stair placement

[wobbly]

All the down stairs on the level:

http://angband.oook.cz/screen-show.php?id=4886

Trouble is, that as far as the stair placement function is concerned that room is 21 great potential stair spots. It's similar with other special rooms

[wobbly]

Ok here's a suggestion.

• Keep the same criteria for a "good" stair spot.
• When checking a spot for good, check the adjacent wall spots, if you can create a good spot by carving out the wall tile, place there.
• Maybe stop it from carving a spot near a monster pit, maybe not, depends how cruel you feel.

Edit: Maybe best to only carve in a corridor? Or you can get trickier with the carving:

  #############
  #
###
#>+
###
  #
  #############

and

#############
#>#
#
###
  #
  ###########

[wobbly]

###
.1.
###

 ### 
 .1. 
 234 
 567 
 890

 ### 
 .1. 
 #.# 
 #># 
 ###

So if 1 is a corridor spot (square_suits_stairs_ok) and 2 to 0 are all wall tiles....

[backwardsEric]

The capability is there (because of persistent levels) to enforce a minimum distance between stairs. It would be very easy to turn that on for non-persistent modified, classic, moria, and lair levels (also caverns, but they have no rooms) to limit the clustering of staircases in a room. If you want to try it yourself, look at handle_level_stairs() in gen-cave.c, change the value after the colon for the "minsep = (persistent) ? 4 : 0" line (in the latest code that's line of 959 of gen-cave.c), and recompile.

Another idea, requiring little modification to the code, would be to require more adjacent walls for a potential staircase location in alloc_stairs() if that location is in a room. That would tend to push the staircases to dead-ends in corridors or to the middle of corridors.

[PowerDiver]

I've always found the clumping to be silly. Is there any reason not to simply enforce a minimum distance between stairs of, say, 1/4 the diameter of the level?

[wobbly]

Yeah sounds like enforcing minimum distance is easy, so go with that?

I'd also prefer something based on level size rather then a constant. Allows it to adapt to small or huge levels.