I hev seen this sapphire knight sword as well. I agree with Ischaldirh. The game definitely needs rebalancing with a (google?) spreadsheet, with IVAN 0.5 as baseline difficulty. I'm not such a good game theorist, and I was hoping to canvass opinion from the community about the state of LIVAN's replayability.

If we take the example of the longsword, which has

Possibility = 100;

then a Knight sword would be

Possibility = 2;

instead of 13, which is presently its scripted value. That would have the effect of reducing the occurence of that item in the game, in the way that Izzy suggests.

Furthermore, for our broken knight sword we might choose:

MainMaterialConfig = { 5, GNIESS, RUBY, SAPPHIRE, DIAMOND, FLAWLESS_DIAMOND; }
SecondaryMaterialConfig = { 5, IRON, STEEL, STEEL, MITHRIL, MITHRIL; }

MaterialConfigChances = { 5, 1000, 100, 100, 10, 1; }

instead of the existing:

MainMaterialConfig = { 4, RUBY, SAPPHIRE, DIAMOND, FLAWLESS_DIAMOND; }
SecondaryMaterialConfig = { 4, STEEL, STEEL, MITHRIL, MITHRIL; }

MaterialConfigChances = { 4, 100, 100, 10, 1; }

CLIVAN has some existing crap materials. LEAD already existed in LIVAN I think, but it (and other lousy materials) is not prevalent in the game because it has not been woven into existing scripted items. Tricky, because one must presently manipulate the script by hand. (Which means the script files basically resemble their own roguelike game).

Ok, here is the thread for posting bugs and suggestions relevant to CLIVAN.
Once a critical mass of issues are identified, then another release can be made.


Right now I have already spotted an issue with rookie kamikaze dwarfs spawning too early in the game, and this can be fixed by altering the script.
In char.dat, HPRequirementForGeneration should be set to 54, not 32.

Thunderbirds also need to be changed so they don't appear too early. Perhaps the following might be appropriate:

HPRequirementForGeneration = 70;
DayRequirementForGeneration = 3;

Yeah, hopefully with a bit of testing we can balance the game a bit. If it can be achieved by the script files alone, then that would be optimal. Some features may also drastically alter the game, so I'm open to the possibility of eliminating some of my implementations.

I'd really love it if Lampshade would drop in and make some suggestions about what he thinks would bring balance to the game.

Perhaps the forestmen should wield taiahas. Yep, the recent natural disasters here in NZ have been good for ivan development, with plenty of time off for programming and scripting.

I added three 'lesser' magic users based on kobolds, goblins and orcs. The goblin warlocks are able to zap wands and a couple of other characters IIRC. So yep, Al can zap as he sees fit ;)

CLIVAN stands for "Continuation of Lampshade's Iter Vehemens Ad Necem"

The sourceforge page is: http://sourceforge.net/projects/clivan/
The source code has been released under GPL v2 in an SVN repository.
A release has been made available, based on the revision 5 code.
The game is based on LIVAN, hence the name CLIVAN.

This work has been in progress over the last year and has undergone sporadic development, with more focussed development taking place over the last six months. The development has been getting out of hand lately, and so a decision has been made to shore up the stable parts of the code and release those parts.
So what does this mean for CLIVAN in the near future? I would love people to test it out and see if there are any major oversights that need fixing up, so the release can be stabilised.

Developments have been modest and has been restricted to a new dungeon, new jokes, familiar jokes and unfamiliar characters. Below is a list of what's new since LIVAN:

Places:
-------
- The Deep Forest - Go there for some new adventures
- Muntuo - Where dwells a peculiar character new to the game
- The Tomb of Xinroch - Spooky sounding, but sadly, reserved for future development

Faces:
-----------
- Fruit Bat
- Fire Fox
- Mice
- Forest Men
- Levitating Hattifatteners
- Giant Eagles
- High Priestess of Scabies
- Goblin Prison Warden
- Prison guards
- A Mango grower
- Solicitus
- Insudo
- Priest of Solicitus
- Okapi
- Thin Pig
- Starved Ox
- Vampires
- Uldras
- Kabouters
- Thunderbirds
- Goblin Warlocks
- Orc Shamans
- Kobold Alchemists
- Rookie kamikaze Dwarfs
- Grenadier Dwarfs
- Ambulatory mushrooms
- Bare-hands doctors
- Noxious Orchids

Things:
-------
- An underground resistance group in the deep forest
- A goblin jail
- An atheist god, who art above Valpurus
- The constitution of Independent Tweraif
- Klein bottles
- Cauldrons
- Maps - these reveal locations in the worldmap
- Mango tree seedlings
- Monographs of Atheism
- Eptyron, a named axe (people complained that there was no serious artifact axe)
- Pentagonal keys
- Mangoes
- The Holy Mango of Oren Ordent (guess who this is named after )
- Wards that prevent teleportation into certain rooms
- Taiahas
- Milestones - these are used instead of staircases to get around in the deep forest
- Filthy Tunic
- Scroll of Fireballs

States:
-------
- Vampirism - Can drain energy with bite attacks, but stats quickly deteriorate
- Detecting - like teleportitis, but instead it comes up with the "detect material" message

Other:
------

- Characters that can sweat now produce an amount of sweat proportional to endurance as: Volume = long(.05 * sqrt(GetBodyVolume() * GetAttribute(ENDURANCE) / 10));
- Added a new victory condition with a score weighting of 1x, which ties in the Forest Arc with the liberation of Tweraif.
- Repaired confdef.h by changing #define ANTITODE_LIQUID (LIQUID_ID + 9) to #define ANTIDOTE_LIQUID (LIQUID_ID + 9)
- Function Slow() now gives temp state SLOWED instead of HASTED
- Added material softening algorithm
- "SoftenedMaterial" in material configs of material.dat to facilitate the alchemist
- Added an algorithm for AI to zap wands with, based on throwing algorithm.
- Added a way to change the player's sweat material through char.h
- Added milder acid liquid VINEGAR
- Added liquid material: Liquid Horror with EFFECT_PANIC
- Added Vladimir and Ivan image by blob to IVAN_LEVEL entering screen
- Added throwing algorithm and a pick-up-items-to-throw algorithm for the AI

Good move Cap, that should do the trick

Actually it's possible the hacker could have spotted that vulnerability from Cap's google spreadsheet detailing the update progress.

I can't delete my own posts. Is that normal? When I try, I get the following message:

Warning: mysql_fetch_array(): supplied argument is not a valid MySQL result resource in /home4/birdfeud/public_html/attnam/delete.php on line 22

I post in your test topic.

Great work Cap! Thanks for taking the time out to fix the site, it means a lot