What is "balance" anyway

[TJS]

The difficulty with early vaults, as anyone who has ever played with the "always generate unusual rooms" option can attest, is that you can't break into most of them without being able to bore through solid granite -- and frequently, much more of it than a -Stone to Mud can provide. Most young characters can't manage that; it's limited to beefy warriors who buy picks, and mages who learn Stone to Mud as a castable spell.

I wouldn't mind modifying vault generation to not always require you to dig to the entrance. Mostly this would involve surrounding vaults with some walkable space (since the game will generate corridors going up to the vaults). Some vaults, like the GCV, should still require digging though.

I don't really have a problem with an early vault that you can't get into, it makes getting a pick or shovel worth keeping rather that just being useless junk like it is at the moment. Also you'll have to scout around the level for a heavy weapon or -stone to mud. Even if you can't get into the vault, it is quite exciting finding it and trying to get in. Better than a boring old level with nothing in it of interest.
I must have played 100 games of Angband now and I've only found one GCV and probably 2-3 CVs.

[fizzix]

I imagine it'd be feasible, but very luck-oriented, kind of like ironman.

It's less trivial than I thought because mucking around with ESP is necessary for this and harder.

[Nightmarjoo]

I'm kind of curious about trying a challenge character where no detection spells are available. Changing the edit files to remove the detection staves/scrolls/wands is pretty trivial.

I imagine it'd be feasible, but very luck-oriented, kind of like ironman.

[andrewdoull]

The difficulty with early vaults, as anyone who has ever played with the "always generate unusual rooms" option can attest, is that you can't break into most of them without being able to bore through solid granite -- and frequently, much more of it than a -Stone to Mud can provide. Most young characters can't manage that; it's limited to beefy warriors who buy picks, and mages who learn Stone to Mud as a castable spell.

I wouldn't mind modifying vault generation to not always require you to dig to the entrance. Mostly this would involve surrounding vaults with some walkable space (since the game will generate corridors going up to the vaults). Some vaults, like the GCV, should still require digging though.

Sangband does a much better job of connecting vaults up to tunnels. Again, it's probably worth stealing the code from there if required.

Andrew

[fizzix]

I quite like the idea of not knowing exactly what an item or monster is until it comes into your line of sight. Just seeing a D and not knowing any more about it is quite an interesting prospect.

Also you could still have these items squelched when they come into your line of sight and become identified, so you still wouldn't have to wade through loads of shards of pottery for example.

Not sure how it would work for people using tiles though (I use old tiles which has a different tile for each monster, and are recognisable at a glance, which I like).

Another thing I'd like to see is the chance of vaults, pits and other interesting stuff as early as level 1. I hate starting a new game knowing there will be nothing interesting at all for a load of levels which I have to go through.

I'm kind of curious about trying a challenge character where no detection spells are available. Changing the edit files to remove the detection staves/scrolls/wands is pretty trivial.

[Magnate]

Would having your level of detection detail be based on your perception be possible? Eg rouge detection spells being the most detailed and so on?

High perception is a big difference to pick rogues but by endgame is borderline meaningless.

This is how it works in Sang (in which perception is an improvable skill), but I don't think it would work for V, unless perception was changed to a clev-dependent skill (like, e.g., magic device skill).

[Marble Dice]

I wouldn't mind modifying vault generation to not always require you to dig to the entrance. Mostly this would involve surrounding vaults with some walkable space (since the game will generate corridors going up to the vaults). Some vaults, like the GCV, should still require digging though.

Another possibility is sometimes replacing granite with magma or quartz. Same mechanics (only bore and passwall can get out), but easier to break into.

[Derakon]

The difficulty with early vaults, as anyone who has ever played with the "always generate unusual rooms" option can attest, is that you can't break into most of them without being able to bore through solid granite -- and frequently, much more of it than a -Stone to Mud can provide. Most young characters can't manage that; it's limited to beefy warriors who buy picks, and mages who learn Stone to Mud as a castable spell.

I wouldn't mind modifying vault generation to not always require you to dig to the entrance. Mostly this would involve surrounding vaults with some walkable space (since the game will generate corridors going up to the vaults). Some vaults, like the GCV, should still require digging though.

[Tatami]

Would having your level of detection detail be based on your perception be possible? Eg rouge detection spells being the most detailed and so on?

High perception is a big difference to pick rogues but by endgame is borderline meaningless.

[TJS]

Whole gaming philosophy was a bit different too: there were deliberate junk items (shards of pottery, non-monster skeletons) without anybody complaining about them and you were not expected to win the game. No item stacking also made things quite a bit different. Much less items were found in drops, especially in summoning explosions and high-reward pits and there was in contrast more floor-items and vaults played bigger role in gaming. You usually saw at least one GV in one game, so you saw approx one CGV in four games. Now it can take a lot of games before you see a good GV. You also usually now have better gear *when* you find one.

Also region between 2500 and 4000 (or something like that) was more difficult because there were no low-speed boost items like Amulets of Trickery. If you found an GV you were very tempted to clear it up in hope to find RoS or BoS or one of the speed-booting artifacts.

I quite like the idea of not knowing exactly what an item or monster is until it comes into your line of sight. Just seeing a D and not knowing any more about it is quite an interesting prospect.

Also you could still have these items squelched when they come into your line of sight and become identified, so you still wouldn't have to wade through loads of shards of pottery for example.

Not sure how it would work for people using tiles though (I use old tiles which has a different tile for each monster, and are recognisable at a glance, which I like).

Another thing I'd like to see is the chance of vaults, pits and other interesting stuff as early as level 1. I hate starting a new game knowing there will be nothing interesting at all for a load of levels which I have to go through.

[Timo Pietilä]

No, it is not fun. Maybe to you it is, to me it is not. You obviously don't know me or what is fun to me, but that's fine, I wouldn't expect you to. That's why I tried to make it clear that it was my opinion when I stated it.

Have you tried? Game feels much more intense without all the information you are now getting with single look. Seriously, that "lack of information" is a good thing, not bad. It increases feel of danger and it also adds kind of "fog of war" that is missing in current vanilla.

Game is quite boring and way too easy now. There is no feeling of mystery left. I never anymore feel compelled to do some exploring. It is just one single run to bottom of the dungeon to kill Morgoth and that's it. Million turns without any "wow!" or "I didn't expect that" moments. That's just boring.

Eddie et co. are trying to re-generate that mystery feeling with "ID by testing", but because ID as spell still exists and is plentiful as items that doesn't change much.

[Magnate]

I can start a thread if people want to sound off on this.

Andrew already did that ...

[d_m]

Magnate and/or d_m - could you elabourate on this more (perhaps by starting another thread discussing it)? I've not seen any discussion to date, and I would be intrigued to see what you had in mind.

Andrew

So, here is the 5 second overview of what I was hoping to do (I'm going to lay out the things I want with the understanding that some of them can be stolen from Leon's patch):

1. Circular or other interestingly shaped rooms
2. Better "high-level" control of room placement
3. Distinct "level feels" e.g. cave levels, maze-levels, more-or-less open-feeling levels, etc.
4. More explicit determination of how "good" a level is, in terms of explicitly deciding whether to place vaults, how many, etc, etc "up front"
5. Try to vary dungeon size in interesting ways

Basically, after creating a patch to vary dungeon-size I got (at least somewhat rightly) smacked by PowerDiver for drastically changing the likelihood of finding greater vaults, based on the reduced chance that the generation algorithm would have room to place them (as well as some other more minor issues).

So my idea was to try to determine "interesting" things, like vaults, weird rooms, level difficulty (mabe generation of unique or OOD monsters) first, and then do all the boring stuff like connecting them with corridors or placing boring rooms. I think this would make useful level feelings possible, and it would also make the quality of a level less based on its size.

Whew. That was more than 5 seconds.

I can start a thread if people want to sound off on this.

[Nick]

Ah that. I like some of the stuff that Leon does, and some of it just didn't work for me (the monster pit contents generators in particular confused me for the longest time).

I find it simplest to just steal a whole variant.

[andrewdoull]

All I know is that d_m was looking a while ago at http://trac.rephial.org/ticket/156 - Leon had sent Takkaria a complete replacement for generate.c, which hasn't yet made it into the V codebase. The more development elapsed, the more work was required to incorporate Leon's changes. I don't know how far it's got, but there were some excited noises from d_m about caves and other room types, so I'm looking forward to seeing it.

Ah that. I like some of the stuff that Leon does, and some of it just didn't work for me (the monster pit contents generators in particular confused me for the longest time).

I was wondering as I have been spending considerable amounts of time fixing the correctness of the Unangband generation code, and adding additional room generation types.

Andrew