[Announce] Wumpus 2000
Muffy St. Bernard
crawl -- is finally in a form that I'm comfortable distributing: version
1.0. There are certainly some bugs to be worked out and issues to be
addressed, but it is in a highly playable state and -- I hope --
entertaining to a particular sort of person (the type who likes to explore
and make maps).
The .z5 file and the .inf source code are working their way through the
IF-Archive, but you can grab them here:
http://www.dangermuff.com/n_wumpus2k.html
The game sucks up a lot of juice due to the number of things that need to be
done (creatures moving around, player information updated, cave generated,
etc) so I'm afraid it will be pokey on a slow system. It will also be
annoying to play on a small screen; a lot of text gets displayed pretty much
every move.
First-time players will want to type "help" right at the beginning, to learn
a bit more about moving around; those who are stuck should also visit the
above link for tips & tricks.
I hope that some folks get a kick out of this...I enjoy playing it, but that
might just be because I know what's happening behind the scenes. In any
case I don't think it's quite like anything that's been done with the
Z-Machine before (though I could be wrong), and the code might be
interesting in terms of sheer abuse.
Special thanks to Greg (Himself), Martin Bays and Adam Thornton for doing
some beta-testing last year...I tried to implement their suggestions, but
the most basic one was making the online help more obvious.
Cheers!
Muffy
http://www.dangermuff.com
Caledonian
NetHack.
Clearly the game isn't meant to be realistic, but why exactly do
temperatures vary so wildly? Most caverns hold at a steady sixty-five
Fahrenheit or so, and there can't be that much geothermal activity or
the whole place would have collapsed.
Muffy St. Bernard
news:1107976416.1...@o13g2000cwo.googlegroups.com...
Well, the temperatures change because I thought it would be more interesting
that way. :)
One part of me wanted to be extremely realistic, and the other part wanted
to throw in every nifty idea I could think of. I don't know whether the
balance I struck "works" or not.
The way the caves are generated, there is an extremely hot room and an
extremely cold room, and their temperatures are spread out through the caves
and averaged during generation. I've never looked into good algorithms for
this sort of thing, so I've just made my own...and in order for it to be
really smooth it would need to do more passes through the rooms in order to
even out the different areas. As it is, it does only a few passes...so you
end up with regions of "blotchy temperature" that are right next to each
other. But it shaves some time off the generation.
As a compromise, I've made the game check a few random rooms between moves,
and tweak the temperature on the fly...this is why you'll sometimes get
messages about temperature change, and the reason for ice forming or melting
during the game. But it needs work...in the next version I'd like to make it
much smoother (and more realistic). And rooms do tend to get hotter instead
of colder, which doesn't make sense in terms of the way I tried to design
it.
I've done very little spelunking on my own, so this is where the Piers
Anthony novels ("Phthor" & "Chthon") came into it...they really grabbed my
imagination young. In those novels, the caves are naturally cold, but some
are heated by gas jets: cracks in the walls between an adjacent set of
tunnels that contain flammable gas, and which somehow got ignited. But I
didn't want to put any "gas jets" in the game, because I'm afraid of fire
(or rather, implementing it).
Those novels also inspired the idea of wind in the tunnels, which is poorly
represented in this version (and doesn't have much purpose except when
"poison" comes into play).
Cheers,
Muffy
http://www.dangermuff.com