Bestiary at Angband.oook.cz

[fph]

The idea behind monster memory is that you get full information about monster abilities only when you are familiar enough with the game and you don't need it anymore.

[Oraticus]

This is an old old discussion. FWIW I think the idea of monster memory is stupid, and have advocated for telling the players the rules of the game [i.e. full monster info] for more than a decade.

Whoops, didn't mean to bring up old topics (though I'm sure nearly every topic has been touched on at one time or another).

From a game design perspective, I love the concept of monster memory and learning from experience. It aids immersion by tying you and your character together in learning experiences... you and @ are sharing your discoveries and failures. It also enhances that visceral fear that comes from diving and discovering new mobs; each mob having a more verbose and foreboding lore than the previous, and that intimidating description is given more gravity by the lack of subsequent information detailing what that monster is capable of. In a narrative-bereft game like Angband, it seasons the gameplay with a little bit of a story element.

That being said, I agree with PowerDiver. While it helps Angband in several ways, the time-release nature of that information is more crippling to gameplay than it is beneficial simply because Angband is a rogue-like. Without that info, you will die, and it's simply not your fault. You didn't have the info to make an educated decision.

The idea behind monster memory is that you get full information about monster abilities only when you are familiar enough with the game and you don't need it anymore.

Pretty much this... the people who direly need this info are the newbies, and they start out with none. Would it be better just to give full monster lore from the start instead of having new players troll through the forums and internet trying to find out specific mob stats or how to "hack" this info into their in-game monster lore?

[Derakon]

That being said, I agree with PowerDiver. While it helps Angband in several ways, the time-release nature of that information is more crippling to gameplay than it is beneficial simply because Angband is a rogue-like. Without that info, you will die, and it's simply not your fault. You didn't have the info to make an educated decision.

Well, more specifically the crippling comes from a) the fact that monsters in Angband can often one-shot you (or more generally, get you into a lethal situation, e.g. knocked out, paralyzed, chain-confused, etc.), so you can't afford to just let them do their thing and learn from experience, and b) monsters don't change from one game to another. So you as a player will end up learning all the monsters eventually anyway, at which point the learned monster memory thing is just a barrier preventing you from easily accessing knowledge that you really have anyway.

The monster memory mechanic would make more sense in a game where monsters aren't as powerful and where their capabilities are randomized across playthroughs.

[caruso]

The bummer is that I think the old bestiary had info for some of the variants too, didn't it?

You can still look it up via the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive.

edit: The search engine won't work, but you can still click the numbers and initials below to search the list manually (or with Ctrl-F). Also, you may get an error message 503. In that case, just refresh the page a couple of times.

[fph]

You can still look it up via the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive

You can see the page, but the search itself doesn't work. The search was implemented server-side, and of course the Wayback machine can't archive it...

[caruso]

You can see the page, but the search itself doesn't work. The search was implemented server-side, and of course the Wayback machine can't archive it...

But you can still click the numbers and initials below to open up the lists of monster entries

[Pete Mack]

On this, I agree with Eddie. There is zero upside to monster memory. It's primary effect is to encourage slow play among newbies, which is...unfortunate. Get rid of it, and get rid of rods of probing and the corresponding priest spell.

This is an old old discussion. FWIW I think the idea of monster memory is stupid, and have advocated for telling the players the rules of the game [i.e. full monster info] for more than a decade.

[Ingwe Ingweron]

On this, I agree with Eddie. There is zero upside to monster memory. It's primary effect is to encourage slow play among newbies, which is...unfortunate. Get rid of it, and get rid of rods of probing and the corresponding priest spell.

I disagree about the zero upside, at least I did when the game was newer to me. At that time, I remember it being fun to discover the monsters and to work out what each did. The upside being FUN. But, maybe I was just masochistic. Once I had become sufficiently versed at the game, however, the monster memory mechanic eventually ceased to be fun. Fortunately, Nick made it so that simply copying monster.txt to lore.txt made the problem moot.

[Thraalbee]

Work in progress

I just uploaded to http://angmongraph.azurewebsites.net/monGraph.html
Works on my laptop but I see that on the mobile version of Chrome the modal will not show.

The main struggle I had is that the html-page reads the actual monster definition files from vanilla angband, they are not hard coded. What would help a lot is if >> monster definition files had version name or revision count in their head <<

Next step is to make the description complete or perhaps partially complete. Not sure how much I want to include. I will also look at reading the artifact.spo file instead of monster file and display in the same manner, should not be difficult and would be extra useful for reviewing randarts.

p.s. I made this to learn html/javascript on which I am still a rookie, so all feedback is welcome.

[Nick]

I just uploaded to http://angmongraph.azurewebsites.net/monGraph.html

This is way more useful to me than any other interface I've seen for monsters. Classifying by level, splitting uniques and non-uniques, and just displaying the glyphs are all massive wins. Awesome work

The monster.txt file is likely to get a bit of an overhaul fairly soon. I'll probably expand the info and power lines to make it more human-readable, and replace colour symbols with names (g->Green, etc).

It would be easy to put a line like this

# Angband 4.0.5

at the top of the file; the only danger here is that updating it is forgotten, but I guess an old header would be better than nothing.

[takkaria]

I just uploaded to http://angmongraph.azurewebsites.net/monGraph.html
Works on my laptop but I see that on the mobile version of Chrome the modal will not show.

The main struggle I had is that the html-page reads the actual monster definition files from vanilla angband, they are not hard coded. What would help a lot is if >> monster definition files had version name or revision count in their head <<

Next step is to make the description complete or perhaps partially complete. Not sure how much I want to include. I will also look at reading the artifact.spo file instead of monster file and display in the same manner, should not be difficult and would be extra useful for reviewing randarts.

p.s. I made this to learn html/javascript on which I am still a rookie, so all feedback is welcome.

Nice! This looks cool. I started prototyping something but yours looks way better. A couple of suggestions:

typeahead.js - https://twitter.github.io/typeahead.js/ - might be a useful tool (the 'bloodhound' component) for doing name-based search. I've used it in other projects and the interface is fairly straightforward.

Also, if you're looking for a challenge, it's probably worth converting the angband .txt file into javascript-friendly data ahead of time and then just serving it up already processed, instead of making the browser parse it whenever you load the page.

EDIT: I just looked at the source, and saw that you're building strings so you can parse them as JSON. You can just build objects directly - if you have an array like 'var x = []' you can add entries using the push method, like 'x.push({ level: mlevel, name: mname, ... })'.

[Thraalbee]

Thanks for feedback. I wanted to learn using json input so started there. Then bolted the read text file to json in front for this use case. But it makes sense see to simplify. Unless Nick changes the source files to json ☺

[fph]

If you write a parser from the gamedata to Json, maybe it would make sense to include it in the main source files, in utils/ -- it is going to be handy for a number of different side-projects.

[Thraalbee]

If you write a parser from the gamedata to Json, maybe it would make sense to include it in the main source files, in utils/ -- it is going to be handy for a number of different side-projects.

Good idea! I did the two step model to learn both ways, that is handy now. Will be easy to split them into two pieces.