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Release 0.2.5 "Thomas
Covenant Was Here"

As promised, this release is mostly about antimagic and the related Unbeliever class, and things related thereto:

• Antimagic fields are implemented, of course. For display convenience, they're implemented as a temporary effect (cleverly named "Antimagic Field" :wink: ) triggered by wielding antimagic equipment or having a non-zero Antimagic skill level, with a tooltip listing the field strength and radius.
• Speaking of antimagic equipment and display convenience, the object descriptions of antimagic equipment (which for now is basically Dark Swords) also includes a description of the antimagic field power/radius boosts it will confer when wielded, based on your current Antimagic skill and its enchantment level.
• The optional visual display effect for the antimagic field didn't come out as impressive as I'd hoped:
  [insert images here]
  I was kind of envisioning something like Ghouls' Retch effect, but that appears to involve shaders, which I haven't worked out yet. On the flip side, one idea I'm toying with for future releases is to use the presence of the effect itself in an NPC's grid to determine whether we need to check it for antimagic jamming, rather than have to check distance to the player every time. That would depend on whether a map effect can be modified in situ to add or remove its visual overlay.
• Also covered are the Antimagic-conferred talents Disrupt the Continuum and Detect Traps (which also disarms traps at Antimagic skill level 35). I'm reasonably sure I've caught all the places that Disrupt the Continuum's teleport jamming needs to be checked to prevent the player or NPCs from teleporting — which, of course, involves the same infrastructure used by the Anchor of Space-Time (for NPCs) and various equipment that prevents teleportation (for the player), so those are now implemented too.

Also the usual batch of bugfixes:

• Was not applying damage bonus for Tulkas prayer correctly.
• Wasn't properly applying the drain-hit-points flag from various equipment.
• Piercing Shots is supposed to be instant-use (as I noticed when I was trying to remember whether Disrupt the Continuum and Detect Traps were supposed to be instant-use).
• A few bugs in the modify-visuals infrastructure:
  
  • Forgot that some grid entities were cloned, so just setting user-pref visuals on the master grid list wouldn't cover them.
  • A Sneaky Hack™ to make ASCII visual overrides from user preferences play nice with graphical tiles: just have the setting "override" the tile's image to the same image.
• Several found by Vaknuva:
  
  • Wasn't applying level-up changes to pval-based flags properly. This includes Ents' speed penalty, RohanKnights' speed boosts, Rogues' bonus to crit chance, and Wood Elves' bonus to ammo multiplier. :oops:
  • Wasn't charging mana costs for RohanKnight powers, and was giving several powers to both RohanKnights and Thunderlords earlier than they were supposed to get them. :oops:
  • Piety is not supposed to change on the worldmap — but for Eru followers, it is supposed to change in the wilderness.
  • Some internal object renaming was causing single-spell spellbooks not to appear in stores. This would also have prevented the Magic Shop from selling Wooden Rods, and was preventing several classes from getting their starting spellbook. :oops:

And unrelated extra features:

• Added DarkGod's half-width ASCII tiles modification (slightly tweaked; your patch would have shrunk graphical tiles to half-width too… :twisted: ).
• Improved the log flasher at the top and the log display at the bottom by enabling them to handle repeated lines as e.g. "You failed to pick the lock. (×5)" a la T2. (That's how I discovered that log flasher bug I mentioned elsewhere, which this release also fixes.)
• Since we now have instant-use talents, I figured the talent description should mention usage speed. This also reflects the spell speed bonus for wielding a Mage Staff.
• Expanded monster memory support to include learning an NPC's alertness, which happens by observing it wake up (or not wake up) enough times. Those who have the 'Learn monster information' option disabled, will see that information immediately in the actor tooltip.
• While I was in the area of Mimicry marking its powers as blocked by antimagic, I decided to spruce it up a bit:
  
  • Creating a new mimicry form used to require both defining the form via ObjectData:newMimicryForm() and defining a talent to be conferred by the associated mimicry cloak. For simplicity, I've consolidated the latter into the former.
  • Also finally got around to implementing the Mouse form's invisibility power and the Spider form's spin-web power — and the infrastructure for the latter was conveniently reusable to finally implement Ents' grow-trees power and the Grow Grass (Yavanna) and Grow Trees (Nature) spells.