Un/Ey/Fay room descriptions

[Mikko Lehtinen]

Fay, through Ey, has inherited room descriptions from Un.

What we have in Fay was borrowed from Un at least eight years ago. I was wondering if there's something new worth stealing? As always in Fay, I'm more interested in the tactical possibilities of room descriptions than just flavour. (I've started playing Un, but I haven't seen much yet.)

I have some really quick ideas of my own:

- Disease room. Get wounded here and you're diseased.
- Poison room. Get wounded here and you're poisoned. Wound a monster, and it is poisoned.
- A statue of the goddess of healing: more powerful healing spells.
- Node of Fire: fire spells are more powerful.
- Fast winds: powders are useless.
- Weird crosswinds: powders get +1 radius.
- Magnetic walls: bows and thrown weapons are useless.
- Dark room. Impossible to light up.
- Powerful leylines. Double spell and magic device range.
- Weak leylines. Halve spell and magic device range.

Does someone else want to brainstorm?

[Antoine]

Rooms with 'powerful darkness' which reduce the range of your light source and cannot be illuminated?

No teleport zones?

A.

[andrewdoull]

The relevant flags from Unangband:

#define ROOM_DAYLITE 0x00000100L /* room is lit during daytime */
#define ROOM_ICKY 0x00000200L /* room cannot be teleport target */
#define ROOM_BLOODY 0x00000400L /* room causes wounds/poison to become worse */
#define ROOM_CURSED 0x00000800L /* room causes items to not provide bonuses (except artifacts) */
#define ROOM_GLOOMY 0x00001000L /* room is never wholely lit by light */
#define ROOM_PORTAL 0x00002000L /* room teleports you randomly */
#define ROOM_SILENT 0x00004000L /* room is magically silent, stopping spells/songs */
#define ROOM_STATIC 0x00008000L /* room causes rods/staffs/wands to fail */
#define ROOM_STATIS 0x00010000L /* room causes monsters to be in statis */
#define ROOM_SEALED 0x00020000L /* room causes features to be unalterable */
#define ROOM_HIDDEN 0x00040000L /* room cannot be detected */
#define ROOM_ANCHOR 0x00080000L /* room is anti-teleportation */
#define ROOM_ECHOES 0x00100000L /* room is anti-stealth */
#define ROOM_STENCH 0x00200000L /* room prevents monsters flow by smell */
#define ROOM_NOISY 0x00400000L /* room prevents monsters flow by sound */
#define ROOM_WINDY 0x00800000L /* room prevents missiles/thrown items */
#define ROOM_GRAVE 0x01000000L /* room brings monsters back to life */
#define ROOM_STORE 0x02000000L /* room prevents objects being taken */
#define ROOM_TOWN 0x04000000L /* room is part of a town */
#define ROOM_RANDOM 0x08000000L /* room activates randomly for effect */
#define ROOM_PUZZLE 0x10000000L /* room requires features contained destroyed */
#define ROOM_GUARD 0x20000000L /* room requires monsters contained destroyed */
#define ROOM_OBJECT 0x40000000L /* room requires objects contained destroyed */

[Mikko Lehtinen]

The relevant flags from Unangband:

Wow! Thanks! I'll try porting many of these to Fay. These remind me of old-style dungeon crawling RPG adventures in my youth.

I'll look into other terrain features in Un, too. I want to keep my dungeons more spartan, but there's probably something that I can use.

[bio_hazard]

How about:

(like Antoine's suggestion) Pitch_Black- Light radius of non-artifact lights reduced to 0

Instability- PC and Monsters randomly blink

Sacrifice- Destroy something from inventory to open doors.

Meekness- Mallus given to high dice attacks, bonus given to low-dice attacks

Soul Draining (or Forgetfullness)- Loose XP per turn.

[Mikko Lehtinen]

Thanks, Antoine and biohazard! This is a nice list of effects to choose from already.

Meanwhile, I'm getting seriously hooked on Unangband level generation. The whole package is a bit too much for my tastes, but I'm going to try to porting the "most basic core" to Fay.

I downloaded some older versions of Un source, where the code is not too different from Ey/Fay. I think I'm beginning to understand what's going on.

[will_asher]

Fay, through Ey, has inherited room descriptions from Un.

What we have in Fay was borrowed from Un at least eight years ago. I was wondering if there's something new worth stealing? As always in Fay, I'm more interested in the tactical possibilities of room descriptions than just flavour. (I've started playing Un, but I haven't seen much yet.)

I have some really quick ideas of my own:

- Disease room. Get wounded here and you're diseased.
- Poison room. Get wounded here and you're poisoned. Wound a monster, and it is poisoned.
- A statue of the goddess of healing: more powerful healing spells.
- Node of Fire: fire spells are more powerful.
- Fast winds: powders are useless.
- Weird crosswinds: powders get +1 radius.
- Magnetic walls: bows and thrown weapons are useless.
- Dark room. Impossible to light up.
- Powerful leylines. Double spell and magic device range.
- Weak leylines. Halve spell and magic device range.

I'll be wanting to steal some of these ideas also (and some from UnAndrew's and bio_hazard's posts).
I've been wanting to do something like this, but I don't know if I can figure out how to tie a flag to a room. Maybe I'll look at the UnAngband code to see if that helps.

EDIT: The relevant UnAngband code didn't help because my C-foo just isn't good enough to figure it out. But I did think of another (hacky) way of doing this.

[will_asher]

attn: UnAndrew

I've been implementing several of these for DaJAngband.

While I was looking at some of the UnAngband code, I noticed stuff about chasms. The idea sounds cool, but when I think about it, it seems like it would be easy for the PC to stand at one side of the chasm shooting monsters on the other side while the monsters are helpless because they can't cross the chasm.
So how would you balance chasms so this kind of thing doesn't happen (or at least would be hard to do)?

[Therem Harth]

- Give some monsters the ability to fly across them
- Improve AI so that monsters use ranged attacks when there's impassible terrain between them and the player
- Give more monsters ranged attacks (e.g. orcs and dark elves throw daggers, maybe trolls throw rocks and stuff, etc.)

[Scraper]

How about rooms where you need to enter the opposite key stoke to go in a direction or fight a monster. e.g. If you want to go left, you have to press the 6 button i.e. the button that normally makes you go right.

[buzzkill]

So how would you balance chasms so this kind of thing doesn't happen (or at least would be hard to do)?

Sounds like an AI thing. Monsters that can fly will cross the chasm. Monsters that can't, without a ranged attack, should be certain to not just stand on the opposite side (they should avoid LoS). Also, standing on the edge of a chasm should be dangerous if you can't fly/levitate. Attacks that can move the player (gravity) should be able to knock them into it. Maybe make archery less reliable by negating some accuracy (strong downdrafts), or loss of ammo. Maybe give shamans and similar casters a phase-across-chasm spell that would place one or several his kin on the opposite side.

[nppangband]

Sounds like an AI thing. Monsters that can fly will cross the chasm. Monsters that can't, without a ranged attack, should be certain to not just stand on the opposite side (they should avoid LoS). Also, standing on the edge of a chasm should be dangerous if you can't fly/levitate. Attacks that can move the player (gravity) should be able to knock them into it. Maybe make archery less reliable by negating some accuracy (strong downdrafts), or loss of ammo. Maybe give shamans and similar casters a phase-across-chasm spell that would place one or several his kin on the opposite side.

This can all be handled rather easily and simply with different monster movement flows, having mnosters that can move through who can't can find a different path to the player. No need for those without range attacks to standby helpless.

NPP actually can have up to something like 20 monster flows working at the same time, with no hesitation in game play. I could probably do alot more now. That code was written 5 years ago, and computers have only gotten faster. There are different flows for monsters who can open or bash down doors, as opposed to hose who can't. Those who can walk through lava safely, those who can just fly over everything, etc....... No monster left behind is my motto.

[bio_hazard]

How about rooms where you need to enter the opposite key stoke to go in a direction or fight a monster. e.g. If you want to go left, you have to press the 6 button i.e. the button that normally makes you go right.

Sort of along these lines, I was thinking of a "chess" room where there might be special movement rules depending on the square you are on (or other constraints). Maybe you get several moves at once in the cardinal directions, can only move diagonally, etc. Super variant territory I'm sure, but maybe it could be interesting.

[andrewdoull]

I've been implementing several of these for DaJAngband.

While I was looking at some of the UnAngband code, I noticed stuff about chasms. The idea sounds cool, but when I think about it, it seems like it would be easy for the PC to stand at one side of the chasm shooting monsters on the other side while the monsters are helpless because they can't cross the chasm.
So how would you balance chasms so this kind of thing doesn't happen (or at least would be hard to do)?

It's never been a major problem as far as I'm concerned. Most monsters of any repute have some kind of ranged attack in Unangband.

[andrewdoull]

If you think the rooms in Unangband are good, you should also check out bRogue 1.5's rooms.

These form a series of linked puzzles on a level where you have to solve a puzzle or overcome a challenge to get a key to another room which may require another puzzle, to ultimately get to a reward room.

Very cool.

An example might be having to cross lava, using either a potion of fire immunity or levitation; one of which can be found elsewhere on the level.

https://sites.google.com/site/broguegame/home