Smeagol Droping a ring

[CunningGabe]

Old style ego-items.txt listed which items ego type is possible, and if sval was 99 it did mean any item of that basic type.

Ah, I see. I think the way that worked (and more or less still works) is that the item is created first, and then you check if there are any valid egos you can apply to improve the item.

[Timo Pietilä]

I'm not sure when or how that would have worked, but it doesn't work here. When monster.txt is parsed, any tval/sval combinations listed in the drop lines are mapped to concrete object types, which are then saved. Putting tval,99 causes the monster drop to have a null pointer.

Old style ego-items.txt listed which items ego type is possible, and if sval was 99 it did mean any item of that basic type.

[CunningGabe]

If it works like it used to be telling tval,99 creates anything whatever that tval specifies.

I'm not sure when or how that would have worked, but it doesn't work here. When monster.txt is parsed, any tval/sval combinations listed in the drop lines are mapped to concrete object types, which are then saved. Putting tval,99 causes the monster drop to have a null pointer.

[Timo Pietilä]

I'm pretty sure you can only specify (tval, sval) pairs (i.e., particular rings, not just "all rings").

If it works like it used to be telling tval,99 creates anything whatever that tval specifies.

[CunningGabe]

The current implementation is more limited, but you can specify tvals (like rings).

I'm pretty sure you can only specify (tval, sval) pairs (i.e., particular rings, not just "all rings").

[Magnate]

Takkaria came up with the concept of "drop profiles" a long while ago (see http://takkaria.org/junkyard/drops.txt), which should, when fully implemented, cope with all of these ideas.

The current implementation is more limited, but you can specify tvals (like rings).

[Derakon]

I guess my ideal monster drop system would allow for specifying:

* How many items to drop (min and max)
* What categories of items are eligible to be dropped (probably with some templating, so you could define ORC_DROP as hard armor, melee weapons, crossbows, and bolts and then just stick ORC_DROP into the orcs' monster.txt entries)
* How much to boost the item level by when generating.

That last would of course be used for uniques, and other high-value targets as appropriate. It'd replace the DROP_GOOD and DROP_GREAT system.

[CunningGabe]

I've been playing around with adding 'drop:' lines to monster.txt, and it seems to work pretty well, but it looks like in the current implementation you can only specify items by both tval and sval. So it's easy to make Smeagol drop a specific ring, but if you want him to drop a random ring you have to list them all separately and run the risk of him dropping several at once. It would definitely be useful to have a way to just specify a tval and have the sval chosen randomly.

It would be nice, but it is harder to do than it sounds. The thing is, we don't really want Smeagol to just drop one of the rings uniformly at random. We want the ring to be level-appropriate (possibly with a boost), and we want it to respect the relative rarities of all rings. The current object allocation code doesn't let us pick a ring this way.

Adding that capability isn't too hard, but it's not trivial. The monster allocation code is very similar, and it does support this kind of operation (e.g., pick an orc that is level-appropriate and respects monster rarities). The way that's done with monsters is that when you want to specifically request an orc (for a pit, escort, etc.), you clear the whole monster table and reinitialize it using a hook that only adds the orcs from monster.txt. Then you choose the monster, and reinitialize the whole monster table again.

The thing is, the object allocation system will probably be overhauled soon*. We hope to eventually have a much richer monster drop system in place, as well as themed rooms, like a library full of scrolls, for instance. Once we have that, it should be easy to have Smeagol drop a random ring.

* for some definition of "soon". Maybe by 3.4.0.

[Nomad]

I've been playing around with adding 'drop:' lines to monster.txt, and it seems to work pretty well, but it looks like in the current implementation you can only specify items by both tval and sval. So it's easy to make Smeagol drop a specific ring, but if you want him to drop a random ring you have to list them all separately and run the risk of him dropping several at once. It would definitely be useful to have a way to just specify a tval and have the sval chosen randomly.

Still, I've been having a lot of fun making rangers drop bows and arrows, priests drop prayer books, dragons drop the appropriate DSMs, etc. I think it adds a great tactical element to the game as well as extra realism, though balance would probably be a major issue.

[UglySquirrell]

Cool, thanks for the replies

[dos350]

obv he should drop the one, please no raging!~

[bulian]

Welcome to 3.3.0

Exciting - announcement forthcoming?

[JohnCW9]

Just an idea, after killing him a lot lately and only getting cash, maybe have him generated with a random ring. With a chance of it being great, poison resist, free action, flames, etc.

In Tome 2.3.5 you get some type of invisbity ring the best I ever got gave +5 to speed

[Derakon]

Awesome, glad to hear it.

I haven't had much time to play Angband lately, unfortunately. I have some catching up to do...

[Magnate]

There's currently no way to set drop type preferences. People have discussed adding treasure categories which monsters would pull from (e.g. orcs tend to drop weapons and armor, liches tend to drop spellbooks, etc.) but it hasn't been implemented...yet. That said, if it were, it would be straightforward to have a "rings only" category that you could use for Smeagol. And I think the idea was pretty well-received, so if it were implemented and balanced it'd stand a good chance of making it into Vanilla.

Welcome to 3.3.0 - with the first implementation of monster-specific drops. Just add the line drop:ring to Smeagol's entry in monster.txt and this should Just Work (tm).

(I've not actually tried this myself - I don't know if the tvals are able to be named yet, or whether you need drop:45 instead.)