Hengband changes 2004 -> 2019

[Letheka]

I saw someone asking what's changed in Hengband in an old thread and decided to put together an answer (the changelog has not been updated in a while so it required source code diving.)

This topic could also be called "Hengband changes between 1.6.2 and the current development repo," as those are the versions I compared, but I tried to limit it to "changes between the version of Hengband that Chengband forked and the current development repo." There were a couple of additions made after 1.6.2 that exist in the Cheng lineage, like the Sniper class, Hex magic, and the crystal castle.

Overall there's not much to mention, compared to what's been happening in Chenglikes and V in the meantime; I guess Mr. hoge has been busy with other things or is just satisfied with Hengband's gameplay. By far the most significant change from a code perspective is the heroic amount of internal cleanup and reorganization, breaking up large files such as cmd*.c, which may have obscured some other changes from my skimming over the source code with a diff tool.

• A "movie" feature that presumably records gameplay to be watched again later.
• An incomplete and currently unselectable new race: Merfolk. Has water resistance and starts with a ring of levitation. Appears to be intended to get extra bonuses while in water tiles, though I can't tell what these bonuses are.
• Magic-Eaters got a new ability called "Powerful Activation" which doubles the effective level of a spell at the cost of some HP.
• Scrolls of Amusement and *Amusement*. Spawns "amusing items" near the player which apparently means worthless junk, statues, non-unique corpses, and the Fishing Pole of Taikobo and Broken Dagger of Magician.
• Some new artifacts, notably the Vampire Killer whip with a Grand Cross activation that creates a cross of holy fire, and Dragon Cloth bronze DSM that you can strip out of to blind/scare nearby monsters and give yourself buffs.
• Some new monsters, nothing particularly exciting except elementally aspected kobolds to make newbies' lives even more miserable.
• 1 new quest in which you "solve" a locked room murder committed by cloakers and death swords.
• Damaging floor tiles for fire (lava), poison, cold, and electricity. Non-lava types are mainly used in vaults.
• A weapon proficiency rating for shields. Your proficiency increases by getting attacked and high levels give a bonus to your AC.
• A building service to repair broken daggers and swords, using another weapon as "material" which is destroyed. Inherits egos and plusses from the base broken weapon. Most obviously improves Narsil, but also has a 100% chance of the new weapons acquiring properties (one random ability, one random activation) from randart materials and a 14.2% chance of them inheriting properties from ego materials.

If I made any mistakes reading the code or missed anything interesting, feel free to add to what I found here.

[MITZE]

Thank ye!

(also ten characters )

[DrWho42]

i'm intrigued by the movie and merfolk features. when i played brogue i enjoyed reviewing my gameplay to figuring out what i could do better next round.