i just thought… should the death be as immediate as it is now?

what if we have the literal Grim Reaper to spawn, and the player is converted to an invincible ghost? initially the ghost is quite fast, so it is easy to outrun the Reaper, but as time passes, the gost becames slower and slower. the Reaper can go through walls too, of course. the idea is that the player can reach an altar of some diety he has good relations with, and pray for the new body. resurrection should have quite a huge cooldown, i think, but it might be fun.

of course, the players will immediately start dying just to explore the level in their new shiny etherial invincible form… which i see as a good advantage of this new mechanic.

outrunning Grim Reaper — what could be more silly than this? so i believe that it definitely fits into IVAN.

btw, 64-bit support is officially dropped from k8IVAN. i see 0 reasons to support it.

the thing i hate in literally all games is pet/ally management. that's why i'm playing IVAN without pets (and never finished it . pets sux. they often do what you don't want them to do, and vice versa. they run away. they cannot equip things from their inventory (fixable, but i'm too lazy for that . that is, pets is annoyance, and i am really sad that you literally need pets to beat the game. ok, you prolly can kill Elpuri solo, but the further you go…

and the worst thing with pets is that i don't know how to fix them. direct control is even more boring. adding more pet options is still not flexible enough, and basically becomes a scripting with unusable UI.

this might look like a small problem (or even not a problem at all for other people), but for me it is so important that i refuse getting pets at all. (yes, i immediately selling scolls of taming and lyres, as i have no use for them.) and i desperately need a solution… but i don't know how that soultion should look. sigh.

NetHack I Smell!

there is another interesting bit of info the game tells you sometimes: weapon usability. it is that "you have much trouble using this item" prompt (and its various other versions). this is quite important info, and you can always check it by unwielding the weapon and wielding it again… but it is boring.

so i added color codes to paperdoll slots, and textual description to equipment string. slot background will be brown for "somewhat difficult", and progressive brighter red for higher difficulties.

i'm not sure about hit value yet: it is interesting info, and something you can roughly figure out by yourself from weapon stats… but i am too lazy to do it. i may remove this info later, though, or make it depend of PC Int level (so boosting Int will have yet another use).