Suggestion: Monsters Return Home

[DavidMedley]

When a monster completely loses track of you, probably because he was TO'ed, he should return to his starting location.

[DavidMedley]

No response?

[Chud]

That would make some sense, though it would also potentially make teleporting yourself a fair bit safer, especially if everyone is returning to the same vault.

[mrfy]

When a monster completely loses track of you, probably because he was TO'ed, he should return to his starting location.

Do the monsters know the map or would they just move around trying to find their way back? Realistically, if the monster did get TO'ed then they have suddenly arrived in a new place with no idea how to get home. If they detect you in some way then they should come after you. So no, they shouldn't automatically go to their starting location, IMO.

We did notice that sometimes you can hit monsters down a long corridor with say Orb of Draining, and if you're outside of their detect range they just stay there and take the damage. This is unrealistic, they should realize they're getting damaged and move in some direction.

[Nick]

FAangband has territorial monsters, which have a home grid. They have a maximum distance they will move away from it, and close to it they get a speed boost.

There are a few monster behaviours you could imagine (guarding a spot, patrolling a route, foraging for food...), but I've never gone very far in implementing any of them.

[DavidMedley]

The freshly-randomized-levels-every-time-you-take-stairs makes anything a bit of a stretch thematically. But generally I think we're saying that these rooms and floors are the monsters' homes and/or places they've been assigned to guard. The fact that so many monsters are asleep when the hero encounters them also suggests they're at home. Iirc, the ancient justification for why monsters don't trigger traps was that the dungeon is their home. So I think they should be able to get back to their starting spot without having to accessing Google Maps on their cell phones.

[wobbly]

I'm fairly neutral on this. What I'd be worried about is what the extra path-finding load did to performance. 4.x is already super laggy on angband.live for some unknown reason.

[Diego Gonzalez]

The home should be a group of grids, to discourage the use of splash damage or hockey stick scenarios.

[DavidMedley]

I'm fairly neutral on this. What I'd be worried about is what the extra path-finding load did to performance. 4.x is already super laggy on angband.live for some unknown reason.

Yeah, I was thinking about that, too. As long as the player isn't nearby could batch 10 moves at once, maybe.

Is the Angband.live lag really based on the game instances taking up too many resources? My completely untested hypothesis was that the bottleneck is managing the connections to players' terminals.

[DrWho42]

i'm intrigued by this idea?