ToME WikiBucketMan: Hi, Nerdanel! I played Zothiqband some last night, and noticed a few things. Here's the list. By the way...when's the next release? 
1) It would be nice to have descriptor information displayed when creating a character.
NerdanelVampire: Character creation is currently not all that finished. I agree that more information is needed.
2) The pet store sells scrolls of light?
NerdanelVampire: They should be scrolls of summon monster, not that it matters much since scrolls of summon monster don't work. The pet store is basically straight from the ToME module and appears to have a hard coded number in it. I'll look into it.
NerdanelVampire: Fixed for the next version.
3) Are hills placed/working as intended? With the 'path into the Mykrasian foothills' and the 'how hill' dungeons, it sort of looks like foothills are supposed to be impassable. Though it is an interesting dynamic being ambushed in terrain that is pasable, but that you can't see monsters through.
NerdanelVampire: The hills are from Theme by the way of ToME and work exactly the same as there. Perhaps I should make the hill terrain a little more varied so that it's a combination of hill-square hills and grass squares for the valleys.
4) The path that leads east out of Cith dead ends. Maybe there could be a road leading to other cities?
NerdanelVampire: I still haven't gotten to implementing roads. But Cith is supposed to be a backwater...
5) Miraab: (Wow...the city reminds me of Daggerfall...)
- Trees block the southern exit from the city.
- Wouldn't it make more sense to have zombies spawn in the city rather than general monsters?
NerdanelVampire: Daggerfall, never played it. Since it will be far too much effort to downsize Miraab, I'll probably have to do something to the grassland square in the south, such as including a road or making a special map. Miraab is populated by humans. There is another town on the map that's supposed to be largely populated by the undead. However, I haven't got to the point of figuring out how to customize town monsters yet.
BucketMan: Town monsters are customized in data/wild/terrain.lua. Add a line like:
rules = { [{100, "or"}] = { flags = { FLAG_TO_REQUIRE=true } } }
to the new_wilderness_terrain{} entry. "and" will work also.
6) Several terrain types appears to block spells and breath weapons. Fields and deep water in particular.
NerdanelVampire: Interesting... That should be easy to fix.
7) The Blasphemous Noble quest description appears not to wrap.
NerdanelVampire: I'll look into it. I thought things like that wrapped automatically..?"
BucketMan: Whoops! I just double-reported this. It's not entirely implemented correctly in the engine, but to get quest descriptions to wrap, I think you have to return them as strings instead of tables. But, doing that makes it difficult to get the description line (in yellow) to not blend with the description itself.
8) The 'two of everything' store theme in most towns might be more interesting if each of the pairs had different inventory. Or at least were 'different stores' so that buying an item from one didn't also remove it from the other.
NerdanelVampire: I want to do that eventually, but beyond defining two different stores for the same store, I don't know how to go about with it. Thinking of the long-standing ToME issue with dungeon towns, I actually think this should probably be handled in the engine. Meanwhile, the multiple shops are there to provide that big-city feel.
BucketMan: Two different stores for each store would certainly work. Or more, even. Call it 'low, middle, and high' quality, for example. That way you could have different towns more or less able to supply the player with quality equipment, and provide a gradual 'building up' of equipment over the course of the game, in a very standard nintendo RPG fashion.
9) I'm guessing those are house quests in the works?
NerdanelVampire: Technically yes. I've been thinking that perhaps I should make the quest dialogue inaccessible until I actually have quests. The dialogue got put in the game only because the system of it was something that wasn't likely to change in later alphas and the only way I could test the dialogue was to have it accessible in-game. More important than the quests however, would be to have items with pluses get generated and to fix all the elusive issues with character creation, etc.