of text anyways. * The buildall.sh script for Linux has been updated to try and make it more ebuild compatible thanks to work by Zasenko Sergey. I may have misread his patch, however, so problems in this version are likely my fault.

Powder: New PSP release!Game by Stanislaw Skowronek, PSP porting + changes by Brian LedbetterJust like any other homebrew PSP app, copy to PSP/GAME/powder folder on an M33-firmware'd PSP (runs on 3.xx kernel). Run. Follow onscreen instructions (no, seriously, they're full of useful tricks). Have tons of fun.

Two new exciting changes in this release. First we have a new spell: Animate Forest, for those who were wondering what the point of the Grow Forest spell was. Second we have the run mode which lets you auto-follow corridors, hopefully cutting your keystrokes substantially. * Daemon now has the a in the summon daemon spell description. (FEG) * If a daemon decides not to be summoned, an a is put in the daemon's name. * PSP character dumps should now say PSP Version rather than Linux version. (Dave Hong) * If you were in the habit of quitting without saving, the random number seed would keep being the same between games, resulting in very similar games. For those keeping track, yes, this was caused by my naive attempts to make things *more* random. (Erik Spigel) * If you manually climb a ladder while autoprompt is enabled you no longer are immediately prompted to climb back up the ladder when you get to the other side. * New Run command, 'r' for SDL users, which will cause you to run in that direction until something interesting happens. You will turn corners if there is only one way to do so. You can interrupt by hitting a key / pressing a button, useful if you find yourself running a closed loop. As the name implies, this is not meant to be some super safe way to explore the map. (PBP) * Vi keys now support the Ctrl modifier to turn them into safe walk (David Damerell, Cuboidz) * New spell: Animate Forest (Adam Boyd) * When level teleporting via Wishing, do not start on same square as a monster. * Diminishing returns on piety gains when gods already like you. * List of items in character dump should now match order of list in inventory. (Meddyan, Cuboidz) * Soul Suck spell no longer grants caster spells or skills that are present only due to items such as staves. (Eilu) * Creatures that die underground should no longer have their corpse and items float to the surface. (Meddyan) * Properly assign guilt to party responsibly for filling holes with boulders. (Meddyan) * Properly credit kills for creatures that die from suffocation from a boulder you place. (Meddyan) * The support programs now include cstring.h so should compile with the latest gcc. (Joe B) * Fixed the #define guard in stdafx.h (Malte Helmert)

Keeping with POWDER tradition, a long time between releases does not mean there was some huge secret code being worked on that took this long to get ready. It means I was busy with other stuff. That said, there are a good number of fixes in this version. Most important is likely the Safe Walk ability, derived from a patch by Andreas Bohm, which lets non-DS users the ability to avoid accidentally attacking kiwis when they go careening through the hallways. The intent is you can bind it to, say, [L], and then hold that when you want to move safely. If you want [L] to attack, you can change the global option. SDL users may use the ctrl key. Unless they are using vi-keys in which case I'm afraid they are out of luck for now. I can only hope those players believe that Safe Walk is for weaklings. * The mouse will work again for the onscreen keyboard in SDL builds. (Ilya, Teun Peelen) * Description when wearing necro dress code spells servant right. (David Damerell, Andreas Bohm) * Vacuum correctly spelled in death message. (David Damerell) * "Click on your self to search" rather than Clicking. (Narius Varigor) * Starting as cultist will immediately tell you >

Homebrew developer Jeff Lait recently released another hefty set of updates to the dungeon crawling homebrew game Powder. The current build clocks itself as release 107 and adds a lot of new features taken directly from the users' feedback.Most of the new additions center mainly on gameplay and visual tweaks. For instance, several new tilesets have been added to reflect various status effects, such as stoned or poisoned characters.Anyway, here are the complete details to all the new stuff added since our previous coverage of Powder: * Leather helms will actually use the new leather helm icon. (Bunnyriffic) * Doors to special rooms will hopefully now be properly blocked so wandering monsters don't wander through them. * Secret doors should no longer be giveaways in dark rooms by being the only lit wall. * Special overlay tile when creatures are on fire. * New special weapon, the earth hammer. (Ibson the Grey) * Creatures may teleport you to escape rather than always themselves. * Creatures will use wands of sleep to escape. (Derek S. Ray) * Creatures that are tame to someone other than yourself are described as followers rather than tame. (Derek S. Ray) * Picked up items always go to the end of your inventory rather than filling holes, hopefully making it easier to find items you just picked up. (Malte Helmert) * H'ruth is no longer impressed by you being surrounded by sleeping or paralysed enemies. (Robert Hamaker) * The charging of lightning rapiers is now proportional to the damage that would be done. * Tlosh will grant exotic armour skill. (R. Dan Henry) * Necromancer and Barbarian dress codes (R. Dan Henry) * When polyed into a grid bug you can move diagonally with the stylus, mouse, or the new Move command. (Michal Bielinski) * Flamestrike's strength now is dependent on your favour with your current god. (Xaintrix) * Ghosts are no longer able to bypass the library's locks. * You can make secret doors and hidden traps. (CYBER Aeon) * You can smash viewports. (Brendan) * Name generator has a hotkey so keyboard purists can use it. (Brendan) * Forgetting things no longer leaves the menu on screen. * When turning to stone or poisoned your apperance changes. * The final damage from poison is now applied before the you are cured message, leading to a less confusing apparent order of events. (Andrew Poandl) * Ibson the Grey tileset white and red dragons fixed. (Vladimir Stalin) Powder release 107 includes a lengthy documentation, which explains all of the game's controls and how to run it on your preferred platform. You can also leave your comments by dropping by the developer's project page, accessible through the Via link in the main article.

It's yet another update to Powder, the homebrew roguelike game by Jeff Lait (check out the previous version here). One of the biggest changes this time around is the switch from the fixed 8x8 tile size to 10x10, which allows for a native res of 320X240. Jeff notes that the change may have brought about some errors such as menu or stylus input not working properly.

Other important changes include players now being able to request for specific spells (visit Powder's website, linked below, for details on how to do so), among other things. Here's the complete changelog, meaty as usual, for your perusal:

• [DS] Pressing keys on on-screen keyboard will move the button-based cursor to the pressed location.
• Flavour text for empty bottles. (R. Dan Henry)
• Zombies, skeletons, ghasts, and liches that are made by magic will have their original creature type prefixed to the name: rat zombie, tridude lich, etc. (Adam Boyd)
• Trolls that resurrect inside lava will remain inside the lava rather than being teleported out. (Oohara Yuuma)
• Acid Pool can now be cast at range rather than only on adjacent squares.
• When you suffer system shock due to ending a polymorph or possession by dying a "You feel a little dead inside" is reported to alert you to the damage done. The Possess spell help has been updated to point out the dangers of dying while possessing creatures. (Derek S. Ray)
• You can now wish for specific spells. Well, provided you can wish at all. If only you knew how to wish.
• Wands of light will now slightly damage creatures and blind them for a turn or two.
• Floating eyes that are blind can no longer paralyse you. (Michael Brough)
• A Grow Forest spell that... grows a forest. I guess you could use it to block line of sight of those that chase you? (Adam Boyd)
• Being hit by water has more consistent effects.
• To hit bonus of weapons now shown in [] after weapon damage to make it clear that rapiers have a bonus.
• A Down Pour spell to sodden excessively cheerful spirits.
• Extra commas in the monster descriptions (R. Dan Henry)
• The character dump will now give you your playtime and which platform you are playing on.
• Option to turn off colouring of hp and mp. (David Damerell)
• "Your spear glows grey" from Detect Curse spell now has punctuation. (Michael Brough)
• Forest tiles can catch on fire and turn into forest fires. Be careful, these spread.
• Support for tilesets with a base tile size other than 8x8 in SDL builds. (Ibson the Grey)
• Your tileset, name choice, and button mappings are now saved with the highscores, not with your save game. This means the settings from when you last died or saved will be restored when you power back on again. (Matthew Rollins, Tim Allen, Robert, Irashtar, Matt, likely many others)
• [PSP] Quit removed from PSP menu pending me figuring out how to properly boot back to the host system. (stabwound)

As always, you need to check the readme files included before you attempt to install the game to your handheld. If you encounter any errors in the game, help out Jeff and visit Powder's site to add your comments and suggestions.