New level generation

[PowerDiver]

Timo and Eddie have argued passionately that permanent walls only belong in vaults and level borders. You can currently create labyrinths with permanent walls at greater depths, but I may remove this.

I agree that digging gets so easy that labyrinths become somewhat pointless with it. Maybe that's an argument against them, or against digging, or against something else.

What you are doing is designing interesting room types. The caverns would be interesting as a room that fills 1/4 of the dungeon. Mazes with permanent walls would make fine vaults. They just aren't suitable for entire levels, IMO obviously, but when Timo and I strongly opine in agreement that ought to mean something.

I'd love to see digging removed. However that is radical. I may be the only person who never uses ASCs, so take my next comment as coming from the only source.

The new dungeon types are not cumulatively compatible with no digging. It takes all of my skill to deal with summoners in caverns without ASCs. That's not my objection to caverns, btw. My objection is that they don't contain vaults or moated rooms -- I was going to say not for the shape but for the contents, but the OoD monsters need some containment, so I guess I really mean for the shapes too.

[Napsterbater]

If you removed digging you'd have to do something about earthquakes/destruction.

[d_m]

The new dungeon types are not cumulatively compatible with no digging. It takes all of my skill to deal with summoners in caverns without ASCs. That's not my objection to caverns, btw. My objection is that they don't contain vaults or moated rooms -- I was going to say not for the shape but for the contents, but the OoD monsters need some containment, so I guess I really mean for the shapes too.

So just to be clear: if a level was pretty much an entire cavern, but with some rooms interspersed (either individually or in small groups) do you think that would answer your objection? How much non-labyrinth or non-cavern area is necessary in your opinion?

I am sympathetic to the idea that caverns aren't rewarding enough for their difficulty level. I'd rather not just make them a room type because I like the fact that they are challenging and I think it's worth making players deal with them now and again. But I agree that if there aren't pits/vaults/etc. then maybe they seem too hard for their reward, if that's what you're getting at...

Anyway, given the 3.3 freeze it's going to be hard to get changes through, but I may try to work on it a bit. I think it could qualify as a "balance change" which is appropriate just before a release. We'll see...

[PowerDiver]

So just to be clear: if a level was pretty much an entire cavern, but with some rooms interspersed (either individually or in small groups) do you think that would answer your objection? How much non-labyrinth or non-cavern area is necessary in your opinion?

I am sympathetic to the idea that caverns aren't rewarding enough for their difficulty level. I'd rather not just make them a room type because I like the fact that they are challenging and I think it's worth making players deal with them now and again.

I have no idea what is enough. Perhaps Timo has an idea. However, things were not broken before, so the question is not what meets minimum specs. The onus should be on you to show that your new stuff is definitely an improvement.

Maybe your second paragraph above is our fundamental disagreement. You never "have to deal with" anything. You can always reset a level with 2 scrolls of recall, if nothing else.

Everything in the game is about choosing your battles, risk vs reward. The game occasionally get more interesting when there are multiple things going on in different places on the level with limited but non-zero interaction, which happens on large levels but not on small levels. If you play go, think about the difference between 19x19 and 9x9. You can practice tactics on the small board, but a certain minimum size is required for the real complexity to expose itself. One of my many disagreements with mazes and caverns is that they don't seem big enough for the complex issues to arise often enough. You see small levels as forcing difficulty. I see them as removing complexity.

Caverns are high risk with substandard reward and little possibility of advanced tactics. They call for an immediate reset, unless detection shows that you got exceptionally lucky and can see low risk with high reward in the immediate vicinity. They require more keypresses to traverse despite being smaller, and they screw up the principles of lighting rooms. The main question is whether a dungeon exit is convenient or you resort to magic to quit the level.

As always, playing for turncount changes the game so that the player is forced to deal with what shows up a bit more often. So there are a few of us who will see a little something of the forced difficulty you have in mind [but not much if the black market sold stacks of ?telLevel that game]. This explains my encounters with summoners in cavern levels. However, there's been a strong consensus that Vanilla game design should not be aimed directly at diving style games, so that shouldn't factor in to whether the new level types are considered a good choice for Vanilla.

[Magnate]

Anyway, given the 3.3 freeze it's going to be hard to get changes through, but I may try to work on it a bit. I think it could qualify as a "balance change" which is appropriate just before a release. We'll see...

IMO the next month is all about improving stuff that's already in the game, including caverns and labyrinths. Obviously the more ambitious you are with changing them, the more likely it is that those changes won't be fully settled/tested/balanced by release, but it's your code.

[d_m]

However, things were not broken before, so the question is not what meets minimum specs. The onus should be on you to show that your new stuff is definitely an improvement.

I don't agree that things were fine before. There was a ticket open by Takkaria years ago about smaller levels and another about supporting a wider variety of level types. Many people had expressed that all levels felt too similar. While I agree that there are problems I'd say many people have said they enjoyed at least one of the new level types.

That said, I understand the argument. Are things worse now? Given that players already opt out of encountering monsters and situations they don't want is it bad that really talented players will opt out of caverns?

You see small levels as forcing difficulty. I see them as removing complexity.

I'm not sure cavern levels are really that small anymore. I certainly made them bigger awhile ago after finding some bugs that were limiting their size. At this point they are pretty big, and they could be even bigger. In terms of open floor squares I think they currently end up squarely within the normal variance of a standard level.

The big reasons I've heard for people skipping them is that controlling LOS is harder, finding good places to fight monsters is harder, and running/lighting are annoying.

(Although in the past I did introduce a change, which was reverted, which made levels too small and which you pointed out was broken.)

That said, I also disagree that smaller levels just function to remove complexity. Consider strategies for dealing with vaults: phasing as a guaranteed way to jump just out of the vault, teleporting monsters out of the vault, and teleporting when in trouble. I consider levels which force you to tweak or change those strategies (because their smaller size makes teleport more dangerous to do, and makes teleporting monsters away less reliable) interesting.

If the level is too small then it will probably just make iron players hate life (which is what one of my early changes did), but I disagree with the analogy to Go that bigger is aways better/more interesting/more complex. In fact, I think big levels *are* easier and less complex in the sense that stealth/teleport/teleport-other are all substantially more useful on those levels (and I imagine that players can become over-reliant on those--I certainly was/am).

Also on a big level, floor items have a much better shot of being far from things you don't want to deal with, which creates the "hobo/scrapper diver" archetype who doesn't bother fighting things and just finds nice things that (apparently) someone threw on the ground. I think this is a valid play style but that doesn't mean it's efficacy needs to be directly preserved.

That said, I do take the objections/criticism people on oook have given about the new level types seriously and am hoping to find some kind of solution/compromise.

[jens]

The big reasons I've heard for people skipping them is that controlling LOS is harder, finding good places to fight monsters is harder, and running/lighting are annoying.

In my book the first two in your list are good reasons to have caverns, but running/lighting has so far outweighed the gain. Looking forward to test caverns in the last nightly

It's a bit funny how people keep complaining that the game is too easy, but then most don't want the changes to make it harder...

[Magnate]

It's a bit funny how people keep complaining that the game is too easy, but then most don't want the changes to make it harder...

I think that's because people want "harder" to mean "more challenging but without any impact on my chosen style of play". Unfortunately some changes mean that people have to adjust their style a bit, and they don't like that.

[Derakon]

Random thought: how about a small level that is built around a vault? So basically the level is about 50% vault and 50% outer corridors and rooms. By removing all the extra space that usually surrounds vaults, teleportation becomes more limited as a tactic for dealing with them. But they're vaults, so they're usually worth taking on anyway.

The main problem I see with the concept is that if the player has disconnected stairs and lacks the means to crack the vault, they probably will end up stranded, since most of the outer rooms are not likely to directly connect to each other. But it seems like that could be worked around, e.g. by ensuring that each disconnected component has a down staircase (or up, if on dlvl 99 without dead Sauron, etc.).

[d_m]

Random thought: how about a small level that is built around a vault? So basically the level is about 50% vault and 50% outer corridors and rooms. By removing all the extra space that usually surrounds vaults, teleportation becomes more limited as a tactic for dealing with them. But they're vaults, so they're usually worth taking on anyway.

The main problem I see with the concept is that if the player has disconnected stairs and lacks the means to crack the vault, they probably will end up stranded, since most of the outer rooms are not likely to directly connect to each other. But it seems like that could be worked around, e.g. by ensuring that each disconnected component has a down staircase (or up, if on dlvl 99 without dead Sauron, etc.).

I were going to do this I would just moat the whole vault so that all the surrounding regions would be connected.

I actually think that all the current vaults that require tons of digging should be moated (now that I think about it). The vault mechanic is fun but I think it's confusing/weird that you follow a tunnel that hits a permanent wall and have to dig around to the complete other side.

Eddie has proposed using rubble instead of granite in vaults and I think I support a change like that.

The small level around a vault is a cool idea and I will probably try it at some point.

[Timo Pietilä]

I don't agree that things were fine before. There was a ticket open by Takkaria years ago about smaller levels and another about supporting a wider variety of level types. Many people had expressed that all levels felt too similar. While I agree that there are problems I'd say many people have said they enjoyed at least one of the new level types.

Old levels were not broken, they were just only level type there was. That was a problem, nothing more. If you just had made caverns to appear instead of normal levels every now and then that would have been definite improvement, but you did change the ordinary levels too, and those were not broken.

I don't agree with Takkaria that we need smaller levels. Smaller levels are just less. I would rather have bigger levels than smaller ones. In NPP where you encounter small levels every now and then I just moved to next level ASAP if I could unless that small level had something I wanted. If not they are more boring than boring levels in old angband. There isn't anything to explore.

For mazes, they just don't work right now. Maybe as a room type, but that's all they are good for.

[PowerDiver]

It's a bit funny how people keep complaining that the game is too easy, but then most don't want the changes to make it harder...

If you read my comments carefully, you will see that I am not complaining that things are harder. I am complaining that they are less interesting. And I separated out how it applies to my particular playstyle, because the current consensus is that such considerations are irrelevant.

I'm with Timo. If you want to vary the size of the levels, make them larger. Say up to twice as wide and twice as high as the current maxima. That might provide new sorts of interesting situations. Or perhaps not. One has to try and see, and be happy to remove the code if it didn't appreciably improve things.

[jens]

If you read my comments carefully, you will see that I am not complaining that things are harder. I am complaining that they are less interesting. And I separated out how it applies to my particular playstyle, because the current consensus is that such considerations are irrelevant.

Yep, I did note that, and I was not refering to you. I quoted d_m who said that was one of the things people were complaining about.

I'm with Timo. If you want to vary the size of the levels, make them larger. Say up to twice as wide and twice as high as the current maxima. That might provide new sorts of interesting situations. Or perhaps not. One has to try and see, and be happy to remove the code if it didn't appreciably improve things.

If we are talking about 3.2 type dungeons I do not think I would appreciate to have them very much larger. For people going through most of a level they were a pretty well balanced in size. With other designs I could go for it, say in a level where there is a vault, or some other large feature of that kind.

[Jazerus]

The smaller standard levels from the May nightlies weren't very compelling, but I do like the caverns and labyrinths so far. I particularly like caverns generated at around 3-4 tiles wide on average - they feel like an effective blend of standard levels and the larger caverns. There might also be potential for labyrinths with larger passage sizes as well, thinking about it.

Basically, more variety in level design is a really good thing. The trap to avoid is just making one "cavern" algorithm and have that be used for every cavern - size variance and width variance are things that might be interesting to experiment with to produce some really varied caverns. Wider tunnels for standard levels might be interesting to produce more of an open "Mines of Moria" type feel, particularly with pillars and such running down the middle. I'd be happy to see a "standard" level with 1-width corridors and rectangular rooms only be 50% likely or so, with the other 50% occupied by interesting caverns, labyrinths, wide levels, etc.