Tears unnumbered ye shall shed

[half]

Asymmetric line of sight and ability to hit is an anachronism probably due to an oversight in the original code.

If you can see someone then it makes sense that they can see you too and if you can fire an arrow to hit them then they can fire back along the same line without hitting a wall.

It is one of those things that people have got used to and built some tactics around so would be sad to see it go, but really it needs to be fixed.

I think you are roughly right, but it isn't quite as obvious as you make out: there are a few sensible options. Sil uses the NPP system:

1) X has LOS on Y if and only if there is a line from the centre of X to any part of Y
2) X has LOF on Y if and only if there is a line from the centre of X to the centre of Y

So LOF is symmetric, but LOS isn't. This seems to work pretty well. Note that there is a very good thread on this somewhere on this forum.

Either of them could be logically asymmetric as one's eyes (or hands) are smaller than one's body. e.g. there are many cases where people are hiding between pillars, trees, corners etc where one person can see part of someone else's body but the other person can't see them.

That said, I'm in agreement that the current V system is not good.

[LostTemplar]

I would say that LOS == LOF is definitely good, it really should be just one function, used in both cases.

[TJS]

I think you are roughly right, but it isn't quite as obvious as you make out: there are a few sensible options. Sil uses the NPP system:

1) X has LOS on Y if and only if there is a line from the centre of X to any part of Y
2) X has LOF on Y if and only if there is a line from the centre of X to the centre of Y

So LOF is symmetric, but LOS isn't. This seems to work pretty well. Note that there is a very good thread on this somewhere on this forum.

Either of them could be logically asymmetric as one's eyes (or hands) are smaller than one's body. e.g. there are many cases where people are hiding between pillars, trees, corners etc where one person can see part of someone else's body but the other person can't see them.

That said, I'm in agreement that the current V system is not good.

This seems quite an unecessary complication to me. It's not hard to imagine that the player and monsters would use the wall as cover rather than have some of their body poking around the corner. A lot of monsters such as dragons have their head in front of their body so they'd see you are the same time when coming around a corner anyway.

I'd definitely vote to simplify it by making LOF/LOS the same.

[Carnivean]

Either of them could be logically asymmetric as one's eyes (or hands) are smaller than one's body. e.g. there are many cases where people are hiding between pillars, trees, corners etc where one person can see part of someone else's body but the other person can't see them.

How do you (hypothetically) account for the absolutely massive monsters (Titans, Dragons, etc) vs tiny @?

Additionally, if you're talking about realism, there should be more ways of knowing that something is around the corner than looking at it. Asleep monsters would be breathing, moving monsters would be making noises and leaving trails.

Going back to a comment made about using indicators, such as feelings, to discover the danger level, you could use indicators that guide you to working out what type of creatures are around. Predators leave blood trails as they take their victims away, bands of orcs leave a trail of foot prints, etc. @ leaves a trail of victims that could be tracked and hunted.

If you take those extra detection methods, then you could make thief and ranger classes into something other than fighting mages. They could see trails and leave less trails to be seen.

This leaves you with a game wherein @ isn't just walking around stabbing monsters in their sleep.

[half]

I'd definitely vote to simplify it by making LOF/LOS the same.

I've found the thread:

http://angband.oook.cz/forum/showthread.php?t=2018

It has a lot of good stuff in it. No-one should feel like they understand this until they read (or re-read) this thread. In fact it is possibly the best thread this forum has ever had in terms of insightful and careful game design. One example is that you should already understand that there are *3* concepts of sight-lines in Angband. Line of Sight, Line of Fire, Field of View. [Edit: at least I think that is right... and we might also want to think about 'trick shots' where you can hit something with an arrow, but only when not aiming directly at it]. It would be great to move to fewer concepts and to make them symmetric, but *you have to give up important things* to get that to work. It may be worth giving them up, but you need to know what you are giving up (and tell others) in order to seriously advocate for a position on this.

In particular, a great comment by d_m on page 5 started a discussion that showed it was impossible for the system to have a set of three properties generally deemed essential and so any attempts to get the third one would give up one of the others.

OK, I'm going off to re-read the thread...

[Nick]

In particular, a great comment by d_m on page 5 started a discussion that showed it was impossible for the system to have a set of three properties generally deemed essential and so any attempts to get the third one would give up one of the others.

OK, I'm going off to re-read the thread...

Did you know that number of posts per page is customisable, with possible values of 5, 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 and 100? 188 posts in the thread means we can rule out yours being set to 50 or 100, but I have just read at least the first half of the thread while trying to keep in mind to watch out for a post of d_m's fitting your criteria on page 5 according to one of the other numbers, which page I assume is calculated counting backwards from 188.

It's 12:40 am here and my brain is hurting.

[half]

Did you know that number of posts per page is customisable, with possible values of 5, 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 and 100? 188 posts in the thread means we can rule out yours being set to 50 or 100, but I have just read at least the first half of the thread while trying to keep in mind to watch out for a post of d_m's fitting your criteria on page 5 according to one of the other numbers, which page I assume is calculated counting backwards from 188.

It's 12:40 am here and my brain is hurting.

I didn't know that. It sounds useful! It was post 47, but now I see that it was building on things from even earlier, like post 32.

edit: also check out Atanvarno's posts in the thread. (S)he might have the highest average quality post on this whole forum.

[Antoine]

One of the interesting comments in the thread you cite is that this kind of discussion may stretch the limits of what can be achieved in a threaded forum. A wiki format may be more manageable.

I bet the comments you get in your other thread about 'ideas you're not considrering' will be even more all over the show.

A.

[PowerWyrm]

Whether or not this ends up actually implemented or not, it's a fantastic idea. Best of all, it opens up the possibility of allowing specified inventory slots - which we already really have with the quiver, but nobody had thought of it like that.

Fair warning to everyone - read this, if you don't like it, you'd better start marshalling arguments against it.

I'm a little biased here as I mainly play (and maintain) a variant that is multiplayer and need to think carefully not about the player but about player interactions. Clearly I like better that the town stays like it is (random stocks, full restocking of basic supplies), and rather see an "ordering" system for endgame supplies to eliminate scumming and make gold more useful.

Introducing potion slots would break ironman where your supplies are limited and need to be carried at any time.

If you never seen the concept used in ToME4, you should check it. Potions and scrolls have been replaced by infusions and runes, which have unlimited uses (eliminates scumming), but also a cooldown, meaning that you cannot use them indefinitely. Every character starts with 3 slots for consumables and can expand them up to 5. So, for example, you can carry two healing infusions, a speed infusion, a phase door rune and a teleportation rune. They will last for the whole game, or until you find better ones. During a fight, you will have to manage your cooldowns, since you won't be able to heal each turn or escape at will.

[PowerWyrm]

There's tons of potential "abuses" for fighting Morgoth that really amount to being willing to use all the supplies you've gathered throughout the game. We can make the final fight harder by simply making those supplies not work (e.g. letting monsters resist Teleport Other / Destruction), but I think really we ought to reward creative problem-solving against Morgoth. The real problem with the final fight is that the community has shared their approaches to dealing with him, so they're "common knowledge" for us now. Someone who isn't on the forums won't have anywhere near such a huge advantage against him.

That said, the specific issue of LOS abuse is not limited to Morgoth, and can be relatively easily fixed by tweaking the LOS rules. My preferred approach is to allow sight of monsters in hockeystick situations, but only allow targeting if the monster can target you back. In other words, for vision you project from the player to the monster; for projectiles you project from the monster to the player.

This issue has been fixed in 3.5 with the new FOV code. The only remaining case where you can abuse LOS is the "chess knight move" case (one square in one direction, two squares in the other).

[maboleth]

Sorry for my ignorance, I have been absent for quite some time... is there a specific date set for v3.5 release?

[debo]

I think the devs set a goal of having a certain set of bugs fixed, and that 3.5 will go out once those are done.

So, "When It's Done (tm)"

3.5 looks wayyyy better than 3.3.x and 3.4.x from what I've seen so far, I'm pretty stoked about it.

[MattB]

Sorry for my ignorance, I have been absent for quite some time... is there a specific date set for v3.5 release?

Worth adding that you can play it now if you want (I do, even though it's still a little bit crashy) on www.rephial.org/nightlies

And agreed that it's a huge step forward.

[maboleth]

Great, thanks! Can't wait for the final!

And oh, too bad Android version currently does not support any of the graphic tiles. I was the maintainer & creator of late Gervais tiles in the Ruehelmann days.

[Monkey Face]

I haven't played with forced descent, but if it is set as the default, I would like to see one other change implemented with it and that would be for the native depth of scrolls of deep descent to be increased. Currently, if I am playing a priest that has not yet learned OOD and the unknown scroll I read turns out to be deep descent, I start looking for the nearest upstairs since I'm usually beyond what I can handle when I know that Bullroarer, Lagduf, Mughash, Brodda, and Wormtongue are all likely to make toast of me if they find me (and several of those are trouble even if I do have OOD if I don't have enough mana yet).