Why I strongly dislike auto-squelching (long)
Leon Marrick
Who's up for a debate on auto-squelching?
--- "Autosquelch, why do I dislike thee?" ---
Angband, as was Rogue and Moria before it, a game of "many shells,
few pearls". The delight at finding that wonderful ego-item or artifact
is heightened and made vivid by the anxious searching for something,
anything, that can take out that wretched monster who keeps killing me!
The game designer who supplies too many pearls, or who allows the
impatient player to auto-suppress or auto-ignore the shells, is dumbing
down two battle-proven features of this game and its ancestors, features
that have kept people playing past bedtime since at least '85: 1)
anxious anticipation, even frustration, that builds up tension released
by wonderful, unexpected finds, and 2) the value of ordinary objects
themselves in making for a consistant medieval, semi-Tolkeinesque
atmosphere for the game common to every Roguelike I have ever played. I
just plain feel comfortable around 1d4 daggers, okay?
This matter touches on the design and presentation of game
elements. If I design an object, I am not likely to encourage players
to skip past it by giving them handly tools to ignore this part of the
game. If I code up objects with hidden nastiness or coolness, I am most
emphatically not going to supply an interface to auto-learn or
auto-ignore the secrets.
When we speak of auto-squelching objects, we speak of the loss of
ways of playing the game. Rogue, Moria, and Angband are all
object-oriented games; the types and quantities of particular objects
that you find in the dungeon is, with your own fertile imagination, what
opens up and makes possible diverse methods of play. A good roguelike
game allows many effective ways of playing. A poor one allows but few.
A high-quality interface encourages you to try new things, and makes
many ways of playing attractive and user-friendly. A poor interface
encourages you to ignore possible ways of playing the game, or makes
them unfriendly or impracticable.
How terrible it is to see players auto-squelching gameplay
possibilies because the interface makes it easy to delete them, ignore
them, to not try something new!
-- Back in the old days ---
Moria has always had a certain problem with the quantity of objects
in the dungeon. Angband added more objects, in variety and sheer mass,
but (until Ben Harrison came along) made no essential improvements in
handling or presenting them. Ben Harrison's macro/inscription system
was a tremendous boon, yet it eventually proved insufficient.
But, before we go any further, we need to remember one thing very
clearly: Angband got popular in the first place because it offered
cooler objects (and monsters). The old-time variants got popular for
pretty much the same reasons. People just plain like loot, and the game
designer who doesn't cater will play his creation alone.
When I startd coding Oangband, Zangband was pretty much the only
game in town. It looked to do to Angband what Angband did to Moria -
deliver more coolness, and damn the torpedos. But there were a few
serious game design problems that Topi, for all his genius, was not only
not solving but actively exacerbating.
Among them was what become known as "the endless loads of crap"
problem. In 1998, to the best of my knowledge, there was no variant
which did anything about objects that Angband did not except to throw
more of them at the player. This was, even back then, leading to a
growing player revolt that led, eventually, to mass ID and
autosquelching.
--- My own approach ---
Against both problem and "solutions" I set my face. For almost as
long as I have been coding *bands, I have been working to develop ways
to present a modern variety of objects, often in greater quantities than
a warmed-over Moria interface makes it convenient to deal with.
1. The first major thing I did was to fully integrate Tim Baker's
easy_floor patch into the game, with special attention to picking up
objects. Back in 1999 or thereabouts, Angband's (Moria's, really)
interface was lousy at dealing with multiple objects, but quite good at
dealing with single objects. Tim Baker's patch was exactly the
opposite: good for many objects, too much work for single ones.
Oangband (roughly 0.3.0) offered a pickup interface that offered the
best of both worlds, and it's seen repeated development since (most
recemtly in Sangband 0.9.9, beta 18). It has always been a
disappointment to me that so few other coders choose to adopt this code
or an equivalent.
2. The next step was a rebalancing of monster and object levels and
abundances. In Oangbands released by myself, and then by Bahman Rabii,
monsters and objects were much less likely to be found well in-depth,
and therefore less likely to be junk. Monster abundances dropped
considerably. This effort continues: for example, in Sangband, weaker
artifacts are unlikely to be found deep in the dungeon and low-level
monsters drop more gold instead of (useless) objects. The next step is
to set up minimum and maximum generation levels at which ego-items and
artifacts are (normally) found at; no need for Orc-Slaying at '4500.
Has anyone coded this yet? I wouldn't be surprised...
3. Patchwork changes could never do the job alone. The key to killing
low-level junk is to scrap and re-write the object generation code.
Starting with Sangband 0.9.9 (some beta, I forget which), object
generation probabilites at all levels has been much more finely
controlled, with complete supression of low-power items in high-level
drops (after a bugfix in beta 18 - oops). This is fairly CPU-intensive
code, but, combined with the rules against low-level monsters in the
deep dungeon, it really does take an axe to the "loads of crap" problem.
4. More importantly than any interface improvement is how intrinsically
useful the objects in the game are at the levels they are most commonly
found at. Most variant maintainers have worked strenuously on this
problem; some few of their improvements have met with general adoption.
My own approach is to resurrect or build up under-used ways of defeating
monsters; I've been advertising the death of innocent critters with new
magic realms, magical devices, thrown objects, bare-handed attacks, and
traps for quite some time now, and they in turn take sweet revenge by
waxing my hapless chars in creative ways.
--- Wrap-up ("about time!") ---
Gentle reader, I ask you: Is auto-squelching the only way? Surely
it is a challenge to us, and not a fixed and final solution. To me,
speaking only for myself and my own little variant, the choice has
always been clear: Give up and port auto-squelch, or keep working to
improve the interface and deepen the game. For better or worse, I have
and will attempt the latter. With what success? Only you can judge.
Billy Bissette
@bignews5.bellsouth.net:
> Who's up for a debate on auto-squelching?
I'll give my own thoughts. Unfortunately probably better to just
state them as you've stated your own rather than to try to put them
in direct response to quoted sections. I've tried to make it fairly
readable, but I've also been re-editting it and it is several hours
past "too late to be awake"...
I see a few issues with the very nature of Angband that encourages
an autosquelch, and even a few Sangband-specific situations.
You mention Zangband's inflation of drop rate and encouragement of
mass ID. But Angband has always been a relatively high item rate
game, with a variety of said items being for any particular point
of the game relatively worthless.
Things are complicated further with the detail that for many items,
"worthless" is a very relative term. A player without decent boots
would love boots of speed +3, but a player with boots of speed +5
would find a +4 pair useless except for cash value. If he is at a
point where he easily earns money faster than he spends it, then even
the cash value is relatively meaningless.
Another Sangband-specific example of relative uselessness are the
vials and papers produced by quaffing and reading after gaining
alchemy. At the current rate, you will create vials and papers
faster than you would use them, if you actually create potions and
scrolls at all. Reducing the production rate though might hurt
players who need to make something right then. On the other hand,
a rough toggle that stops all vial and/or paper production hurts
the player that is willing (or even desires) stockpiling the rarer
materials that very randomly appear. Just because a character
doesn't want 50 glass bottles cluttering his inventory doesn't mean
he doesn't want any agate bottles or ether scrolls. Realistically,
such a person would look at the bottle and either keep it or discard
it immediately based upon his desires, basically auto-squelching
any empty bottle that didn't meet his current minimal standard.
One major problem is the inventory system of Angband. Limited
inventory slots by their nature encourage a desire for auto-squelch
or other methods of automatic item destruction, prevention, and/or
removal. With the game having thousands of separate possible items
but the player being limited to around 30 different items at any
particular moment, there will be entire groups of items that he
knows that he simply doesn't want to bother with, on top of many
more items that he would only keep in inventory until something
better comes along. You can make every breed of mushroom amazingly
useful and appearing in large bunches, but it still won't change
the fact that the player knows he doesn't have room for all of them
combined with his regular kit and other pick-ups. Inventory has
always been a related issue, as can be seen by the various tweaks
and changes to make specific item types more useful, such as expanded
equip slots and various item stackings. And it will always be a
problem as long as the player is limited to a low number of specific
unique items.
The thing about autosquelching is that it is already present after
a fashion. For convenience in code and past memory restrictions,
there are already presumably large numbers of items that are simply
never created. Surely all those hostile orcs aren't naked and unarmed.
Their equipment is abstracted into their stats, and the player never
has to deal with going through the worn armor and weapons of a pile
of corpses of orc guards. It isn't an issue for the player, as they
are presumably all average or below average in quality (particularly
after receiving multiple perforations) and not exactly the things
the local shop would like to stock. So it is never even created for
the player to see, as it was effectively squelched in the design
phase of the game.
Various fixes are themselves hard-coded autosquelch. When someone
chooses to code a version to favor items related to the chosen class
of the character rather than items they can't or wouldn't want to use,
that code is effectively squelching items on a general level. The
main difference is that the player isn't being allowed to choose what
he would rather see. And with any system that de-emphasizes class
restrictions (such as Sangband), such a creation bias could actually
be a detriment at times. If, for example, a character has a higher
bow skill than crossbow skill, do you know that he would rather see
bows dropped than crossbows? Perhaps he really wants a good crossbow
but has yet to find one, and has only raised his bow skill in the
meantime because that is the best item he has so far. While you can
assume what a majority of characters would prefer, only the player
knows what any specific character wants. Which is a benefit of
autosquelch. (Or take a Sangband skill like forging. Perhaps a
player wouldn't bother to put points into forging until he's found
enough ore for it to look like a viable path. It doesn't necessarily
mean he doesn't want to find ore.)
I'm not saying there aren't alternatives to autosquelch, nor that
creators and developers should just avoid even trying. But various
forms of squelching and automatic destruction aren't in themselves
inherently evil, and Angband by nature of its design encourages the
desire for such ability.
topazg
> Who's up for a debate on auto-squelching?
>
Me me me!
>
> --- "Autosquelch, why do I dislike thee?" ---
>
[Snip]
>
> When we speak of auto-squelching objects, we speak of the loss of
> ways of playing the game. Rogue, Moria, and Angband are all
> object-oriented games; the types and quantities of particular objects
> that you find in the dungeon is, with your own fertile imagination, what
> opens up and makes possible diverse methods of play. A good roguelike
> game allows many effective ways of playing. A poor one allows but few.
> A high-quality interface encourages you to try new things, and makes
> many ways of playing attractive and user-friendly. A poor interface
> encourages you to ignore possible ways of playing the game, or makes
> them unfriendly or impracticable.
>
> How terrible it is to see players auto-squelching gameplay
> possibilies because the interface makes it easy to delete them, ignore
> them, to not try something new!
>
I couldn't agree more, the task here should be to give them the same proportions
of average/bad/good drops all the way through the game, yet as the definition of
"good" obviously changes the more powerful you get, the game should adapt to
take this into account.
>
> -- Back in the old days ---
>
[The Old Days]
>
>
>
> --- My own approach ---
>
> 1. The first major thing I did was to fully integrate Tim Baker's
> easy_floor patch into the game, with special attention to picking up
> objects. Back in 1999 or thereabouts, Angband's (Moria's, really)
> interface was lousy at dealing with multiple objects, but quite good at
> dealing with single objects. Tim Baker's patch was exactly the
> opposite: good for many objects, too much work for single ones.
> Oangband (roughly 0.3.0) offered a pickup interface that offered the
> best of both worlds, and it's seen repeated development since (most
> recemtly in Sangband 0.9.9, beta 18). It has always been a
> disappointment to me that so few other coders choose to adopt this code
> or an equivalent.
I'm not entirely aware of the changes made, though I do like Sang 0.9.9b18's
pickup options
>
> 2. The next step was a rebalancing of monster and object levels and
> abundances. In Oangbands released by myself, and then by Bahman Rabii,
> monsters and objects were much less likely to be found well in-depth,
> and therefore less likely to be junk. Monster abundances dropped
> considerably. This effort continues: for example, in Sangband, weaker
> artifacts are unlikely to be found deep in the dungeon and low-level
> monsters drop more gold instead of (useless) objects. The next step is
> to set up minimum and maximum generation levels at which ego-items and
> artifacts are (normally) found at; no need for Orc-Slaying at '4500.
> Has anyone coded this yet? I wouldn't be surprised...
>
This is just what I was trying to say above, the good items need to become more
appropriate for the higher level characters, but not more common than they
were.
>
> 3. Patchwork changes could never do the job alone. The key to killing
> low-level junk is to scrap and re-write the object generation code.
> Starting with Sangband 0.9.9 (some beta, I forget which), object
> generation probabilites at all levels has been much more finely
> controlled, with complete supression of low-power items in high-level
> drops (after a bugfix in beta 18 - oops). This is fairly CPU-intensive
> code, but, combined with the rules against low-level monsters in the
> deep dungeon, it really does take an axe to the "loads of crap" problem.
>
Excellent.
> 4. More importantly than any interface improvement is how intrinsically
> useful the objects in the game are at the levels they are most commonly
> found at. Most variant maintainers have worked strenuously on this
> problem; some few of their improvements have met with general adoption.
> My own approach is to resurrect or build up under-used ways of defeating
> monsters; I've been advertising the death of innocent critters with new
> magic realms, magical devices, thrown objects, bare-handed attacks, and
> traps for quite some time now, and they in turn take sweet revenge by
> waxing my hapless chars in creative ways.
This to me is the most appealing factor of Sangband. You can have a real classes
and play them much more closely to how you would expect them to be played ....
and still do just as well! However, the necessity to make items that are
appropriate to the given class means that for other classes there will always
be junk that they cannot use. The only way I can see around this is to generate
objects weighted towards the player's skillset.
>
> --- Wrap-up ("about time!") ---
>
> Gentle reader, I ask you: Is auto-squelching the only way? Surely
> it is a challenge to us, and not a fixed and final solution. To me,
> speaking only for myself and my own little variant, the choice has
> always been clear: Give up and port auto-squelch, or keep working to
> improve the interface and deepen the game. For better or worse, I have
> and will attempt the latter. With what success? Only you can judge.
>
Auto-squelching is a complete hack, and whilst it helps in the immediate term
resolve the "getting rid of junk" problem, it does nothing to increase the
quality of gameplay.
--
Take Care,
Graham
Pos(0.3.0a2) Alpha "Natar" XX L:1 DL:50' !A R--- !Sp w:Short Sword +0,+0
Pos(V/T//NPP) W H- D+ c-- f PV+ s- TT? d P++ M+
C-- S+ I- So B ac GHB- SQ+ RQ+ V+ F:Better monster AI (Acting like decent
players without automatically knowing where the player is - randomly roaming
the dungeon etc...)
bluetrolls
My 2 cents, as a Vanilla player. Auto-squelching is the only way against
tediousness. Actually I'm using a poor-man's auto-squelching by having a macro
that will destroy the object on top of a stack. I.e. 'Do you want to pick-up a
potion od sleep y/n?', F12, potion of sleep gone. Particularly useful to avoid
'compacting objects' and saving my object cache from doom (ironman).
I would go even further and dream for a world where id would not be necessary.
Or at least not be necessary to find out the details of known items, i.e. wand
charges or armor bonuses or ... That would make auto-squelching even more
useful :-)
> anxious anticipation, even frustration, that builds up tension released
> by wonderful, unexpected finds
My anxiousness is built by:
a. knowing which monsters/uniques are likely to drop some good items.
b. christmas-tree monsters.
c. little pictures showing the items dropped.
d. what remains after an auto-squelching run through piles of objects (NPP).
All else is just the tediousness of destroying the crap.
> How terrible it is to see players auto-squelching gameplay
> possibilies because the interface makes it easy to delete them, ignore
> them, to not try something new!
The 123th potion of sleep is hardly something new or exciting. On a more extreme
tone, the 25th character id-ing a potion of sleep is kind of getting tired of
it.
> 2. The next step was a rebalancing of monster and object levels and
> abundances. In Oangbands released by myself, and then by Bahman Rabii,
> monsters and objects were much less likely to be found well in-depth,
> and therefore less likely to be junk.
Good luck with balancing this. But make sure potions of speed show at all depth,
as well as some means to teleport or haste or heal or magic mapping or whatever
a particular player/class/race might find useful at a certain depth/kit.
> Gentle reader, I ask you: Is auto-squelching the only way?
Yes :-)
Christer Nyfalt
>
> --- Wrap-up ("about time!") ---
>
> Gentle reader, I ask you: Is auto-squelching the only way? Surely
> it is a challenge to us, and not a fixed and final solution. To me,
> speaking only for myself and my own little variant, the choice has
> always been clear: Give up and port auto-squelch, or keep working to
> improve the interface and deepen the game. For better or worse, I have
> and will attempt the latter. With what success? Only you can judge.
>
>
>
But I want squelching for food, potions, scrolls and staves.
The food, potion and scroll problems could be solved by autohiding identified
bad flavors and by implementing something similar to the quiver for these
types of items. You might call them food basket, potion bag and scroll case.
Why do I want these containers?
Because there are a lot of potions that are useful, but not useful enough to
carry. Allowing 10x10 potions(and scrolls and food items) to take up the same
inventory space as 90x1 potions would reduce the feeling of too much junk.
There is still the problem with staves, these items are heavy, common, cheap
and many of them aren't useful enough to carry. A rebalancing of them is
needed. How about fusing the junk staves of Treasure Location,
Object Location and Door/Stair Location with the somewhat more useful
Trap Location staff into a 'Sense Dungeon' staff?
--
Christer Nyfalt
Twisted One
unbalancing, would be to allow small objects to stack even if they were
dissimilar, as long as they were of the same general type. So 99
assorted rings would use one inventory slot. Same with 99 assorted
mushrooms. They'd be accessed individually with a submenu or with a
quiver type interface.
--
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Palladium? Trusted Computing? DRM? Microsoft? Sauron.
"One ring to rule them all, one ring to find them
One ring to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them."
Nick
> --- "Autosquelch, why do I dislike thee?" ---
[snip nice description of the romance of roguelikes]
> How terrible it is to see players auto-squelching gameplay
> possibilies because the interface makes it easy to delete them, ignore
> them, to not try something new!
I see your point completely, but not every item is a gameplay
possibility. When my necromancer finds his 20th copy of "Call of the
Wild", he can leave it on the ground, destroy it, or keep it to throw
at a centipede. Or it could be squelched.
[more snips]
> 1. The first major thing I did was to fully integrate Tim Baker's
> easy_floor patch into the game, with special attention to picking up
> objects. Back in 1999 or thereabouts, Angband's (Moria's, really)
> interface was lousy at dealing with multiple objects, but quite good at
> dealing with single objects. Tim Baker's patch was exactly the
> opposite: good for many objects, too much work for single ones.
> Oangband (roughly 0.3.0) offered a pickup interface that offered the
> best of both worlds, and it's seen repeated development since (most
> recemtly in Sangband 0.9.9, beta 18). It has always been a
> disappointment to me that so few other coders choose to adopt this code
> or an equivalent.
It's certainly good, but killing lots of things in a corridor is still
a bit painful. Dealing with a stack containing a Potion of Slime Mold
Juice and a Scroll of Summon Monster takes, IMHO, more time than is
warranted. A "real" adventurer might shove it all to one side and then
go through it once the orcs are all dead - maybe that could be made
easier.
[snip better ways of generating items]
All this is good, and there should be more of it.
>
> --- Wrap-up ("about time!") ---
>
> Gentle reader, I ask you: Is auto-squelching the only way? Surely
> it is a challenge to us, and not a fixed and final solution. To me,
> speaking only for myself and my own little variant, the choice has
> always been clear: Give up and port auto-squelch, or keep working to
> improve the interface and deepen the game. For better or worse, I have
> and will attempt the latter. With what success? Only you can judge.
I don't think having an auto-squelch entails giving up.
Even with the most intelligent item generation, I believe there's still
going to be a nontrivial amount of useless stuff produced. And then
some that's probably useless, and some that's perhaps useful, and so
on.
In the end, there are two things you can do: (1) try to stop generating
junk; (2) make an easy way to get rid of it. Why not do both?
That's today's opinion, anyway :)
Nick.
Erik Piper
> One thing to help with the inventory size effect, without being too
> unbalancing, would be to allow small objects to stack even if they were
> dissimilar, as long as they were of the same general type. So 99
> assorted rings would use one inventory slot. Same with 99 assorted
> mushrooms. They'd be accessed individually with a submenu or with a
> quiver type interface.
...and this is what I mean when I say you often write enlightening and
interesting things. :-) I'm not really too qualified to judge since I
never got my feet wet in Angband proper (played a lot of ToME though),
but I see thoughtful, useful ideas presented without hyperbole or
emotion, and it triggers my Happy Enyzmes. :-)
Erik
Andrew Doull
> Who's up for a debate on auto-squelching?
Howabout going for a monster drop system that (in Sangband terms) only drops
parchments, bottles, chunks of metal, essences, treasure and (what the heck)
artifacts?
That way, you'd force everyone to learn forging skills or buy their equipment in
the shops; however, no one would complain about getting stuff that was
inappopriate for their character.
Andrew
--
Unangband L:C E+ T- R- P+ D-- G+(+) F:Sangband RL-- RLA-- W:F Q++
AI+(++) GFX++ SFX++ RN+++(+) PO++ Hp+++ Re--(+) S++ C- O* KG--
Werner Bär
"Leon Marrick" <inv...@runegold.org> schrieb...
> Back in 1999 or thereabouts, Angband's (Moria's, really)
> interface was lousy at dealing with multiple objects, but quite good at
> dealing with single objects.
Moria's interface wasn't able to handle multiple objects, simply
because it didn't have to.
The amount of junk in the dungeon exploded when object stacking
was introduced in angband 2.8.x.
Werner.
pete mack
>There is still the problem with staves, these items are heavy, common, cheap
>and many of them aren't useful enough to carry. A rebalancing of them is
>needed. How about fusing the junk staves of Treasure Location,
>Object Location and Door/Stair Location with the somewhat more useful
>Trap Location staff into a 'Sense Dungeon' staff?
One quibble: Staffs of Object location is anything but junk. They are
absolutely critical from 1800' to 2500' for Priest and Paladin classes.
It's the one place where Vanilla is hands-down better than NPP.
Getting Godly Insights is like a mini quest. You need to finish
levels very fast but still search effectively, and Object detection is
the only way to go.
On earlier levels, it lets you decide if that room full of water hounds
or is worth going near. It also cuts down on turncount. Leon is
absolutely right on this one. You are not taking advantage of your
environment if you aren't using it! (Or you aren't playing priest....)
NPP store services totally wreck this challenge, as does the extreme
rarity of dungeon books. If you need to balance cash, don't allow them
to be sold back on subjective player value, but according to true
rarity. Supply and demand...
Similarly, Rod of Detection is insanely rare. It should have
A:30/8
A:55/2
or something like that, which would make for similar a challenge for
Warrior class. Its current distribution gives a perverse incentive to
scum 1500'. Very bad. The game should always reward diving. The
current distribution actively penalizes diving past 1500'.
Jeda
pete mack wrote:
> Christer writes:
> >There is still the problem with staves, these items are heavy, common, cheap
> >and many of them aren't useful enough to carry. A rebalancing of them is
> >needed. How about fusing the junk staves of Treasure Location,
> >Object Location and Door/Stair Location with the somewhat more useful
> >Trap Location staff into a 'Sense Dungeon' staff?
>
> One quibble: Staffs of Object location is anything but junk. They are
> absolutely critical from 1800' to 2500' for Priest and Paladin classes.
> It's the one place where Vanilla is hands-down better than NPP.
> Getting Godly Insights is like a mini quest. You need to finish
> levels very fast but still search effectively, and Object detection is
> the only way to go.
>
> On earlier levels, it lets you decide if that room full of water hounds
> or is worth going near. It also cuts down on turncount.
Also very true for warriors. After finally realizing how far easier it
is to
get the necessary resources (one word: phial) it took me only two tries
to win with 45. My last character was collecting both staves and
scrolls of detect objects at home all the game, after adding detect
object to the "stuff that the shops sell too rarely" list :)
bluetrolls
> Dealing with a stack containing a Potion of Slime Mold
> Juice and a Scroll of Summon Monster takes, IMHO, more time than is
> warranted. A "real" adventurer might shove it all to one side and then
> go through it once the orcs are all dead - maybe that could be made
> easier.
Heh, just had a briliant idea ;-) Change the interface of 'auto-pickup' to apply
the auto-squelching filter algorithm. Thus the piles of junk stay on ground and
make mantainers happy (?), while the player is relieved of having to deal with
humungous amount of junk. Moreover, some gamplay issues (traps, runes of
protection) with auto-squelching are fixed.
Ah, where is the 3D interface of *band when you really need it? Imagine being
dwarfed by the junk piling up around you ;-)
Eddie Grove
> Who's up for a debate on auto-squelching?
The first part of any debate is to define the terms. Here is
what I consider to be
BASIC SQUELCHING
(1) When you 'k'ill an item that is a ring or an amulet
or unwieldable, you are prompted with y/n/s. The choice of s
marks that type/flavor to be squelched in the future, after
a confirmation that you really mean it.
(2) When the player steps onto a square, any uninscribed objects
in the square marked to be squelched are automatically deleted
at 0 energy cost.
(3) There is some sort of clunky interface to stop squelching.
That's the entirety of basic squelching. There are no display
changes. There are lots of ways this can be improved, but let's
stick to the basics to avoid arguing about tangential issues.
If you are anti squelching, I assume you are anti "basic squelching",
so let's try to keep the discussion focused there so we can actually
get somewhere. If you are not against basic squelching, just say so
and ignore the rest of this post, and there will be much rejoicing.
Then we could move on to arguing about advanced squelching. :)
> Angband, as was Rogue and Moria before it, a game of "many shells,
> few pearls". The delight at finding that wonderful ego-item or artifact
> is heightened and made vivid by the anxious searching for something,
> anything, that can take out that wretched monster who keeps killing me!
> The game designer who supplies too many pearls, or who allows the
> impatient player to auto-suppress or auto-ignore the shells, is dumbing
> down two battle-proven features of this game and its ancestors, features
> that have kept people playing past bedtime since at least '85: 1)
> anxious anticipation, even frustration, that builds up tension released
> by wonderful, unexpected finds, and 2) the value of ordinary objects
> themselves in making for a consistant medieval, semi-Tolkeinesque
> atmosphere for the game common to every Roguelike I have ever played. I
> just plain feel comfortable around 1d4 daggers, okay?
I am sure that the vast majority of well-traveled 10'x10' squares in a
cave system contain at least one pebble. Why are there not pebbles on
every square? Because we don't care to be inundated with the
ordinary, that's why.
> This matter touches on the design and presentation of game
> elements. If I design an object, I am not likely to encourage players
> to skip past it by giving them handly tools to ignore this part of the
> game. If I code up objects with hidden nastiness or coolness, I am most
> emphatically not going to supply an interface to auto-learn or
> auto-ignore the secrets.
Learning secrets has absolutely nothing to do with squelching.
Perhaps there are secrets to broken sticks, but I have given up trying
to find them. Why do you wish for me to have to explicitly kill each
broken stick? How does that improve my gameplay experience?
> When we speak of auto-squelching objects, we speak of the loss of
> ways of playing the game. Rogue, Moria, and Angband are all
> object-oriented games; the types and quantities of particular objects
> that you find in the dungeon is, with your own fertile imagination, what
> opens up and makes possible diverse methods of play. A good roguelike
> game allows many effective ways of playing. A poor one allows but
> few.
No matter what hidden code changes you make, I am simply not going
to use broken sticks unless someone "spoils" me on the issue.
I will never use iron spikes, but I don't want you to suppress them
from the game. Generate them, and let those who want to use them,
but let me squelch them since there is no way I will ever want them.
For newbies you enjoy annoying by not telling them sticks are junk,
they get to try as long as they like before they give up and squelch.
> A high-quality interface encourages you to try new things, and makes
> many ways of playing attractive and user-friendly. A poor interface
> encourages you to ignore possible ways of playing the game, or makes
> them unfriendly or impracticable.
[OT Aside -- If you really feel this way, I suggest you implement my
mod to eliminate selling items to stores. When items cannot be sold,
it encourages you to use them. That one simple change will do 10
times as much to encourage using things as the worst squelching
interface might do to discourage them. You cannot fully appreciate
this until you've played a couple games through.]
> How terrible it is to see players auto-squelching gameplay
> possibilies because the interface makes it easy to delete them, ignore
> them, to not try something new!
How terrible to have only 23 slots so that we have so little choice.
Oh wait - managing 23 slots is what the skill of game is actually about.
> Among them was what become known as "the endless loads of crap"
> problem. In 1998, to the best of my knowledge, there was no variant
> which did anything about objects that Angband did not except to throw
> more of them at the player. This was, even back then, leading to a
> growing player revolt that led, eventually, to mass ID and
> autosquelching.
What leads to autosquelching is different classes. When you make
different things of different values to different classes, and you
have inventory limits, you produce problems for which squelching is
the solution.
A potion of resistance to cold is simply not worth a slot to a player
with lots of mana that can cast a spell that provides said resistance.
A player lacking the spell will find it useful. There is no amount of
intelligent item distribution that can provide the potion at levels
where some players want to find it, without certain others considering
it to be junk. If you allow for different classes, there will be
junk, and lots of it.
> 1. The first major thing I did was to fully integrate Tim Baker's
> easy_floor patch into the game, with special attention to picking up
> objects. Back in 1999 or thereabouts, Angband's (Moria's, really)
> interface was lousy at dealing with multiple objects, but quite good at
> dealing with single objects. Tim Baker's patch was exactly the
> opposite: good for many objects, too much work for single ones.
> Oangband (roughly 0.3.0) offered a pickup interface that offered the
> best of both worlds, and it's seen repeated development since (most
> recemtly in Sangband 0.9.9, beta 18). It has always been a
> disappointment to me that so few other coders choose to adopt this code
> or an equivalent.
And yet, it is horribly clunky when compared to auto-pickup combined
with squelching. You step onto a pile of 8 items containing only 2
that you do not wish to squelch. This kind of thing happens _frequently_.
(with squelch) You get a message you picked up the first, you press
space, and you get a message you picked up the second.
(your way) You get a list, you have to look through it to find what
you want, see two things, select one. Oops - the lettering changed,
have to read through the list again, select again, then ESC to stop.
Now, lots of people choose to press a macro for destroy-top-item-of-pile
6 times. Better hope they didn't miss anything when perusing the list.
In the no-squelch solution, you cannot adequately do confirmation of
killing objects. If you make the kill macro ask for a 'y', your
fingers learn to press 'y' faster than the brain can say "oops I meant
no".
I'd grade the solution you want to see exported to other variants a
'C' -- if I was feeling generous. In a class where UI principles were
made clear, I'd mark off a grade each for (1) keypresses to kill each
individual item rather than the class known to be of inconsequential
value, (2) lack of [usable] confirmation for a permanent delete, and
(3) requirement to re-read the list after it changes.
> 2. The next step was a rebalancing of monster and object levels and
> abundances. In Oangbands released by myself, and then by Bahman Rabii,
> monsters and objects were much less likely to be found well in-depth,
> and therefore less likely to be junk. Monster abundances dropped
> considerably. This effort continues: for example, in Sangband, weaker
> artifacts are unlikely to be found deep in the dungeon and low-level
> monsters drop more gold instead of (useless) objects. The next step is
> to set up minimum and maximum generation levels at which ego-items and
> artifacts are (normally) found at; no need for Orc-Slaying at '4500.
> Has anyone coded this yet? I wouldn't be surprised...
Irrelevant to basic squelching. Spellbooks I cannot use that are not
of sufficient value to use a slot to take home to sell are junk. Most
spellbooks fall into that category. If you provide spellbooks to the
spellcasters, and have multiple spell realms, adjust the spellbook
levels all you like, they are mostly junk.
> 3. Patchwork changes could never do the job alone. The key to killing
> low-level junk is to scrap and re-write the object generation code.
Junk cannot be eliminated, as long as there are different playstyles.
> Starting with Sangband 0.9.9 (some beta, I forget which), object
> generation probabilites at all levels has been much more finely
> controlled, with complete supression of low-power items in high-level
> drops (after a bugfix in beta 18 - oops). This is fairly CPU-intensive
> code, but, combined with the rules against low-level monsters in the
> deep dungeon, it really does take an axe to the "loads of crap" problem.
It's just not possible. One person's crap is another's treasure.
Let me tell you of a *bander I'll call J. J is moderately skilled,
having won multiple times each at [V], [Ey], and [S]. J simply is
uninterested in wands/rods of light and scrolls/staves of destruction,
and wants them squelched always. I carried rods of light down to
2500' in my current [S] ironman game, so you can see I prize them
highly. In every game, I go after every scroll of destruction like
Gollum after his precious. No method of item generation can please
both of us. Squelching is a simple answer.
> 4. More importantly than any interface improvement is how intrinsically
> useful the objects in the game are at the levels they are most commonly
> found at. Most variant maintainers have worked strenuously on this
> problem; some few of their improvements have met with general adoption.
> My own approach is to resurrect or build up under-used ways of defeating
> monsters; I've been advertising the death of innocent critters with new
> magic realms, magical devices, thrown objects, bare-handed attacks, and
> traps for quite some time now, and they in turn take sweet revenge by
> waxing my hapless chars in creative ways.
We have only 23 slots. That's all there is. More items means more
junk. It cannot be otherwise.
[OT aside - throwing artifacts are basically useless, unless you
change the quiver to allow them. In practice, it's exceedingly
unlikely that it's worth an entire slot for a single throwing weapon,
even Mjollnir. In traps, they are one-shots. I only keep them if
they are useful in melee.]
> Gentle reader, I ask you: Is auto-squelching the only way? Surely
> it is a challenge to us, and not a fixed and final solution. To me,
> speaking only for myself and my own little variant, the choice has
> always been clear: Give up and port auto-squelch, or keep working to
> improve the interface and deepen the game. For better or worse, I have
You can personally play without squelching, if you think that
will make you a better maintainer.
The whole point of squelching is to improve the interface to the
kill/destroy command. That is the _entirety_ of what basic squelching
does. IMO you cannot be both anti basic squelching and simultaneously
pro "improve the interface".
[I am being slightly disingenuous. If you agree to basic squelching,
I will go the next step and argue that one should be able to choose to
make said items not even show up on the display when using advanced
squelching, but that is a different argument for another day.]
> and will attempt the latter. With what success? Only you can judge.
Here are three judgements. J will not play another game in a *band
lacking autosquelch. Methods like in [O] requiring 'k' then '!' are
not sufficient. I know of another decent player with the same
philosophy. After I finish my current game of [S], I will make 3.
Eddie
Twisted One
> Howabout going for a monster drop system that (in Sangband terms) only drops
> parchments, bottles, chunks of metal, essences, treasure and (what the heck)
> artifacts?
>
> That way, you'd force everyone to learn forging skills or buy their equipment in
> the shops; however, no one would complain about getting stuff that was
> inappopriate for their character.
Congratulations. You just massively nerfed spellcasters, who will now be
stuck with the first four books most of the game, due to how stingy the
BM tends to be with the deeper books. And how little money the character
will make without all those long swords of something-or-other (+1,+3) to
sell anyway. Also, most of the powerful wands, rods, staves, scrolls,
and potions. Stat gain will depend wholly on the BM and proceed very
slowly due to the inability to sell lots of junk for cash to buy the
potions with. At least [S] reportedly stocks teleport scrolls reliably
at the alchemist. Or is there some way to forge all of these items, not
just armor and weapons? I doubt it extends to the spellbooks even so...
Or did you intend this to apply to monster drops only, and still let
floor generation produce ego long swords of mucho moolah +3 and deep
spellbooks and such?
Twisted One
> One quibble: Staffs of Object location is anything but junk. They are
> absolutely critical from 1800' to 2500' for Priest and Paladin classes.
> It's the one place where Vanilla is hands-down better than NPP.
> Getting Godly Insights is like a mini quest. You need to finish
> levels very fast but still search effectively, and Object detection is
> the only way to go.
Why? A priest at that level has reliable healing spells and decent HP,
and a paladin is a walking tank with even more hp. The priest also has
decent ranged attacks and other ways to deal with problematical foes via
spell. (Less sure about the paladin here.)
> or something like that, which would make for similar a challenge for
> Warrior class. Its current distribution gives a perverse incentive to
> scum 1500'.
So do stat potions.
> Very bad. The game should always reward diving. The
> current distribution actively penalizes diving past 1500'.
Oangband and variants that have shifted item and monster power in
similar ways to Oangband might be for you, then.
Otto Martin
Unfortunately, this would require some major rebalancing. Currently the
idea is that each inventory slot holds only one kind of item, which means
that light (small) items, like potions, scrolls, rings and amulets, can be
quite powerful, since you're sacrificing a slot for each type you carry.
If you could carry lots of small items, you'd need to tone down their
power, possibly close to non-existent, since with this you could carry so
many useful items. You'd have one of every kind of semi-useful ring you've
found and always swap in the best for each situation; you'd carry all the
useful potions and scrolls found in the town shops and use them any time
you fought an out of depth monster, and so on...
(The latter at least as soon as you have abundant money - what is it,
maybe at 1000' or so?)
I'm not saying that being able to carry lots of stuff is necessarily a bad
thing, but any changes to how the inventory is handled has to be thought
out carefully; the size has always been restricted and this has shaped the
game a great deal.
Otto Martin - your friendly game rules analyst :-)
--
<XnD> Personally its not God I dislike, its his fan club I cant stand
http://bash.org/?277337
Twisted One
> I'm not saying that being able to carry lots of stuff is necessarily a bad
> thing, but any changes to how the inventory is handled has to be thought
> out carefully; the size has always been restricted and this has shaped the
> game a great deal.
I'm not claiming otherwise; obviously attention to balance must be paid.
But nobody uses sang mushrooms, even powerful ones, as things currently
are. The O quiver isn't apparently unbalancing; limiting it to one type
of item (ammo) seems to be sufficient in this case. Mushrooms are
probably a good candidate for similar treatment, since they (like
branded ammo) are situational and consumable and balanced already by
scarcity and difficult, potentially hazardous identification.
Julian Lighton
Twisted One <twist...@gmail.invalid> wrote:
>Andrew Doull wrote:
>> Howabout going for a monster drop system that (in Sangband terms) only drops
>> parchments, bottles, chunks of metal, essences, treasure and (what the heck)
>> artifacts?
>>
>> That way, you'd force everyone to learn forging skills or buy their
>equipment in
>> the shops; however, no one would complain about getting stuff that was
>> inappopriate for their character.
>
>Congratulations. You just massively nerfed spellcasters,
I think you auto-squelched your sense of humor.
--
Julian Lighton jl...@fragment.com
/* You are not expected to understand this. */
Twisted One
> In article <HoudnRCTivU...@rogers.com>,
> Twisted One <twist...@gmail.invalid> wrote:
>
>>Andrew Doull wrote:
>>
>>>Howabout going for a monster drop system that (in Sangband terms) only drops
>>>parchments, bottles, chunks of metal, essences, treasure and (what the heck)
>>>artifacts?
>>>
>>>That way, you'd force everyone to learn forging skills or buy their
>>
>>equipment in
>>
>>>the shops; however, no one would complain about getting stuff that was
>>>inappopriate for their character.
>>
>>Congratulations. You just massively nerfed spellcasters,
>
> I think you auto-squelched your sense of humor.
Were you intending it to be a joke? If so, some indication would be
useful, such as a smiley. People make suggestions like that for *bands
all the time in full seriousness, after all.
(In fact, now that I look, the From: for the two posts differs. So
either you're nymshifting or you're claiming to be able to read someone
else's mind here. What's up with that?)
Glen Wheeler
"Twisted One" <twist...@gmail.invalid> wrote in message
news:loadnSwVJMT...@rogers.com...
> Otto Martin wrote:
>> I'm not saying that being able to carry lots of stuff is necessarily a
>> bad
>> thing, but any changes to how the inventory is handled has to be thought
>> out carefully; the size has always been restricted and this has shaped
>> the
>> game a great deal.
>
> I'm not claiming otherwise; obviously attention to balance must be paid.
> But nobody uses sang mushrooms, even powerful ones, as things currently
> are. The O quiver isn't apparently unbalancing; limiting it to one type of
> item (ammo) seems to be sufficient in this case. Mushrooms are probably a
> good candidate for similar treatment, since they (like branded ammo) are
> situational and consumable and balanced already by scarcity and difficult,
> potentially hazardous identification.
>
This is patently false. I use Sang mushrooms quite often and consider it
a sign of bad play when players ignore them. Considering the quite obvious
fact that you know little to zero about Sang please refrain from making such
vast generalisations as:
"nobody uses sang mushrooms, even powerful ones, as things currently are"
--
Glen
L:Pyt E+++ T-- R+ P+++ D+ G+ F:*band !RL RLA-
W:AF Q+++ AI++ GFX++ SFX-- RN++++ PO--- !Hp Re-- S+
Glen Wheeler
"Twisted One" <twist...@gmail.invalid> wrote in message
> Julian Lighton wrote:
>> In article <HoudnRCTivU...@rogers.com>,
>> Twisted One <twist...@gmail.invalid> wrote:
>>
>>>Andrew Doull wrote:
>>>
>>>>Howabout going for a monster drop system that (in Sangband terms) only
>>>>drops
>>>>parchments, bottles, chunks of metal, essences, treasure and (what the
>>>>heck)
>>>>artifacts?
>>>>
>>>>That way, you'd force everyone to learn forging skills or buy their
>>>
>>>equipment in
>>>
>>>>the shops; however, no one would complain about getting stuff that was
>>>>inappopriate for their character.
>>>
>>>Congratulations. You just massively nerfed spellcasters,
>>
>> I think you auto-squelched your sense of humor.
>
> Were you intending it to be a joke? If so, some indication would be
> useful, such as a smiley. People make suggestions like that for *bands all
> the time in full seriousness, after all.
>
> (In fact, now that I look, the From: for the two posts differs. So either
> you're nymshifting or you're claiming to be able to read someone else's
> mind here. What's up with that?)
>
I would say this falls under the category of ``obvious sarcasm''.
Twisted One
> I would say this falls under the category of ``obvious sarcasm''.
There was nothing "obvious" about it -- and by the way, it's shift-' if
you're still unable to find them.
Radical suggestions are made in utter seriousness fairly often around
here, and sometimes they have led to successful variants. Reducing
equipment acquisition to stores+forging to both balance forging and
reduce junky drops isn't, on its face, any more ridiculous than, say, O
combat. :) But as posed, with the specific list of items generated, it
looked likely to unbalance spellcasting and probably other aspects of
the game -- typical with a quickie radical suggestion, and often a sign
that it needs refinement rather than consignment to the dustbin of rgra
history. :)
Twisted One
[snip]
Do not attack me.
I expect there to be some exceptions, but the general observation *by
others* which I am merely *repeating* is that Sang mushrooms seem to be
underused. The inventory slot issue is one of the cited reasons. I
proposed a reasonable solution -- not one I claim is guaranteed free of
balance issues or even ultimately workable, just worthy of investigation.
There is no need to jump down my throat for attempting to be helpful.
Discouraging people from attempting to be helpful is not something you
really should be doing.
Billy Bissette
news:d7lh85$fuk$1...@news.cc.tut.fi:
> If you could carry lots of small items, you'd need to tone down their
> power, possibly close to non-existent, since with this you could carry
> so many useful items. You'd have one of every kind of semi-useful ring
> you've found and always swap in the best for each situation; you'd
> carry all the useful potions and scrolls found in the town shops and
> use them any time you fought an out of depth monster, and so on...
In the case of Sang mushrooms, one might could argue simply reversing
their appearance in stacks could be a balance. After all, mushrooms
were made to appear in (sometimes rather large) stacks in order to
encourage people to carry them even though they would occupy a slot.
If you alleviate the slot restriction in some manner, the numbers could
be reduced again. As could the number appearing in shops.
While some scrolls appear in groups in the dungeon, they aren't quite
the same case as mushrooms, as shops quite often are willing to stock
and restock scrolls and potions while mushrooms can appear more rarely.
The sheer volume stocked by shops could be reduced as well, but people
could still stockpile across repeated trips.
On potions, I'm not really sure how strong they are. Players already
form large stockpiles of "useful" potions based on their depth, supply,
and current goals. Indeed, they might stock heavily on some things
simply because they have space restrictions on alternatives. Scrolls
are similar, but there are perhaps more "useful but perhaps not quite
good enough to take a space in a limited kit" scrolls in Sangband than
there are potions, which could boost player power if suddenly the
player was able to carry them without the slot concern. Potion-wise,
the main thing I can think of would be stocking dungeon pick-ups of
unneeded stat potions for resale (at roughly 6k each, the biggest
penalty for resale is that it might take you six slots due to six
different types).
You could bump up potion/scroll destruction rates as a counter
though, perhaps a number between 1 and a percentage of the total
present destroyed? Randomly picking across whatever is clumped
together into one slot/container.
On the issue of swapping rings, I wouldn't think it would be so much
an issue as people wouldn't bother to go through the hassle of switching
rings based on every other mob. Then again, I'm sure some players would
quickly make swap macro/inscription combinations so that whatever
resistance or ability they need is only a single keystroke away.
Omega used an unlimited inventory, but taking items from your pack had
a time penalty based upon how many items were "above" it (as unused
objects would drift to the bottom of the pack with new things placed
above them and others were taken from the pack to be used). Angband's
system doesn't encourage the same style, but it perhaps could be an
option if useful sub-containers were added. It isn't a very
"Angband"-ish solution though.
And of course one problem is that the limited inventory is considered
a plus of Angband, with the game (particularly as development
progressed) primed to deliver items at a relatively high rate compared
to available inventory. In other words, you get a ton of objects of
varying degrees of usefulness made available through both dungeon trips
and shop availability, but can only carry a small fraction of those
objects. If you make it easier to carry a larger number of items, you
change the system.
Atriel
that made to NPP, it would be cool in wacky variants like Z or
Heng, but both already have junk problems mildly solved.
Your idea of ego generation deepth based would be
nice instead of mass id.
BUT
No autosquelch is too radical, really ;)
--
I will hold the candle till it burns up my arm.
I'll keep taking punches until their will grows tired.
I will stare the sun down until my eyes go blind.
I won't change direction and I won't change my mind...
How much difference does it make?
Ernest Huang
> snip>
See, I never understood the arguement for item squelching at all. IMO, part of
the fun of *bands is figuring out how to ration ID out on all of the supposed
"junk" that you get. For spellcasters, obviously it's not a big deal, but for
Warriors and classes similar to warriors, this poses an interesting challenge;
at least until you find that rare rod of perception.
And I agree with the attitude of finding uses for items that are seemingly
useless. From the rare feedback that I do receive on my variant, I've seen
some quite ingenious methods utilized while playing that don't occur in other
*bands.
I had written up a semi-squelching algorithm based off of a Gaussian curve (not
implemented yet), but I still honestly feel that takes a lot of the fun out of
the game.
--
AKA Yumi_Saotome on #angband
Martin Read
>Andrew Doull wrote:
>> Howabout going for a monster drop system that (in Sangband terms) only drops
>> parchments, bottles, chunks of metal, essences, treasure and (what the heck)
>> artifacts?
>>
>> That way, you'd force everyone to learn forging skills or buy their equipment in
>> the shops; however, no one would complain about getting stuff that was
>> inappopriate for their character.
>
>Congratulations. You just massively nerfed spellcasters, who will now be
>stuck with the first four books most of the game, due to how stingy the
>BM tends to be with the deeper books.
Make the dungeon spellbooks artifacts. Sorted.
>And how little money the character
>will make without all those long swords of something-or-other (+1,+3) to
>sell anyway.
You won't need as much money if there's a decent supply of raw
materials with which to make equipment. And you could always make some
of the higher-quality raw materials meaningfully saleable.
>Also, most of the powerful wands, rods, staves, scrolls,
>and potions. Stat gain will depend wholly on the BM and proceed very
>slowly due to the inability to sell lots of junk for cash to buy the
>potions with.
Make your stats be another thing you spend experience on. Sorted.
>At least [S] reportedly stocks teleport scrolls reliably
>at the alchemist. Or is there some way to forge all of these items, not
>just armor and weapons? I doubt it extends to the spellbooks even so...
S certainly allows forging of potions and scrolls.
--
Martin Read - my opinions are my own. share them if you wish.
"Bigots leave a stench wherever they have been
It's four parts holy incense and six parts gasoline"
-- Rome Burns, "Catharsis"
Christophe
You have a messed up sense of fun you know. IDing the mass of items
generated by the game is one of the most annoying things possible. I
guess I could never play an artifactless char because it's much easier
to just destroy everything and ID what remains. With an artifactless
char, you must pseudo-id or id everything for a much longer time than
normal.
Neil Stevens
> How terrible it is to see players auto-squelching gameplay
> possibilies because the interface makes it easy to delete them, ignore
> them, to not try something new!
If someone's ready to auto-destroy an item, it's plain they already
decided against messing around with it. The squelch system isn't at fault
there.
In ToME land, my sample automatizer file destroys items that can be
useful. That's way more encouragement than merely making such destruction
possible, yet I see in character sheets plenty of characters using the
items I destroy!
> -- Back in the old days ---
>
> Moria has always had a certain problem with the quantity of objects
> in the dungeon. Angband added more objects, in variety and sheer mass,
> but (until Ben Harrison came along) made no essential improvements in
> handling or presenting them. Ben Harrison's macro/inscription system
> was a tremendous boon, yet it eventually proved insufficient.
>
> But, before we go any further, we need to remember one thing very
> clearly: Angband got popular in the first place because it offered
> cooler objects (and monsters). The old-time variants got popular for
> pretty much the same reasons. People just plain like loot, and the game
> designer who doesn't cater will play his creation alone.
>
> When I startd coding Oangband, Zangband was pretty much the only
> game in town. It looked to do to Angband what Angband did to Moria -
> deliver more coolness, and damn the torpedos. But there were a few
> serious game design problems that Topi, for all his genius, was not only
> not solving but actively exacerbating.
>
> Among them was what become known as "the endless loads of crap"
> problem. In 1998, to the best of my knowledge, there was no variant
> which did anything about objects that Angband did not except to throw
> more of them at the player. This was, even back then, leading to a
> growing player revolt that led, eventually, to mass ID and
> autosquelching.
Your history misses one critical moment, that I think came after Angband
shoveled loads of artifacts on top of Moria: the introduction of floor
stacking.
A lack of floor stacking used to be an automatic form of squelching,
destroying plenty of non-artifacts to reduce the piles. (I never played
Angband from those days; I'm just regurgitating what I've seen mentioned
on this group before, so go easy on me if I'm wrong here).
If you hate that some players feel squelching is necessary, I think you
should consider getting rid of floor stacking as your first step. I'd
see about trying it in ToME, but ToME's already fully loaded with a very
featureful automatizer and good mass identify, so it's really too late to
bother.
--
Neil Stevens - ne...@hakubi.us
'A republic, if you can keep it.' -- Benjamin Franklin
Billy Bissette
news:d7m4mo$1gks$1...@news.vol.cz:
> On 2005-06-01 07:40:49, "Leon Marrick" <inv...@runegold.org> wrote:
>
>> snip>
>
> See, I never understood the arguement for item squelching at all.
> IMO, part of the fun of *bands is figuring out how to ration ID out on
> all of the supposed "junk" that you get. For spellcasters, obviously
> it's not a big deal, but for Warriors and classes similar to warriors,
> this poses an interesting challenge; at least until you find that rare
> rod of perception.
Though one of the easier ways to deal with rationing ID is to
simply destroy various brands of items on sight. Which goes right back
to the idea of autosquelching as an assist.
> And I agree with the attitude of finding uses for items that are
> seemingly useless. From the rare feedback that I do receive on my
> variant, I've seen some quite ingenious methods utilized while playing
> that don't occur in other *bands.
Angband isn't really designed for everything to be useful though.
It gives you many more items than you can carry, which results in
players building a fairly static kit with a few open slots. Of those
open slots, they can carry a few pick-up items, but no where near what
they will generate on a level. And thus those slots end up holding
either high resale items or certain useful pickups and anything that
doesn't fit that catagory gets destroyed. At least destroyed after
something more useful is found, and it isn't hard to fill those open
slots entirely long before you clear a level as you go downwards, so
you fairly quickly get into the destruction practice.
In Sang, I find myself leaving plenty of semi-useful items behind
if there isn't a nearby monster to throw them at. Even throwing potions
and such isn't really "optimal" play, I just do it to keep a bit of
exercise in throwing and because I feel kind of guilty leaving them
there on the ground. (It isn't optimal because anything that a potion
actually works on is something that I could kill easily enough without
bothering. And anything a potion would actually aid on, the potion
tends to not affect.)
I wouldn't miss an absence of various negative potions despite their
benefits when used or thrown, because they don't really help. I'll
carry one as filler until something better is found or until the next
monster is found, but I wouldn't miss them if they were gone entirely.
Nor would I miss things like scrolls of the sea, forest, or magma,
which I almost never use as they are more hassle than aid to my play
style. I might carry one until I need the space for something (darn
near anything) better. And depending on character skills, I might
destroy things like staves of detect evil on sight (though with
different skill sets I might be happy to find one.)
Billy Bissette
news:pan.2005.06.02....@hakubi.us:
> Your history misses one critical moment, that I think came after
> Angband shoveled loads of artifacts on top of Moria: the introduction
> of floor stacking.
>
> A lack of floor stacking used to be an automatic form of squelching,
> destroying plenty of non-artifacts to reduce the piles. (I never
> played Angband from those days; I'm just regurgitating what I've seen
> mentioned on this group before, so go easy on me if I'm wrong here).
Pre-floor stacking was indeed an automatic semi-random squelching,
with protection for artifacts.
In that regard, floor stacking with autosquelch just gives the
player control over what the computer would have simply destroyed on
its own in the past.
> If you hate that some players feel squelching is necessary, I think
> you should consider getting rid of floor stacking as your first step.
> I'd see about trying it in ToME, but ToME's already fully loaded with
> a very featureful automatizer and good mass identify, so it's really
> too late to bother.
If you plan to remove floor stacking, you'll likely need to severely
curtail monster drops. As well, you'll need to consider its impact on
ranged weapon characters, who tend to leave a floor scattered with
spent ammo when dealing with either mobile creatures or crowds. You
might or might not want to try to create an intelligent automatic
squelching system as well to decide whether a new drop should replace
an old or not (but at the same time realize an intelligent system
might be abused for free item identification.)
Twisted One
for floor stacking. Replace big drops and fairly rare artifacts with
smaller drops and less rare artifacts. I.e. the odds of an item being an
artifact increase; the odds of a given drop containing one remain the
same; the drop itself shrinks. Likewise skew non-artifact item
generation in favor of useful items (at least against useless items that
are well in-depth) and useful items generally don't become rarer; drops
shrink at the expense of useless items (at least well in-depth ones).
R. Dan Henry
<mpr...@chiark.greenend.org.uk> wrote:
>twist...@gmail.invalid wrote:
>>Andrew Doull wrote:
>>> Howabout going for a monster drop system that (in Sangband terms) only drops
>>> parchments, bottles, chunks of metal, essences, treasure and (what the heck)
>>> artifacts?
>>>
>>> That way, you'd force everyone to learn forging skills or buy their equipment in
>>> the shops; however, no one would complain about getting stuff that was
>>> inappopriate for their character.
>>
>>Congratulations. You just massively nerfed spellcasters, who will now be
>>stuck with the first four books most of the game, due to how stingy the
>>BM tends to be with the deeper books.
>
>Make the dungeon spellbooks artifacts. Sorted.
That wouldn't be a bad idea anyway.
Of course, as described, you could simply boost up the prices to
compensate for being easily purchasable and put them in stores.
>>Also, most of the powerful wands, rods, staves, scrolls,
>>and potions. Stat gain will depend wholly on the BM and proceed very
>>slowly due to the inability to sell lots of junk for cash to buy the
>>potions with.
>
>Make your stats be another thing you spend experience on. Sorted.
Or allow you to make stat potions. In which case, you'd put the
necessary raw materials around "stat gain level" and the player
advances mainly as before, except after stat gain, he finds materials
he can use for various purposes, instead of just useless potions to
sell.
--
R. Dan Henry
danh...@inreach.com
Hugo Kornelis
>On 2005-06-01 07:40:49, "Leon Marrick" <inv...@runegold.org> wrote:
>
>> snip>
>
>See, I never understood the arguement for item squelching at all. IMO, part of
>the fun of *bands is figuring out how to ration ID out on all of the supposed
>"junk" that you get.
(snip)
Hi Ernest,
It appears as if you're confusing what Eddie calls "BASIC squelching"
with someting more intelligent.
Currently, my V303 warrior destroys most potions, scrolls, wands,
staves, rings, amulets, and rods on sight. He carries weapons and armor
around until pseudo-id kicks in, then destroys everything {good} and
below. Only {excelent} and {special} get ID'd.
If NPP's squelch system had been available in V303, none of this would
really change - the only effect would be that I no longer have to type
"kty" after pseudo-ID of inventory item t, or "k-ay" when walking over
an uninteresting item - the squelch mechanism would do that for me.
Best, Hugo
--
Your sig line (k) was stolen! (more)
There is a puff of smoke!
(Remove NO and SPAM to get my e-mail address)
Otto Martin
>wacky variants like Z
I would like to point out here, as I have earlier on, that the Z of today
isn't all that "wacky" anymore, though it may of course become such again
some day.
IMNAAHO, currently I would describe Z as "dehydrated", moving slowly
towards "mummified".
Otto Martin - I'll give it about two years until "dead" :-)
Billy Bissette
news:8cku91l3l2ot30p55...@4ax.com:
So who wants to make AlchemyBand? Or should it be ForgeBand?
Wait... CraftBand hasn't been used by anything has it? An entire
Angband variant dedicated to the idea of crafting various objects.
The crafting system of Sangband could be enhanced and expanded, or
a new one could be built from the ground up.
Though if you really wanted to go into a crafting system, you
could really keep the current variety of item drops if you gave
the player the ability to convert them into something else. Melting
down and reforging weapons and armor encountered. Drawing the
magic out of items that would otherwise be destroyed. Mixing potions.
Using scrolls to imbue staves. Etc.
Various generic items could be given a primary element of construction
that lends it properties like weight and durability, and perhaps
extra characteristics. Kamband did similar in the past with items
being made of random materials (so that you could find a sulpher torch
or gold boots.) Just be careful of items that have a material in
their description. Or if you want to get really fancy, have two
materials per item.
R. Dan Henry
<bai...@coastalnet.com> wrote:
> If you plan to remove floor stacking, you'll likely need to severely
>curtail monster drops.
On the contrary, if you *fail* to remove floor stacking, you need to
severely curtail monster drops. Monster drops were never revised to
take into account that all of their drops would always survive,
leading to the incredibly excessive piles of garbage seen today. Even
"less, but better" isn't all that necessary, just less. Most *bands
give out a lot of stuff too early, leading to most finds being junk
because something better was already made available.
bluetrolls
>
> That wouldn't be a bad idea anyway.
One vote from me, too. Even a non-melee mage needs exactly one copy of those
books, which makes them junk pretty fast for all classes.
Andrew Doull
> Glen Wheeler wrote:
> > I would say this falls under the category of ``obvious sarcasm''.
>
> There was nothing "obvious" about it -- and by the way, it's shift-' if
> you're still unable to find them.
>
> Radical suggestions are made in utter seriousness fairly often around
> here, and sometimes they have led to successful variants. Reducing
> equipment acquisition to stores+forging to both balance forging and
> reduce junky drops isn't, on its face, any more ridiculous than, say, O
> combat. :) But as posed, with the specific list of items generated, it
> looked likely to unbalance spellcasting and probably other aspects of
> the game -- typical with a quickie radical suggestion, and often a sign
> that it needs refinement rather than consignment to the dustbin of rgra
> history. :)
Sadly, I have to agree with Neo on this one. I was suggesting this much on the
above basis.
My last sentence about 'noone would complain about not getting the items
inappropriate for them' of course, falls into the obvious sarcasm category.
You are correct in the specific issues to do with spell casting. I'd counter
with a system that would allow you to research the spells in higher books using
essence... or allowing the higher books to be purchased more readily from the
shops... or guaranteeing them as quest rewards (for the appropriate spell
casters) in some way.
Andrew
--
Unangband L:C E+ T- R- P+ D-- G+(+) F:Sangband RL-- RLA-- W:F Q++
AI+(++) GFX++ SFX++ RN+++(+) PO++ Hp+++ Re--(+) S++ C- O* KG--
Andrew Doull
> On 02 Jun 2005 11:12:00 +0100 (BST), Martin Read
> wrote:
> >Make your stats be another thing you spend experience on. Sorted.
Un, and Heng increase the players stats 1 per level gain, which smooths the
progression. You could even make this player selectable... Sang would be a
little tricker: perhaps provide more 'breakpoints' in skills that increase your
stats.
> Or allow you to make stat potions. In which case, you'd put the
> necessary raw materials around "stat gain level" and the player
> advances mainly as before, except after stat gain, he finds materials
> he can use for various purposes, instead of just useless potions to
> sell.
>
I've always wondered why no one has added a temporary stat boost from drinking a
potion of stat, say +3-+5 to the stat.
Andrew Doull
I was going to say 'except when you get the spell book stolen' but there's not
much reason now not to make artifacts stealable... (word of destruction,
genocide, monster compaction).
Jeff Greene
"Leon Marrick" <inv...@runegold.org> wrote in message news:eNbne.44671$lQ3....@bignews5.bellsouth.net...
>
> Who's up for a debate on auto-squelching?
>
>
>
> --- "Autosquelch, why do I dislike thee?" ---
"Autosquelch, shall I compare thee to a summer's day?"
{Snip a couple well thought out paragraphs}
First, there are many different forms of autosquelch. Some go as far as actually eliminating an object set to squelch during object creation, so it never makes it to the dungeon floor, which is IMHO going a bit too far. Just so we are comparing apples to apples, the patch for vanilla which I used in NPP does not do this. It allows the player to automatically destroy items that have been identified when walked over, with an option to view them as a purple dot on the screen if the user chooses. This allows the player to avoid repeatedly type "k-{foo}". I see this as useful for things like a staff of darkness where, once identified, have little to no practical use. It also allows the player to automatically destroy items based on their quality once identified. There is little reason to do anything with a cursed dagger after a player is aware of what cursed items are. I do not view autosquelch as anything but a tool that allows the player a few keystrokes and time. I agree it should not affect the actual gameplay.
If, on a side note, the counter-argument to what I said above is that items like staves of darkness should have a practical use (maybe a chance to blind monsters, or have them lose their knowledge of where the player is), then I would agree with that being a fine ideal to strive to achieve.
>
> When we speak of auto-squelching objects, we speak of the loss of
> ways of playing the game. Rogue, Moria, and Angband are all
> object-oriented games; the types and quantities of particular objects
> that you find in the dungeon is, with your own fertile imagination, what
> opens up and makes possible diverse methods of play. A good roguelike
> game allows many effective ways of playing. A poor one allows but few.
> A high-quality interface encourages you to try new things, and makes
> many ways of playing attractive and user-friendly. A poor interface
> encourages you to ignore possible ways of playing the game, or makes
> them unfriendly or impracticable.
I sort of view autosquelch as something that merely improves the game interface. Once I have identified a potion of poison, I really don't want to be bothered with seeing it or manually destroying it again.
>
> How terrible it is to see players auto-squelching gameplay
> possibilies because the interface makes it easy to delete them, ignore
> them, to not try something new!
In NPP I tried to make it as useful as possible. All objects have 4 potential game settings, squelch, always pickup, never pickup, and default to user options. The always pickup and never pickup options are for individual items where the player would want to make exceptions to the game pickup options. A player who does not want to automatically pickup items may want to make an exception for potions of life. A player who has maxed out all their stats may not want to automatically pick up stat increase and restore potions, but may not want to destroy them either. The never_pickup option allows them to just walk over and ignore those potions, but if they get their stats drained they can always go back and drink them.
I added is an auto-inscribe feature. This is useful for items like staves of teleportation. Most players want to inscribe them so they don't accidentally teleport. They are also frequently destroyed. With auto-inscribe, a custom inscritpion can be made for any object type and inscribed when the item is identified.
>
>
>
> Among them was what become known as "the endless loads of crap"
> problem. In 1998, to the best of my knowledge, there was no variant
> which did anything about objects that Angband did not except to throw
> more of them at the player. This was, even back then, leading to a
> growing player revolt that led, eventually, to mass ID and
> autosquelching.
Starting with the NPP 04x series, NPP suffers from "the endless loads of crap" problem probably worse than any variant I know of, due to more useful and interesting monster pits, and themed levels of monsters that drop 18 items. Mass-ID is a band aid until I can re-balance the game. I am still adding major features, and after the next release I am going to stop adding new features and work on getting the balance back where it should be.
>
>
>
>
> 2. The next step was a rebalancing of monster and object levels and
> abundances. In Oangbands released by myself, and then by Bahman Rabii,
> monsters and objects were much less likely to be found well in-depth,
> and therefore less likely to be junk. Monster abundances dropped
> considerably. This effort continues: for example, in Sangband, weaker
> artifacts are unlikely to be found deep in the dungeon and low-level
> monsters drop more gold instead of (useless) objects. The next step is
> to set up minimum and maximum generation levels at which ego-items and
> artifacts are (normally) found at; no need for Orc-Slaying at '4500.
> Has anyone coded this yet? I wouldn't be surprised...
It is coming in NPP; adding maximum depths and rarities for items, instead of just having mimimum depths. First I just need to get all the major features in there that I want, or I will be re-balancing this every release.
[Snip a bunch of paragraphs I agree with, and are on the list of features to put in NPP]
>
>
> --- Wrap-up ("about time!") ---
>
> Gentle reader, I ask you: Is auto-squelching the only way? Surely
> it is a challenge to us, and not a fixed and final solution. To me,
> speaking only for myself and my own little variant, the choice has
> always been clear: Give up and port auto-squelch, or keep working to
> improve the interface and deepen the game. For better or worse, I have
> and will attempt the latter. With what success? Only you can judge.
>
What's wrong with both? A routine that automatically destroys unwanted objects will always have some use. In an ideal game, items are useful to several classes but not all classes, and the list of useful items should vary for each race/class. What is wrong with a person playing a warrior wanting to automatically destroy spellbooks when they walk over them? Why would a mage want a 30 pound {average} weapon? I don't think it is a bad thing to save those players a couple keystrokes.
--
-Jeff
replace the ".spam"s with comcast.net to reply
Author of NPPAngband. Check it out at:
http://home.comcast.net/~nppangband/
Christophe Cavalaria
> Atriel <atri...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>>wacky variants like Z
>
> I would like to point out here, as I have earlier on, that the Z of today
> isn't all that "wacky" anymore, though it may of course become such again
> some day.
> IMNAAHO, currently I would describe Z as "dehydrated", moving slowly
> towards "mummified".
>
>
> Otto Martin - I'll give it about two years until "dead" :-)
Hey, there have been a lot of cvs commit the last few days. It seems a
resurection is in the works :)
R. Dan Henry
<andre...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>On 2005-06-02 22:14:17, R. Dan Henry <danh...@inreach.com> wrote:
>I've always wondered why no one has added a temporary stat boost from drinking a
>potion of stat, say +3-+5 to the stat.
I've already got it halfway done in Dangband. Just have to make the
actual boosting happen, instead of just setting timers.
Billy Bissette
news:d7p8mn$13mr$1...@news.vol.cz:
> I was going to say 'except when you get the spell book stolen' but
> there's not much reason now not to make artifacts stealable... (word
> of destruction, genocide, monster compaction).
There is one reason to not make spellbooks stealable artifacts,
the whole unique aspect of artifacts. Anyone who is worried about
their spellbook currently being stolen can simply carry more than
one copy. If it is an artifact, then they'll only have one ever
available. Not to mention that you can afford to write off losing
a spellbook currently, such as if it is stolen in a very nasty and
deadly area.
Bahman Rabii
Well stated. Let me add a few specific ideas that I have either used
or will use in more recent versions of Oangband.
There are *far* too many negative items are dropped in Angband and
most variants. After the first Potion of Ugliness, they add nothing
to the game - items like that should be rare enough that they are only
see 5-6 in an average winning game. An added problem is that many
weak negative types - especially potions, scrolls, and rings - are
clusted at extremely low level. Why should 7 of my first 9 potions be
cursed? Let's spread these things more evenly over the first 25% of
the game.
Similarly, cursed weapons and armor are fairly pointless once ID or
pseudo-ID become cheap. Let's turn them down as well.
Certain items types are "once per game" items, notably non-pval,
non-combat rings and amulets. Let's get fewer of these. Maybe the
stores should have an extremely overpriced stock of "special survival
items" like rings of free action, early dungeon books, etc. Unlike
the Black Market these things would be consistently stocked, but they
would be even more expensive than the BM. In exchange, they would be
much more rare as drops. There could be a level limit (20?) for
purchasing these items - the are kept in the "back room" where only
the big kids get to shop.
The above mechanic could be extended to things like Scrolls of
*Identify*, which are too valuable to be sold in the regular store
inventory, but which are not predictable enough as drops.
Monsters currently have only have a fairly gross tuning of drops: they
get some range of number of drops, and the may get the "good" or
"great" flags. We could add a monster race field for quality instead
- an offset to the effect level of the drop. Monsters that get
boosted get smaller drops. An AMHD in Oangband 0.7.0 gets 4-8 items.
Why not 2-3 items at +10 levels? Or even 0-2 items at +15 or +20
levels?
--
Bahman Rabii
Bahman Rabii
> What's wrong with both? A routine that automatically destroys unwanted objects will always have some use. In an ideal game, items are useful to several classes but not all classes, and the list of useful items should vary for each race/class. What is wrong with a person playing a warrior wanting to automatically destroy spellbooks when they walk over them? Why would a mage want a 30 pound {average} weapon? I don't think it is a bad thing to save those players a couple keystrokes.
The problem is that going too far with squelching turns what should be
a "band-aid" solution into a replacement for a real fix. I was very
hesitant to put any form of squelching in Oangband. I don't want it
too become too accepted as a "fix", and I don't want to put one moment
more effort into developing it - that effort should be spent on
dealing with the root problem.
Once the real problem is fixed and squelching is more of a minor
convenience, I will be happy to adopt any convenience features that
make it nice and usable.
--
Bahman Rabii
Timo Pietilä
>>>Make the dungeon spellbooks artifacts. Sorted.
> One vote from me, too. Even a non-melee mage needs exactly one copy of those
> books, which makes them junk pretty fast for all classes.
There is one problem. You will _need_ those books if you are playing
spellcaster. You don't need any of the other particular artifact. If you
play preserve off and get a GCV with those books in too dangerous
monsters that would ruin the rest of your game.
Losing Ringil or even The One Ring is not a problem. Losing Ethereal
Openings or Godly Insights or Resistances or Mordenkainens would be.
Timo Pietilä
Eddie Grove
> "Jeff Greene" <nppan...@spam.spam.spam.spam,> writes:
>
>> What's wrong with both? A routine that automatically destroys unwanted objects will always have some use. In an ideal game, items are useful to several classes but not all classes, and the list of useful items should vary for each race/class. What is wrong with a person playing a warrior wanting to automatically destroy spellbooks when they walk over them? Why would a mage want a 30 pound {average} weapon? I don't think it is a bad thing to save those players a couple keystrokes.
>
> The problem is that going too far with squelching turns what should be
> a "band-aid" solution into a replacement for a real fix. I was very
> hesitant to put any form of squelching in Oangband. I don't want it
> too become too accepted as a "fix", and I don't want to put one moment
> more effort into developing it - that effort should be spent on
> dealing with the root problem.
You wouldn't have to spend any significant amount of time. Ask for
volunteers, and I bet you'll get multiple offers from people who would
be happy to code squelching for you. The time you would spend would be
less than the time you spend responding to jerks like me in this group.
> Once the real problem is fixed and squelching is more of a minor
> convenience, I will be happy to adopt any convenience features that
> make it nice and usable.
>
> --
> Bahman Rabii
I've read variations on that argument from assorted people for years.
I just don't buy it.
P: Doctor, doctor, my arm is bleeding!
D: That's a nasty cut, you need stitches.
P: May I have some stitches?
D: Sorry, I haven't actually invented stitches yet.
P: Would you put a band-aid on it?
D: I too busy inventing stitches to give you a band-aid.
P: What about letting an assistant give me a band-aid?
D: I wouldn't trust an assistant to do it right.
P: When will the stitches be ready?
D: Maybe in a year or two. You'll just have to bleed until then.
P: Wouldn't a band-aid be better than nothing?
D: Then you wouldn't pester me, and I wouldn't invent the stitches.
After I give you the stitches, then you can ask for a band-aid.
That's how it sounds to me, anyway.
Eddie
Bahman Rabii
Eddie,
To be fair, I *did* implement a form perfectly functional verion of
squelching several versions ago. I also reduced monster drops by
about 35% already with a corresponding increase in quality. The next
release will have another major reduction in drops using some of the
ideas I posted in this thread and perhaps some Sangband ideas as well.
It is possible to extend any argument to absurdity as you have done
below. In fact, I would claim that I have that I have given
reasonable attention to both applying the band-aid and developing the
stitches.
- Bahman
Eddie Grove <eddie...@hot.NOSPAM.mail.com> writes:
> I've read variations on that argument from assorted people for years.
> I just don't buy it.
>
>
> P: Doctor, doctor, my arm is bleeding!
> D: That's a nasty cut, you need stitches.
>
> P: May I have some stitches?
> D: Sorry, I haven't actually invented stitches yet.
>
> P: Would you put a band-aid on it?
> D: I too busy inventing stitches to give you a band-aid.
>
> P: What about letting an assistant give me a band-aid?
> D: I wouldn't trust an assistant to do it right.
>
> P: When will the stitches be ready?
> D: Maybe in a year or two. You'll just have to bleed until then.
>
> P: Wouldn't a band-aid be better than nothing?
> D: Then you wouldn't pester me, and I wouldn't invent the stitches.
> After I give you the stitches, then you can ask for a band-aid.
>
>
> That's how it sounds to me, anyway.
>
>
> Eddie
--
Bahman Rabii
Eddie Grove
> Eddie,
>
> To be fair, I *did* implement a form perfectly functional verion of
> squelching several versions ago. I also reduced monster drops by
> about 35% already with a corresponding increase in quality. The next
> release will have another major reduction in drops using some of the
> ideas I posted in this thread and perhaps some Sangband ideas as well.
Earlier, I explained why what I called "Basic Squelching" is a good
thing. If you and Leon would get behind it, then the rest of us
might be able to convince Robert to put it into Vanilla, but that
isn't going to happen while you two publicly oppose the idea.
> It is possible to extend any argument to absurdity as you have done
See -- this is scary -- IMO I didn't "extend" anything. The analogy
seems frightfully accurate to me. I truly find your arguments against
squelching just as absurd as you found my analogy.
> below. In fact, I would claim that I have that I have given
> reasonable attention to both applying the band-aid and developing the
> stitches.
>
> - Bahman
To be fair, you did implement squelching(*). That's not the problem.
The problem is that when you argue against squelching in this forum,
you do harm to those who would be happier with the best band-aid
available today, but do not get it.
Eddie
(*) a form I find too annoying to use, but maybe that's just me and J
pete mack
Bahman Rabii wrote:
>
> Certain items types are "once per game" items, notably non-pval,
> non-combat rings and amulets. Let's get fewer of these. Maybe the
> stores should have an extremely overpriced stock of "special survival
> items" like rings of free action, early dungeon books, etc. Unlike
> the Black Market these things would be consistently stocked, but they
> would be even more expensive than the BM. In exchange, they would be
> much more rare as drops. There could be a level limit (20?) for
> purchasing these items - the are kept in the "back room" where only
> the big kids get to shop.
I strongly disagree with this. The way these objects work now is:
Almost never available until just a little after you begin to need
them. Very common thereafter. This design actively encourages diving.
What you describe is exactly what is wrong with NPP: books are
shallow, but rare, and are avialable in the store. This encourages
people to scum for loot to buy books, rather than diving to a depth
where they are guaranteed. Since thy are rare, there is no guaranteed
depth. Putting a max depth on such things might make some sense. But
not changing the basic model.
Also, they aren't all actually once per game. I often use more than
one ring of Poison Resist or Ring of See Invisible during a game. These
are swap items, and frequently get destroyed, or left behind (SI) to
carry better loot.
Anyway, you are making mountains out of mole-hills. It's not the
special items that are annoying; these are obvious and easy to avoid.
It's all the junk weapons and armor that you have to paw through for
that one good object.
Bahman Rabii
> Bahman Rabii wrote:
>
> >
> > Certain items types are "once per game" items, notably non-pval,
> > non-combat rings and amulets. Let's get fewer of these. Maybe the
<SNIP> Idea about high priced store availablity for some these items.
> I strongly disagree with this. The way these objects work now is:
<SNIP reasonable criticism>
OK fair enough. That's why I like getting feedback on these ideas. I
may yet find a good use for the "back room" idea, though.
> Also, they aren't all actually once per game. I often use more than
> one ring of Poison Resist or Ring of See Invisible during a game. These
> are swap items, and frequently get destroyed, or left behind (SI) to
> carry better loot.
Yes, but I am not suggesting these things be strictly *one* per game.
Currently, you might find hundreds of Rings of See Invisible. That is
just too many.
> Anyway, you are making mountains out of mole-hills. It's not the
> special items that are annoying; these are obvious and easy to avoid.
> It's all the junk weapons and armor that you have to paw through for
> that one good object.
Now I disagree. Special items are a big enough problem to be
annoying. Maybe today it is masked by the excess of weapons and
armor; once the they are fixed, special items will still need a fix.
--
Bahman Rabii
Bahman Rabii
Eddie Grove <eddie...@hot.NOSPAM.mail.com> writes:
> Earlier, I explained why what I called "Basic Squelching" is a good
> thing. If you and Leon would get behind it, then the rest of us
> might be able to convince Robert to put it into Vanilla, but that
> isn't going to happen while you two publicly oppose the idea.
Come on. Robert knows and understand both sides of this argument and
is perfectly capable of making his own decisions based on the merits.
For what it is worth, I do feel that *if* item generation is not to be
fundamentally changed in Angband, then autosquelching would be an
improvement.
--
Bahman Rabii
Timo Pietilä
> For what it is worth, I do feel that *if* item generation is not to be
> fundamentally changed in Angband, then autosquelching would be an
> improvement.
That's the point we need to discuss, not wether or not squelching is a
good thing or not.
Squelch is a good thing no matter how well we fine-tune item generation
as long as it just does automatically what player could do himself and
nothing more. *if* squelch automatically removes items before player has
even seen them then it is bad thing and affects game balance.
Timo Pietilä
Bahman Rabii
> Squelch is a good thing no matter how well we fine-tune item
> generation as long as it just does automatically what player could do
> himself and nothing more. *if* squelch automatically removes items
> before player has even seen them then it is bad thing and affects game
> balance.
Yes and no. With perfect item generation, the benefit is
diminishingly small. At that point the whole argument is a little
pointless, but OK... why not.
With bad item generation, squelch is an ugly kludge. Most importantly
it makes the less friendly to beginners - why should someone have to
learn to use this annoying and hackish tool for the game to be
playable?
--
Bahman Rabii
Timo Pietilä
> Timo Pietilä <timo.p...@helsinki.fi> writes:
>
>>Squelch is a good thing no matter how well we fine-tune item
>>generation as long as it just does automatically what player could do
>>himself and nothing more.
>
> diminishingly small. At that point the whole argument is a little
> pointless, but OK... why not.
Item generation should adjust to characters current equipment in order
to be so good that squelching isn't useful. That is pretty obviously bad
thing. I don't think we can do that kind of item generation without
losing much of the game feeling. Players are different as are
characters. Some like to go fast some slow. Those need different tactics
and different equipment.
Timo Pietilä
Christophe Cavalaria
Why, yes we can do that somewhat and still keep the game feeling. Remember,
there is one var in the character that we can use to better tune the item
generation : it's the current dungeon level :)
Courtney Campbell
Bahman Rabii <bah...@oangband.com> wrote:
Isn't Robert rather fameous for his response:
"How many people have to support an idea for it to make it into [V]?"
Robert's reply,
"One. Me."
I thought that was why he was the right person for the job.
-Campbell
Andrew Doull
> Andrew Doull wrote in
Given that monsters now carry stealable objects in their inventory - if you had
an artifact stolen, its now possible to track the monster down and recover it.
The only way of losing the artifact is the number of situations that delete a
monster - namely destruction, genocide, monster compaction.
Therefore, the game downside of now allowing artifacts to be stealable isn't
huge - particularly in Sangband, where the reduced number of monsters monsters
makes monster compaction much less likely.
Garrie Irons
news:1117841704.88a00b6d59641767efbbe1ce6f837208@teranews...
>
> Well stated. Let me add a few specific ideas that I have either used
> or will use in more recent versions of Oangband.
>
> Similarly, cursed weapons and armor are fairly pointless once ID or
> pseudo-ID become cheap. Let's turn them down as well.
>
cursed weapons should be of two varieties:
1. the weapon was "always" cursed and the fact the enemy was using a cursed
weapon may
have helped you kill the enemy. We'll never know. ;)
2. The enemy you just killed, cursed his weapon somehow.
cursed weapons resulting from 1 would most likely occur at shallow levels
because
anyone weilding a cursed weapon would die early.
cursed items resultinf from 2 would most likely occur at deep levels because
you need
to be fairly powerful to invoke a curse.
so cursed weapons should be **generated** all the way from 0' to maxdepth
(varient specific).
<<SNIP>>
I think that drops from monsters should be more themed. archer kobolds
should drop arrows
and bows, kobold shamen should drop weak wands and spellbooks.
but hey that's as logical as light hounds radiating light & being visible to
non-infravision @'s... :)
> --
> Bahman Rabii
--
Garrie
A(3.0.0) CD "Detritus" H W 33 DL1750' A++ R+ Sp- W:Defender Tridend
A W H- D- c-- f- PV++ s d+ P++ M+ C- S+ I !So B-- ac- SQ? !V
bluetrolls
<timo.p...@helsinki.fi> wrote:
> Losing Ringil or even The One Ring is not a problem. Losing Ethereal
> Openings or Godly Insights or Resistances or Mordenkainens would be.
Hmmm, what about bookless artifactless hobbit mages? Do they absolutely need
these books, or can handle it with alternative solutions? In other words, are
these books essential, or just a convenience?
Resistances would be the only book on which I semi-agree. But that points more
to lack of potions of resistance (NPP style), rather than an absolute
necessity.
One side note, imho books are way to heavy. 3 pounds for a book that has less
than 10 spell descriptions in it?! I would exepct three pounds maybe for a
treaty on quantum electrodynamics, not 'magic for beginners'. Give the latter
0.5 pounds, at most. Gameplay wise, town books have a lot of useful spells.
Giving an options to stack more town books would reduce the need for dungeon
books, which are so sought after moslty for the undestructable attribute.
Timo Pietilä
> On 2005-06-04 01:42:10, =?ISO-8859-15?Q?Timo_Pietilä?=
> <timo.p...@helsinki.fi> wrote:
>
>>Losing Ringil or even The One Ring is not a problem. Losing Ethereal
>>Openings or Godly Insights or Resistances or Mordenkainens would be.
>
> Hmmm, what about bookless artifactless hobbit mages? Do they absolutely need
> these books, or can handle it with alternative solutions? In other words, are
> these books essential, or just a convenience?
For ordinary spellcaster they are. There are also spell-only mage
winners. _Everything_ is just luxury as long as you can get speed, HP
and resistances needed for situation at hand. You can play spellcaster
like if it were a warrior, but that is a challenge-game.
> Resistances would be the only book on which I semi-agree. But that points more
> to lack of potions of resistance (NPP style), rather than an absolute
> necessity.
For priest Godly Insights is probably the most important book in game.
If you have that you can dump first town book completely. Etheral
Openings comes very close behind (tele other, blink). Greater healing
-spells are in dungeon books and Wrath of God is also very useful for
priest.
Mages have a lot less useful dungeon books.
> One side note, imho books are way to heavy. 3 pounds for a book that has less
> than 10 spell descriptions in it?! I would exepct three pounds maybe for a
> treaty on quantum electrodynamics, not 'magic for beginners'.
<out of the hat-explanation>
Those spells cannot be contained in ordinary paper and in order to
understand what you need to do you need to read a lot.
</out of the hat -explanation>
> Give the latter
> 0.5 pounds, at most. Gameplay wise, town books have a lot of useful spells.
> Giving an options to stack more town books would reduce the need for dungeon
> books, which are so sought after moslty for the undestructable attribute.
I couldn't care less about undestructable attribute if those books were
not so rare. Spells in them are importance.
Timo Pietilä
Hugo Kornelis
(snip)
> Maybe the
>stores should have an extremely overpriced stock of "special survival
>items" like rings of free action, early dungeon books, etc. Unlike
>the Black Market these things would be consistently stocked, but they
>would be even more expensive than the BM. In exchange, they would be
>much more rare as drops. There could be a level limit (20?) for
>purchasing these items - the are kept in the "back room" where only
>the big kids get to shop.
Hi Bahman,
If they are extrmeely overpriced, then there is no reason to put a level
limit on the "back room" - lower level chars won't have the gold to buy
there anyway.
(And without the level limit, this sounds remarkably close to some of
NPP's store services).
Best, Hugo
--
Your sig line (k) was stolen! (more)
There is a puff of smoke!
(Remove NO and SPAM to get my e-mail address)
bluetrolls
<timo.p...@helsinki.fi> wrote:
Disclaimer: I only played recently ranger & paladin, no pure spell-caster. I
played pure-spellcasters many moons ago (2.7?, 2.9?), but I rapidly figured out
that, when it counts most, i.e. big uniques, they turn into some sort of weak
warrior. I have avoided them since.
> _Everything_ is just luxury
Totally agree. Then maybe spell books deserve artifact status. Loose one of
them, have a harder time :-)
> You can play spellcaster like if it were a warrior, but that is a challenge-game.
My point is that you risk loosing one of the artifact books only in very adverse
circumstances. For instance, playing preserve off, which is some sort of
challenge-game already.
> Mages have a lot less useful dungeon books.
I can't really argue, as I have no experience. All I know is that, with ranger &
palladin I only carried 2 out of 4 dungeon books to save slots & weight, and
only one spell out of each book.
> Those spells cannot be contained in ordinary paper and in order to
> understand what you need to do you need to read a lot.
> I couldn't care less about undestructable attribute if those books were
> not so rare. Spells in them are importance.
I care because I can sometime dump a pile of 3-4 town books to keep the dungeon
one(s), saving some weight. As inventory management is the real Angband
challenge, I rate that pretty high in usefullness.
Timo Pietilä
> On 2005-06-04 23:25:18, =?ISO-8859-15?Q?Timo_Pietilä?=
> <timo.p...@helsinki.fi> wrote:
>
> Disclaimer: I only played recently ranger & paladin, no pure spell-caster. I
> played pure-spellcasters many moons ago (2.7?, 2.9?), but I rapidly figured out
> that, when it counts most, i.e. big uniques, they turn into some sort of weak
> warrior. I have avoided them since.
Try new 3.0.5 (or 3.0.6). Mage spells have been redesigned quite
thoroughly. You can now play spell-only mage quite easily.
>>_Everything_ is just luxury
>
> Totally agree. Then maybe spell books deserve artifact status. Loose one of
> them, have a harder time :-)
Problem is that there is no alternative for them. Everything else has.
You can have ego-weapons/armor and plenty of selection in artifacts. You
do not have ego-dungeon books.
Lose one, press shift-Q @.
Losing Godly Insights while playing priest is same as losing GCV with
only white icky things and The One, Bladeturner, Ringil and Feanor.
Actually worse, because you could still get other Power rings, PDSM,
Deathwreaker, BoS +10 and so on, but you could not get another Godly
Insigts.
Timo Pietilä
Billy Bissette
news:d7udrg$2e7d$1...@news.vol.cz:
> On 2005-06-04 23:25:18, =?ISO-8859-15?Q?Timo_Pietilä?=
> <timo.p...@helsinki.fi> wrote:
>
>> You can play spellcaster like if it were a warrior, but that is a
>> challenge-game.
>
> My point is that you risk loosing one of the artifact books only in
> very adverse circumstances. For instance, playing preserve off, which
> is some sort of challenge-game already.
There is a difference between a spellcaster not getting or losing
one of their four dungeon books and a warrior not getting or losing
one of the large number of available artifact weapons.
The warrior isn't particularly hurt, because there are several
entirely feasible alternatives at any point of the game. Late game,
there are still various artifacts that are competative. Mid and
early game have a variety of ego weapons thrown into the mix, that
sometimes even outclass the available artifacts.
Maybe if you add ego spellbooks, that carry some but not all of the
spells carried by the artifact spellbooks, or carry different
combinations of spells. Then you wouldn't be crippled if the
artifact version fo some reason neither showed or was lost (and if
you make them stealable, losing them is more likely than some think,
as you could easily lose the book that has the spells you need to
get that book back.)
Nick
> bluetrolls wrote:
> > One side note, imho books are way to heavy. 3 pounds for a book that has less
> > than 10 spell descriptions in it?! I would exepct three pounds maybe for a
> > treaty on quantum electrodynamics, not 'magic for beginners'.
>
> <out of the hat-explanation>
>
> Those spells cannot be contained in ordinary paper and in order to
> understand what you need to do you need to read a lot.
>
> </out of the hat -explanation>
Absolutely. Your quantum electrodynamics book may have some
speculation on quantum teleportation - 'Magic for Beginners' has a
fully implemented and practical solution (Phase Door), and that's just
one spell.
Plus those leather covers are heavy :)
Nick.
R. Dan Henry
<bluet...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>One side note, imho books are way to heavy. 3 pounds for a book that has less
>than 10 spell descriptions in it?!
Well, half of the book is taken up with the licensing agreement. If it
were iron-clad, can you imagine the lawsuits the publishers would
face?
R. Dan Henry
<bluet...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>One side note, imho books are way to heavy. 3 pounds for a book that has less
>than 10 spell descriptions in it?!
Well, half of the book is taken up with the licensing agreement. If it
weren't iron-clad, can you imagine the lawsuits the publishers would
Juho Schultz
>
> One side note, imho books are way to heavy. 3 pounds for a book that has less
> than 10 spell descriptions in it?! I would exepct three pounds maybe for a
> treaty on quantum electrodynamics, not 'magic for beginners'.
I think it like this: a Scroll contains the description of one spell.
Magic for Beginners explains how a set of spells work.
The scroll contains "E = mc**2" and some other equations,
the book is "Gravitation and Spacetime" by Ohanian & Ruffini
(which is in the three-pound class.)
Of course my experience on magic is quite limited...
> Gameplay wise, town books have a lot of useful spells.
> Giving an options to stack more town books would reduce the need for dungeon
> books, which are so sought after moslty for the undestructable attribute.
>
Gameplay wise, also dungeon books have useful spells.
Try a mage with and without dungeon books and you'll see.
bluetrolls
<timo.p...@helsinki.fi> wrote:
> Lose one, press shift-Q @.
I have a macro for that one ;-)
Werner Bär
"bluetrolls" <bluet...@yahoo.com> schrieb...
> Disclaimer: I only played recently ranger & paladin, no pure spell-caster. I
> played pure-spellcasters many moons ago (2.7?, 2.9?), but I rapidly figured out
> that, when it counts most, i.e. big uniques, they turn into some sort of weak
> warrior. I have avoided them since.
When Timo wrote 'pure spellcaster', he didn't just mean playing a mage.
He talked about mages that don't use melee or ranged weapon.
That mages surely aren't 'weak warriors'
It is doable playing spell-only mages. I had 4 winners in V 2.9.x,
without using invulnerability. But you needed to find the last spellbook
to be able to kill the strongest uniques.
Werner.
bluetrolls
> Maybe if you add ego spellbooks, that carry some but not all of the
> spells carried by the artifact spellbooks, or carry different
> combinations of spells. Then you wouldn't be crippled if the
> artifact version fo some reason neither showed or was lost (and if
> you make them stealable, losing them is more likely than some think,
> as you could easily lose the book that has the spells you need to
> get that book back.)
That is only going to increase the amount of spell-casting related junk. I feel
sort of let down when after a long and dangerous fight with the Tarrasque (for
instance) 1/4 to 1/3 of the loot is composed of various spell books that are
99.9999% useless for whatever class my character would happen to play,
including pure spell casters. Perhaps what I'm looking for is only removing the
'good' attribute of dungeon spell-books. At least I will not get spammed with
junk 99.9999% of the time when I expect something that might have some use and
I don't have already.
Billy Bissette
news:d81llh$23p0$1...@news.vol.cz:
> At least I will not get spammed with junk 99.9999% of the
> time when I expect something that might have some use and I don't have
> already.
You're going to get junk the majority of the time anyway. Anything
that isn't better than what you already have is bordering on junk, and
you certainly aren't going to swap to new-found equipment after every
pile of loot is inspected.
Which is one of the general complaints of item generation, but not
necessarily a good reason to change spell books to artifacts.
Paul Murray
>> Totally agree. Then maybe spell books deserve artifact status. Loose one of
>> them, have a harder time :-)
> Problem is that there is no alternative for them. Everything else has.
> You can have ego-weapons/armor and plenty of selection in artifacts. You
> do not have ego-dungeon books.
>
> Lose one, press shift-Q @.
>
> Losing Godly Insights while playing priest is same as losing GCV with
> only white icky things and The One, Bladeturner, Ringil and Feanor.
> Actually worse, because you could still get other Power rings, PDSM,
> Deathwreaker, BoS +10 and so on, but you could not get another Godly
> Insigts.
What would work is *random* artifact spellbooks.
Unlimited number of possible spellbooks generated, with a random selection
of spells from the current list. Then you could have so-so books, with
middling spells, or a truely godly books with good spells from several
normal books. This could be biased by level generated, so that as you
explore further you find better and better books.
Not being able to gaurantee finding any specific spell might force different
approaches, and make previously marginal spells useful.
Going further, you could have the spells themselves be random. So you could
have heal X amount, or (bolt/beam/ball) of (element) for X damage.
pete mack
I don't think the current model is as broken as has been made out.
Keep the books very common at level, and just a few more for flavor and
loss once you are well passed the level. And it sounds like Leon has
the problem well in hand. Elaborate schemes are unnecessary. (Have you
seen the code? It's already very complex.)
And occasionally finding books early is ... nice. That won't happen
anymore if the book is made an artifact. On the other hand, diving for
Godly Insights and then *not finding it because even common artifacts
are rare* would almost certainly be lethal.
Billy Bissette
news:7P1pe.322676$CV1.1...@fe02.news.easynews.com:
> What would work is *random* artifact spellbooks.
> Unlimited number of possible spellbooks generated, with a random
> selection of spells from the current list. Then you could have so-so
> books, with middling spells, or a truely godly books with good spells
> from several normal books.
Ego spellbooks would probably be more fitting for random.
My own mention earlier was the idea that if the dungeon books were
made artifacts, then there should be ego books of random spells.
Then you might find what you need early in an ego book. If really
lucky, you might find an ego book that had exactly what you wanted
out of two artifacts, but wouldn't have the same degree of protection
to itself. You would also have a fallback if you for some reason
either lose or just happen to never find the artifact books.
For people that don't want to see more books, their creation could
be limited to the appropriate spellcasters, or just appearing at a
greatly reduced rate for others. Still would leave an issue for any
system like Sang where the player can dabble or even delay with
spellcasting. (Even in Sang though there are some choices that
can eventually exclude certain options though.)
> This could be biased by level generated, so
> that as you explore further you find better and better books.
> Not being able to gaurantee finding any specific spell might force
> different approaches, and make previously marginal spells useful.
> Going further, you could have the spells themselves be random. So you
> could have heal X amount, or (bolt/beam/ball) of (element) for X
> damage.
Wasn't there a varient in the past that had randomized spells?
Kamband perhaps? Maybe for a chaos warrior (was that Zang?)? I
forget. People were trying all sorts of wonky things there to see
what worked and what didn't.
If you restrain the generation too much, you get something fairly
generic and lose preset coherence. But if you don't restrict it, you
get things like Sang's armor forging where bad luck gets you worse than
the prebuilts but good luck can get you so much better than the
prebuilts.
Atriel
> What would work is *random* artifact spellbooks.
> Unlimited number of possible spellbooks generated, with a random selection
> of spells from the current list. Then you could have so-so books, with
> middling spells, or a truely godly books with good spells from several
> normal books. This could be biased by level generated, so that as you
> explore further you find better and better books.
> Not being able to gaurantee finding any specific spell might force different
> approaches, and make previously marginal spells useful.
> Going further, you could have the spells themselves be random. So you could
> have heal X amount, or (bolt/beam/ball) of (element) for X damage.
Damn man
you just had one of the best ideas i扉e read for a long time
I think that the low books should be in town....
but spells from books 5-9 would come in the dungeon, in
random books with random names containing random spells...
so that there could be a book X with Mana Storm,
Word of Recall and Rune of Warding for example...
--
I will hold the candle till it burns up my arm.
I'll keep taking punches until their will grows tired.
I will stare the sun down until my eyes go blind.
I won't change direction and I won't change my mind...
How much difference does it make?
bluetrolls
> bluetrolls wrote in
Not quite. When monster description says 'drops x *good* objects' I expect
something that might be useful. Like that dagger of extra attacks (+25,+25) +2.
Or RoS +20. Books cannot bring any upgrade whatsoever.
Timo Pietilä
> On 2005-06-06 17:59:36, Billy Bissette <bai...@coastalnet.com> wrote:
>
>>bluetrolls wrote in
>>news:d81llh$23p0$1...@news.vol.cz:
>>
>>>At least I will not get spammed with junk 99.9999% of the
>>>time when I expect something that might have some use and I don't have
>>>already.
>>
>>You're going to get junk the majority of the time anyway. Anything
>>that isn't better than what you already have is bordering on junk, and
>>Which is one of the general complaints of item generation, but not
>>necessarily a good reason to change spell books to artifacts.
>
> Not quite. When monster description says 'drops x *good* objects' I expect
> something that might be useful. Like that dagger of extra attacks (+25,+25) +2.
> Or RoS +20. Books cannot bring any upgrade whatsoever.
Unless you don't have that book, of course. Or have DEX way below 18/150
and are worried about theft.
"good" objects contain currently dagger (+1,+1) and that is definitely
junk. Unless you rewrite entire item generation to inclue some sort of
"useful"-flag you will get a lot of junk from "good" drops. Books are
pretty excellent from "good" drops. If nothing else they are worth lot
of money and they stack so you can collect them like potions.
Timo Pietilä