blandness in V (from DF forum)

[wobbly]

http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=164729.30

Angband necromancers gather and cast ... Thread Necromancy !

Angband 4.2.0 has been released, a big update as it has new magic (Nature and Shadow), classes and a lot of rebalancing (+bugfixes and code improvement) :

http://angband.oook.cz/forum/showthread.php?t=9537

Sounds interesting, maybe time to get a new character as it's been so long i didn't played, hopefully it will feel a bit less generic and more Tolkien this time.

Edit : played a few levels and nope, it's still the exact same boring dungeon generation big empty room, very long corridors of nothing , no special dungeon features or etc... some monsters here and there that do nothing interesting, etc...
I guess after playing all those roguelikes that can do some very interesting dungeons and explorations, vanilla Angband is not for me anymore, entirely too generic with nothing special.

Probably time to see what variants there is currently, too bad most of them are based on older version of Angband without all the interface and other quality of life improvement 4.x has

[Nick]

Can't please all the people - especially when they only play for long enough to confirm their existing biases

[tangar]

Diversity of terrain in Angband

no special dungeon features

I suppose it won't hurt if the game would more terrain features, eg:

- water generation (streams and lakes, flooded levels)
- chasms (also different types, some could work like 'big' pit-traps, floors-like where you could fight with monsters (with certain +/-); some like deep descent chasms)
- more types of terrain - floors/walls. Online roguelikes (PWMA and TomeNET) got different layouts in the dungeons, it makes adventure more diverse. As V got one dungeon, it could have such features just certain lvls, eg
-- some levels could be 'cold' (with icy floors which could be slippery - such ones exist in TomeNET; ice walls (melted by fire easely).
-- some could be hot (with sand, which is easy to dig) etc

Also TomeNET had relatively recent update with great way of 'inserting' parts of the 'interesting' terrain in the dungeon. So in common 'stone' dungeons could be small patches of sandy walls (they looks very organic as they come in certain group/pattern, not randomly; it looks and feels very fun), maybe V-devs could investigate how it's made in TomeNET code

[fph]

Can't please all the people - especially when they only play for long enough to confirm their existing biases

It is a more subtle improvement to notice, but in my view the new special rooms patterns make the dungeon a lot more interesting.

[Huqhox]

Maybe some discussion on dungeon generation is needed? The special rooms code has been in for a while and although the number of possible special rooms is now large, making the rooms themselves interesting, there could be scope for some amendments.

Not sure about 4.2.0 (not checked yet) but in 4.1 the old style 'bland' level generation was still there and the game randomly chooses between that one, the new one with special rooms, labyrinths and caverns (the last two having depth checks). Removing the old style generator would seem to be a step forward as we know the new one works. And then maybe add some more interesting level generators.

There was discussion years ago about a way to create a more closely packed room structure and I'm sure other ideas would present themselves.

Having a selection of different generators would certainly keep each level as more of a surprise

There was also the discussion around having smaller levels at the start, primarily to encourage diving. But it would also stop the first couple of levels seeming like endless stretches of corridors

[Gwarl]

What would be really nice from a development perspective would be hooking up the generation routines to the terrain definitions and having a standalone command line tool that spits out a text, coloured text, or html rendering of a level into a file, so that one could adjust the generation routines and inspect outputs without booting up a game and going into wizard mode.

One can dream.

[Huqhox]

What would be really nice from a development perspective would be hooking up the generation routines to the terrain definitions and having a standalone command line tool that spits out a text, coloured text, or html rendering of a level into a file, so that one could adjust the generation routines and inspect outputs without booting up a game and going into wizard mode.

One can dream.

A simple command line option to Angband ought to be added fairly easily to do this. Get it to load all the data files then call the required level generation, dump the output to a file and quit

[Estie]

I think thats a guy who doesnt use shift-run. If you do use that, theres a feature literally every step.

[wobbly]

I doubt it. I pretty much agree with what he is saying & I do shift run. I think the game is fun despite being bland in a lot of places but I do think its there & that it gets in the way of trying to get into the game & enjoy yourself. Particularly in the early game. It matters less later on when the game gets more dangerous & you're concentrating more on not dying.

[Ingwe Ingweron]

Some of that feel in the early game may be the inevitable result of expert experience. In a game that forces one to start from ground zero every time, you have to bear with some drudgery to work your way to where things get difficult for you. A beginner would likely not feel the same, as they need the time to learn and figure out what is going on, something the early levels do particularly well. I imagine Serena Williams having lost her top seed position by being out of tennis for awhile had some of the same feeling having to work her way back up to the top ranks.

[Derakon]

Blandness basically means lack of variety, especially when it comes to terrain. Vanilla has never been a game that featured a wide variety of terrain, and while that hasn't particularly hampered it in the gameplay department, I can see how it means there's not a lot of flavor to the dungeon. I guess that could create extra barriers to bringing in new blood.

[luneya]

Blandness basically means lack of variety, especially when it comes to terrain. Vanilla has never been a game that featured a wide variety of terrain, and while that hasn't particularly hampered it in the gameplay department, I can see how it means there's not a lot of flavor to the dungeon. I guess that could create extra barriers to bringing in new blood.

Yep. And remember, the OP was on a forum mainly discussing Dwarf Fortress rather than Angband. Playing DF is all about terrains; the monsters you encounter are very much a side-effect of the terrain rather than being the primary feature as they are in roguelikes.

[werecobalt]

Maybe we can dump player directly to DL20 for some thrill.

edit:
other random ideas:
no food ration in shop
make first ten levels nethack-sized and each guarded by an early unique or several warg-tier monsters
replace town folk with baby dragons

[HallucinationMushroom]

Well, for my two cents, I came off a Vanilla hiatus from 3.0.6 to some of the recent versions put out in the last year and I found the increased variety in dungeon layout one of the most enjoyable changes. I've only run through it twice, but I was constantly surprised to see new rooms, vaults, special rooms (whatever terminology is technically correct), and even the town was different. Lots and lots and lots of these things. Shrugs. I guess this is a perspective thing. When I played a lot of old Vanilla what OP was saying was pretty true to my experience,... long hallways, tons of boring square rooms, an insane number of that 4x4-room-thing-with-4-doors, the three-rooms-forward-slash-small-vaulty-thingy, and the rare-greater-vault-that-you-can't-explore. These are all the official names of these things, btw. But lately, I was finding new things I had never seen before on most of the levels I played. Shrugs.

tl;dr, I think there has been a lot of love given to dungeon layouts and variety, if not precisely lava/ice/water/sand etc.

[Therem Harth]

As far as variety in V, I'm digging the changes to spiders in Vanilla git master. The web terrain makes them a lot more creepy and threatening. An imprompto monster group with web slinging spiders and higher HP giant ticks can be surprisingly dangerous, and it just looks cool.