New room templates for Angband 4.0+

[Rowan]

I know nothing about room coding- does the greater number of unique room options lower the frequency of the "common" rooms? There seem to be far fewer of the large, circular rooms with random un-lightable areas outside them (not that I'm complaining- those areas can be tiresome).

[Rowan]

Just saw the enormous arrow-and-bullseye vault. Love it!

[jrodman]

Good news, I love the increased richness with the new room templates.

However, there are a few flies in the ointment, for me personally anyway.

The rooms that appear to be ascii art of a crab holding a television or similar kind of go a bit far over the line into "goofy" territory for me. There's some other rooms that don't really make sense (how often are people going to design rooms so that they make a picture on the blueprint), but it's only when they get really on the silly side like a winking face that it falls apart for me.

If I'm not a total outlier, I wonder if some amount of labelling would do well here. "Include silly rooms (yes/no)?"

The other problem is that some of these rooms are sort of taxing for the game's movement controls. There's a checkerboard-ish room which requires knights-move diagonals to cross, and there's no method in the game currently to traverse them without a lot of repeated manual entry. Perhaps this should be better solved by implementing a "move-to-location" function in the game as opposed to changing the rooms, but they're a little annoying right now.

[Nomad]

The rooms that appear to be ascii art of a crab holding a television or similar kind of go a bit far over the line into "goofy" territory for me. There's some other rooms that don't really make sense (how often are people going to design rooms so that they make a picture on the blueprint), but it's only when they get really on the silly side like a winking face that it falls apart for me.

Well, there is one that's crab-shaped, but I'm not sure where the television comes in...? Possibly just a chance combination of two rooms that happened to look that way? There are a few animal-shaped rooms but nothing I'd consider excessively goofy like smiley faces or words in English or anything. YMMV. I'm mostly following the lead established by the skull and crossbones and Pacman vaults, which most people seem to quite like.

The other problem is that some of these rooms are sort of taxing for the game's movement controls. There's a checkerboard-ish room which requires knights-move diagonals to cross, and there's no method in the game currently to traverse them without a lot of repeated manual entry. Perhaps this should be better solved by implementing a "move-to-location" function in the game as opposed to changing the rooms, but they're a little annoying right now.

I don't know if there's a consensus on how people feel about rooms with terrain that's difficult to run across - I know some people find cavern levels annoying for that reason - but I tend to err on the side of variety being more interesting and leading to more tactical battles; in any case, there's only a tiny percentage of rooms that have that alternating checkerboard pattern so I wouldn't have thought they'd appear frequently enough to be much of an annoyance. (Unlike caverns.)

But I'd certainly be interested in more views from people playtesting on whether there's any consensus on specific rooms people like or dislike. You can also easily mod your own copy of room_template.txt to delete or comment out any individual room layouts that you don't want to see appear, which won't affect the running of the game or saved games in progress in the slightest.

[Thraalbee]

I am very happy with the new rooms. Some combos are more odd than others but that is fine imo. The only room type I am tired of is the older addition of the round room with a small one (hidden) door room in the center. The room itself is fine but the single design around it is boring.

[jrodman]

You can also easily mod your own copy of room_template.txt to delete or comment out any individual room layouts that you don't want to see appear, which won't affect the running of the game or saved games in progress in the slightest.

Indeed, if this is just my personal taste and that taste is rather unlike that of others, I can just tweak my install. The point of mentioning is that typically people aren't unique.