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I'm in between on this. As a big fan of "Ooooo never seen THAT before" I get where you're coming from. But as has been proven time and time again in gaming, it gets to a point where more items, more monsters, more terrain no longer adds to the game.
In Angband, I think of these options, terrain is in most need of a boost, but even then it's the new rooms that will be the most welcome, and now there are many. Love them!
But I'm more in your camp on the "Why are we changing this?" with a lot of the current Vanilla development goals. A few changes might seem to be catering to squeaky wheels in the forums rather than actual faults with gameplay...
Gotta say, though, after my first win in Vanilla, I switched to variants- and they have not been as great as I'd hoped.
Some are just plain broken, and crash so often it's no fun to try to play. Some seem varied, but the new monsters/features feel like tagged-on baggage with an older, buggier version of Angband. Maybe part of this is that my favorite race/class combo is available in Vanilla, so I really have no interest in suddenly playing a Barrow Wight Geomancer. Maybe it's that I love a graphical tile-set that's not really compatible.
It may also be that the Vanilla devs are so on-the-ball that V will always be more polished. It may also be that making a variant forces you to either make a new but similar game from scratch, or tag on content to an existing version of V.
What variant(s) do you recommend? I purposefully left out the names of the ones I've tried, to avoid insulting anyone.Comment
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So a lot of effort has gone into making Angband moddable for people, even with no/limited coding ability. You can do a lot of stuff without even needing to be able to compile the codebase. You can: add new monsters, add new items, add new artifacts. You can even add new classes and races, (I think this works without recompiling, but I'm not sure). These are all held in the edit files and are read and initialized when the game loads.
With the ability to compile, you can add new spells and effects. Again it's not necessary to really know how to code. These are maintained in files called list-xxxx-.h
If you want to start modifying effects or core mechanics you need to learn a bit of coding. But the devteam will be helpful if you express interest in this. I assure you.
So, what I'm trying to say is that the devteam has worked hard to give *you* the power to modify the game, try out new things, and report your findings. There's a good chance that if you make a strong argument and back it up with your own experiences, and other players experiences (competitions are great for this). The changes you propose could be incorporated in Vanilla.
So don't wait around for other people to make changes that you probably won't like anyway. Identify the stuff you want but isn't there, the stuff you dislike that is there, and start configuring the game to your liking!Comment
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The variant I played the most is ToME2, but I am not sure if I should recommend it. It was polished for the day, but if you are used to vanilla standards, it will seem outdated.
There are various ways to play and win that game that are completely different from anything in vanilla. However, learning the game would take a lot of time and effort, and much of the fun I had back in the days came from sharing with an actively playing community which no longer exists. So while I havent played Poscheng myself (after tome, I wanted straightforward vanilla again), thats the closest thing that is polished and maintained and has an active playerbase, so that would be my recommendation.
Since you mentioned geomancers, tome has that class and it involves a great many terrain features and changes thereof. While I like tome overall, I find the abundant terrain features annoying and not at all conducive and have no use for the geomancer class, which also leads me to be extremely sceptical of any impending terrain feature changes in vanilla. So maybe our milage varies after all.Comment
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@Nick--
Looking at variants, terrain and wildrness need clean implementation for mods. NPP has a pretty good terrain model, and Un Angband has a good--if overly elaborate wilderness--model. The only danger of wilderness is it encourages midlevel bosses, which would dirty up Angband's 3 (4) rules
1. Kill Sauron
2. Kill Morgoth
3. Don't die
The fourth rule comes from a different source:
1. Buy a lantern
2. Kill MorgothComment
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I don't think there is a need for "outside" terrain.
But I would like eventually to see new dungeon terrain and features, including
1) fungus-covered walls and floors (that do stuff when someone is adjacent or on),
2) underground rivers and pools (including aquatic monsters), as well as bridges.
3) lava flows and pools,
4) things other than treasure that could be found embedded in rock (from rock-living creatures such as Cave Worms to more exotic things)
5) ledges (going off of which may take someone from 1 to x levels below, with damage).
6) gas filled caverns (that can cause various types of damage/inconveniences ranging from poison to decreased line of sight)
7) Vaults with magic doors that require someone to have a (1-use) key in hand to make the door normal.
8) slippery floorsComment
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That's an excellent list - in particular, 1 and 4 are ideas I haven't seen before, and I think 1-6 are all things I would like to see implemented. 7 I'm less sure of - it's introducing a relatively complicated but also special new system, and would have to be proof against stone-to-mud. Slippery floors are an interesting idea, but I'm not sure how they would translate into gameplay.
I'd be interested to hear expansion on how you see 1, 4 and 8 working.One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.Comment
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1 would be pretty simple, especially for walls--the simplest version would simply be a fungus rock square. Anybody who moved adjacent to one of its sides, or tried to tunnel through it, would suffer its effects. There could be different types, of course. Types that cause damage each time, types that slow, types that have a chance of causing confusion, etc. A slightly more complicated version would only have the fungus effect on certain sides of a wall square, i.e., not the sides facing other rock squares.
Floors would be similar, except the effect would only be incurred by walking across them (which could also allow items with levitation to avoid their effects; could also be used with lava, etc.).
4 would have, first of all, various rock creatures. All can move through rock. Some, perhaps, can *only* move through rock and cannot leave it, while others are rockphibious and can exist in any environment. They would be generated or spawned in rock squares. As with any monster types, there can be nastier versions deeper down. What this would do is give an element of thrill to tunnelling, because who knows what you might come across.
Another thing you can do with rock is collapsed passageways. These would be passageways entirely filled with rubble.
I like the idea of other things that can be found in rock, like a variety of crystals that could be analogous to mushrooms. For example, the soothing chrystal, which when used heals a certain amount of damage at once, plus X amount of damage for Y turns thereafter, kind of like a reverse poison effect. Or obsidian deposits, which rangers (let's say) could use to enhance the to hit and damage effects of a group of arrows.
8, the slippery floors, would be fairly easy. If a character moves onto a slippery floor square, he/she has x% chance of actually moving *two* squares in that direction instead of one, or possibly one square and one in a random direction--but some amount of movement outside of the control of the player. The percentage could be a flat percentage, or it could be random within a certain range, or there could be varying degrees of slipperiness. For sheer chaos, this could effect monsters, too.
Flying creatures and characters with a levitation effect could avoid this. It occurs to me that you could also have a player slide on square in some direction if he does some other action, too, like casting a spell or firing an arrow, so that the player is always slightly moving.
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Sproggiwood, a fun little roguelike (with a ridiculously hard "Savage" difficulty in addition to the pretty easy normal difficulty) has a variety of slimes that leave slime tiles behind when they die. They have different effects when walked on, and then disperse. Off the top of my head, they include:
* When the player enters this tile, they are immediately transported to the next tile in the direction of travel (100% slipperiness, and IMO 0%/100% is the way to go on this).
* Poisons player when they walk on them.
* Deals lightning damage to player when they walk on them.
* Explodes after a set amount of time if not dispersed.
* Summons a new slime after a set amount of time if not dispersed.
I could easily imagine various monsters effectively laying traps on their corpses when they die. Probably mostly this would be for natural monsters, especially molds, slimes, jellies, and mushroom patches.Comment
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I think these sort of terrain ideas work best when they combine into a sort of themed floor or area. Because of the way angband rerolls floors, I would highly recommend themed floors come in batches of 5 levels or so, where all levels share that theme. This solves the "skip cavern/labyrinth levels" problem.
At some point you could imagine that the dungeon is divided up into 20 blocks of themed levels. With some themes, say like a fungus/slime theme more likely to appear early, and other themes, sulfurous/hell appearing later. I'd also like WoR to be reworked so that at every 5th level there's a portal back to town.
Just for fun, I've thought about these themes in the past, and some that I came up with are.
Early themes:
Forest theme - mostly natural monsters, more open layout, "dens" of monsters often hold treasures
Humanoid cave theme - home mainly to a single group of humanoids. Kobolds at first, then later orcs and trolls. Layout is similar to a cavern, but with cavern nodes having specific purposes, like bedrooms, armouries, etc.
Natural cave theme - like the above but with natural monsters instead of kobolds. Monster dens appear like above and are a central point for treasures.
Slime theme - jellies, icky things, molds abound. Lots of tunnels. More treasure than average, because of all the digested corpses. Needs calibration to make it not painfully annoying.
Early/Mid themes:
Fortress theme - Can show up early, but more common later. Lots of close rooms, more monsters than usual. High chance of a unique in a central room. Also very likely to have a treasure room. Early ones are staffed by kobolds and orcs. Later ones by trolls, giants, dark elves, and humans.
Swamp theme: Lots of water. Early monsters are centipedes and the like, moving to hydras in the mid/late game. Lots of poison breathers, and maybe poison area of effects. Lots of floor treasure.
Mid game themes:
Elemental themed: four themes for one. Elemental halls include monsters favoring that attack. Fire and Cold would be the most common with acid and electricity perhaps being bundled into one for lack of monsters. Layout would look similar to current angband dungeons, but possibly with some area of effect traps that spew out clouds of the appropriate element.
Dragon nursery: A cave overrun with dragon hatchlings and young dragons. Deeper ones might have mature dragons and maybe even an Ancient one.
Ruins: Looks like a standard layout but with some rooms decayed as if by earthquake. Lots of floor treasure, and lots of traps. Primary monsters are humans and humanoids. Vaults are more common here (but are less common the more times you reroll?).
Mid/late game themes:
Crypt: Lots of branching corridors, filled with undead. Main "tomb" rooms have treasures and often more powerful undead. If angband ever plays with darkness/light duality like in Sil, this is a good testing ground for it.
Dragon nest: Like the cave but more structured, with occasional rooms and the like. More Ancient dragons and eventually great wyrms are found near their hordes.
Late game themes:
Hell: Open floors, with lakes of lava. Lots of demons and otherwise difficult monsters. (need to prevent demon summoning explosions for this to work...) High chance for a unique demon on the floor, often ruling from a central structure (i.e. vault).
Nether: Undead everywhere. Layout looks like rooms with "expanses" in between. Random teleportation is a problem in the expanses. Unique undeads live in vaults. Floors can be infinite if desired, sort of like the abyss in DCSS. While undead are more common, all kinds of monsters can be wandering around in the nether.
Halls of Mandos: Looks like the current dungeon but with a lot of formatted rooms. Ainu are common with a unique Ainu usually somewhere. Dragons are also extremely common, as are the unique giants and titans. Huan/Carcharoth are often found here.Comment
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+1000.
... on the condition that labyrinth levels are removed entirely: They are the lazy game designer's choice and are incredibly annoying. Look, I agree that it's fun to write a labyrinth dungeon generator, but they're unbelievably annoying to actually play through[1]. This is one of the few places where T2 did the right thing: It has exactly one (completely optional) maze-level dungeon and you can dig through the walls. Mazes made of un-diggable walls is just annoying for no good reason.
[1] Hence the "skip labyrinth levels problem".Comment
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I feel like once terrain features are implemented we could expand on the existing pit code to create themed rooms/levels. It would be relatively simple to adapt the existing pit profiles in pit.txt so that in addition to themed sets of monsters, they also include terrain and treasure types that match the theme. Then you could move the current hard-coded pit layouts out to an edit file, and add a bunch more layouts that include positions for terrain and treasures as well as monsters.
So for example, imagine you have a room template something like this:
Then you might combine it with, say, a "fire dragons" profile that makes monsters 1,2,3 various strengths of fire-breathing dragon, the & tiles lava and the * treasure jewellery. But you could also use the same layout with a "swamp" profile that makes monsters 1,2,3 reptiles and jellies, the & tiles swamp and the * treasure a mushroom. Or use it with an "archers" profile that makes 1,2,3 different types of archers, the & tiles chasms and the * treasure ammo. That way the same layout can be reused again and again to make many different themed rooms.Code:[bc=black][color=lightgrey]D:############### D:#.............# D:#..[color=#ff4444]1[/color].......[color=#ff4444]1[/color]..# D:#.[color=#ff4444]12[/color].[color=#ffff44]&&&&&[/color].[color=#ff4444]21[/color].# D:#...[color=#ffff44]&&[/color]...[color=#ffff44]&&[/color]...# [color=#ffff44]& = terrain[/color] D:#..[color=#ffff44]&&[/color].[color=#ff4444]3[/color][color=cyan]*[/color][color=#ff4444]3[/color].[color=#ffff44]&&[/color]..# [color=cyan]* = treasure[/color] D:#...[color=#ffff44]&&[/color]...[color=#ffff44]&&[/color]...# [color=#ff4444]1,2,3 = monsters[/color] D:#.[color=#ff4444]12[/color].[color=#ffff44]&&[/color].[color=#ffff44]&&[/color].[color=#ff4444]21[/color].# D:#..[color=#ff4444]1[/color].......[color=#ff4444]1[/color]..# D:#.............# D:############### [/color][/bc]
For standard pits or individual themed rooms, you'd just pick a random theme when the room is generated. For whole themed levels, you could set a specific theme at level generation and then enforce it across all rooms on the level.
(The code side of all this is beyond me, but I'd be happy to design a bunch more layouts and profiles to fill out the edit files if anything similar is implemented.)Comment
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