Portralis and Mac OS X

[fredfnord]

So, after a bit of work, I've gotten portralis working on Mac OS X.

The first hurdle (won't build!) was removing all the X11 stuff from the makefile. I may try to add it back in after I install the X11 SDK, but for right now it doesn't compile that way.

The second hurdle (won't run, crashes with no error messages!) was discovering that the lib directory wasn't included in src002.zip.

The third hurdle (still won't run, now complains about r_info.txt) was discovering that you couldn't just use the lib directory from the previous set of sources, you needed to get the one from the windows distribution.

So now it runs, but there are a few issues.

First: text printing (including conversations) is messy. Text ends up all over the place, sometimes it is missing lines, often the text will hang around in the map or in the status areas after it should have cleared. I have looked at the text display code and I find it... unintuitive.

Second: a lot of monsters appear to be black. Which is to say, black on black. This is sort of frustrating, because you can't, you know, see them. I can't really figure out how it's determining what color to use for which monster, so I have no idea how to fix this.

I'll try it later with x11 and see if I can make that work, and if I can whether that fixes either or both of the above.

[Variaz]

Unfortunately, I don't have access to any Mac OS X machines to make it work...

However, if you do manage to make a working makefile or something, then by all means send it to me, and I will include it in the next release.

[fredfnord]

Okay, I'll see what I can do.

But I'd still like to know how monster colors are determined? It has to be at least somewhat different than Angband, because there aren't black creatures in any of the other variants that I know of.

[Variaz]

Colors are defined in the r_info by a letter, which is then defined in the source code(don't remember which file). The "black" creatures in Portralis are actually dark grey, because the true "black" creatures are, well, black, and therefore you can't see the character. So don't use "d" for monsters colors. Use "D" for the dark grey.

For example:

N:1:Small Kobold
G:k:G
I:110:1d4:10:2:30:0:0:0:0:0:0
W:1:1:800:10
B:4:5:4:1:0:0:1
E:1:1:1:2:1:1
C:0:0
A:hit:Knife:1:1d3:15:0:0
R:5:50
F:DROP_CORPSE | OPEN_DOOR | BASH_DOOR
M:0:0
D:A small, young kobold of the weaker kind.

That "G" means "Bright Green".

Now that you mention it, I don't have the list of colors in the r_info_template.txt file... However, I think I did post the info in the Forge section of the forum before...

[fredfnord]

Ah, I figured it was in there.
So the problem really is that dark grey displays the same color as black in Mac OS X's terminal program. Now, this isn't true for any other angband. Not really sure why that would be. I've noticed that if I select the screen, when it's highlighted, the text is readable.

Also irritating for, say, the ability selection screen, where everything is dark grey (i.e. invisible) unless you've put a point into it.

Oh, and there are a lot of monsters that are dark grey when their listing doesn't say they should be. For example, I ran into a dozen green worm masses, two of which were black. Poking through the code, I came to the conclusion that this had something to do with resistances, but I didn't come to any more of a conclusion than that.

[Variaz]

Resistances doesn't affect the colors. However, it's possible they were elites or bosses, as they use a special color outside of the 16 base colors. Perhaps the Mac OS X terminal doesn't support these colors...