yeah the messages suck :/
Although, try attacking Linaniil and you'll see what the message meant about impending doom ! :>
Some feedback from an angband dev
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Re: Some feedback from an angband dev
[tome] joylove: You can't just release an expansion like one would release a Kraken XD
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[tome] phantomfrettchen: your ability not to tease anyone is simply stunning
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[tome] phantomfrettchen: your ability not to tease anyone is simply stunning
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Zizzo
- Sher'Tul Godslayer
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Re: Some feedback from an angband dev
I've got an addon for that.greycat wrote:In fact, I also dislike the feature where you jump down to the last level of the tier 1 zones because they're "too easy".
"Blessed are the yeeks, for they shall inherit Arda..."
Re: Some feedback from an angband dev
Back on the topic of bugs. This is not quite a bug, it is more like a feature that has bad unintended consequences. This has happened twice to me and is worth commenting on. I was wandering across the game map and came across one of those events. Unfortunately, I was wandering using hjklyubn and when the event triggered I had already pressed the next key. Both times it immediately dismissed the prompt, so I guess I either pressed L which triggered leave or N for No. Either way I missed the event. One game, I missed the merchant event, the current one I missed the lumberjack event. I think only Enter should clear those prompts, since they're one time events.
I agree with the commenter that certain debilitating effects should produce a more visible change than the red icon. Confusion and blindness, low health and low air have this. You could similarly tint the screen for other nasty side-effects, so the player at least gets the hint to check the side and see what's going on.
About telling the player what order to do things. Since the dungeons are essentially set, figuring out difficulties is just a matter of dying in a couple games, or playing an unlimited death character, or asking more experienced players, and then you know forever. The next game will be exactly the same. TOME4 is usually very transparent about static things, it's not clear to me why it should be unclear about this. Perhaps if each game had slightly different scalings so that in some games the other newbie zones were actually harder than the tier 2 dungeons, it would make sense not to direct the player to them. But it's probably way too far along in the release cycle for a change like this, and it's probably not a very good idea anyway.
As far as trying a dungeon, and seeing if it's too much. This is mostly solid advice, but in some cases the game is very tricky about these things. You don't know how dangerous the first rooms are of the prides until you step out and realize there are 4 (6?) casters hidden waiting to snipe you. Even if you creep out, one of the middle enemies is likely to pull you into the center. At least this is only a life, you can lose one and then learn from your mistake. It's far more lenient than a one-life roguelike. Other areas are more problematic. When I went through the portal that took me to the fire place, I didn't get a warning saying, "this place is dangerous, make sure you have fireproof gear." I can't "oops" out of that area after entering, nor can I go back and retrieve appropriate gear. If I can't handle it (I couldn't) then the game ends. The temporal rift is another region like this, although I think that one warns you. The derth freeing quest is similar. The problem is, even if the game warns you, how do you know how prepared you need to be without experiencing it at least once?
By the way, this type of topic comes up a lot in angband discussion. Do you make it obvious to players that a certain monster is deadly, or do you let the player learn by experiencing death? My personal opinion is that letting the players gain knowledge by dying is fine. We're all essentially in the roguelike business after all. However, consistency is important, and killing the player for doing something that previous experiences indicate should be fine, is a bad idea. I should mention that many other angband devs and players disagree with me on this. I actually think that ToME4 is in general *much* better about being fair to players than angband is. To me this is a great feature of the game. The order of dungeons is pretty much the only major piece of information that to me feels misleading.
I should mention the way I handled the prides. I teleported immediately upon entering each floor, and then movement infusioned, then stonewalked into the nearest room. Usually there were only one or two monsters in that room, which I could kill and then lure other monsters inside and kill one at a time. This worked for all except for that one pride that didn't have a large middle area. I don't think that one had casters though.
As a final note, DarkGod (no idea if you'll read this). I'm sorry I missed you on the Angband-dev IRC channel. At some point, I'd love to talk to you about generation algorithms. In the pyrel dungeon generation, I'm trying to accommodate as many different dungeon schemata as possible in a overarching structure. It would be great to get some feedback on what types of features you like, what you don't like. What you've wanted but were unable to implement, and what you've tried but didn't get to work. Who knows, maybe I'll be able to give you some new ideas for map layouts.
I agree with the commenter that certain debilitating effects should produce a more visible change than the red icon. Confusion and blindness, low health and low air have this. You could similarly tint the screen for other nasty side-effects, so the player at least gets the hint to check the side and see what's going on.
About telling the player what order to do things. Since the dungeons are essentially set, figuring out difficulties is just a matter of dying in a couple games, or playing an unlimited death character, or asking more experienced players, and then you know forever. The next game will be exactly the same. TOME4 is usually very transparent about static things, it's not clear to me why it should be unclear about this. Perhaps if each game had slightly different scalings so that in some games the other newbie zones were actually harder than the tier 2 dungeons, it would make sense not to direct the player to them. But it's probably way too far along in the release cycle for a change like this, and it's probably not a very good idea anyway.
As far as trying a dungeon, and seeing if it's too much. This is mostly solid advice, but in some cases the game is very tricky about these things. You don't know how dangerous the first rooms are of the prides until you step out and realize there are 4 (6?) casters hidden waiting to snipe you. Even if you creep out, one of the middle enemies is likely to pull you into the center. At least this is only a life, you can lose one and then learn from your mistake. It's far more lenient than a one-life roguelike. Other areas are more problematic. When I went through the portal that took me to the fire place, I didn't get a warning saying, "this place is dangerous, make sure you have fireproof gear." I can't "oops" out of that area after entering, nor can I go back and retrieve appropriate gear. If I can't handle it (I couldn't) then the game ends. The temporal rift is another region like this, although I think that one warns you. The derth freeing quest is similar. The problem is, even if the game warns you, how do you know how prepared you need to be without experiencing it at least once?
By the way, this type of topic comes up a lot in angband discussion. Do you make it obvious to players that a certain monster is deadly, or do you let the player learn by experiencing death? My personal opinion is that letting the players gain knowledge by dying is fine. We're all essentially in the roguelike business after all. However, consistency is important, and killing the player for doing something that previous experiences indicate should be fine, is a bad idea. I should mention that many other angband devs and players disagree with me on this. I actually think that ToME4 is in general *much* better about being fair to players than angband is. To me this is a great feature of the game. The order of dungeons is pretty much the only major piece of information that to me feels misleading.
I should mention the way I handled the prides. I teleported immediately upon entering each floor, and then movement infusioned, then stonewalked into the nearest room. Usually there were only one or two monsters in that room, which I could kill and then lure other monsters inside and kill one at a time. This worked for all except for that one pride that didn't have a large middle area. I don't think that one had casters though.
As a final note, DarkGod (no idea if you'll read this). I'm sorry I missed you on the Angband-dev IRC channel. At some point, I'd love to talk to you about generation algorithms. In the pyrel dungeon generation, I'm trying to accommodate as many different dungeon schemata as possible in a overarching structure. It would be great to get some feedback on what types of features you like, what you don't like. What you've wanted but were unable to implement, and what you've tried but didn't get to work. Who knows, maybe I'll be able to give you some new ideas for map layouts.
Re: Some feedback from an angband dev
Also agreed on this: for me it's cooldownprevention and healprevention that hurt me the most if I don't notice.fizzix wrote: I agree with the commenter that certain debilitating effects should produce a more visible change than the red icon. Confusion and blindness, low health and low air have this. You could similarly tint the screen for other nasty side-effects, so the player at least gets the hint to check the side and see what's going on.
Of course, this could be different for different players/classes and making a special effect for each and every thing could make things chaotic.
Here's my over-the-top suggested solution: Custimizable effects.
Simply allow the player to right-click on any negative effect and choose one of several graphical effects, which after that will happen any time you get that effect. It would be nice to have a choise among one-time effects (noticable graphic effects that happen once each time you get the bad effect, kind of like the "stunned", only bigger) and full status effects (graphic effects that stay for the full duration of the bad effect, like confusion)
Re: Some feedback from an angband dev
2 more bugs then I'm done (see the 2nd bug for why.)
bug 1. Invisibility. I'm not sure if this is WAD or a bug, but I don't understand the behavior at all. Sometimes I'll see the monster and then when I go to target it with one of my talents the monster disappears. I can still target the square, but I have to manually move to the square. I feel the monster should either be visible or invisible until my character performs an action. It shouldn't pop in and out of visibility seemingly randomly while I'm deciding on an action.
bug 2. This is a really bad one. It's the same bug that I mentioned before with a too large window appearing at the end of game screen preventing me from exiting and forcing me to kill the application. This time it occurred on the merchant's artifact list. The screen was too large, I couldn't escape out of it. In attempting to leave (i thought maybe the bottom option that I couldn't see was "exit"), I wound up with a useless mindstar artifact. Things like this are very frustrating for players, and after this occurred, I lose desire to play. I'm not sure why problems like this remove my desire to continue playing, but it does. Either I figure out how to hack the savefile to get my money back (how hard is this?) or just go back to playing angband (it needs my attention anyways).
Solution. All screens that have even the remote possibility of extending off the top and bottom of the screen should come with a scrolling bar. This will probably fix the problem. I've only come across the two, with the artifact creation and the end of game screen. I highly recommend this gets fixed before the Steam release. It's a bad bug and is bound to occur with anyone playing on a laptop.
bug 1. Invisibility. I'm not sure if this is WAD or a bug, but I don't understand the behavior at all. Sometimes I'll see the monster and then when I go to target it with one of my talents the monster disappears. I can still target the square, but I have to manually move to the square. I feel the monster should either be visible or invisible until my character performs an action. It shouldn't pop in and out of visibility seemingly randomly while I'm deciding on an action.
bug 2. This is a really bad one. It's the same bug that I mentioned before with a too large window appearing at the end of game screen preventing me from exiting and forcing me to kill the application. This time it occurred on the merchant's artifact list. The screen was too large, I couldn't escape out of it. In attempting to leave (i thought maybe the bottom option that I couldn't see was "exit"), I wound up with a useless mindstar artifact. Things like this are very frustrating for players, and after this occurred, I lose desire to play. I'm not sure why problems like this remove my desire to continue playing, but it does. Either I figure out how to hack the savefile to get my money back (how hard is this?) or just go back to playing angband (it needs my attention anyways).
Solution. All screens that have even the remote possibility of extending off the top and bottom of the screen should come with a scrolling bar. This will probably fix the problem. I've only come across the two, with the artifact creation and the end of game screen. I highly recommend this gets fixed before the Steam release. It's a bad bug and is bound to occur with anyone playing on a laptop.
Re: Some feedback from an angband dev
Not especially.Either I figure out how to hack the savefile to get my money back (how hard is this?)
I think it invalidates it for online purposes-there's some sort of protection there, I'm not sure on the details. But if you don't mind that, it takes pretty basic knowledge.
And yeah, I'll second that the merchant list particularly needs to either be divided into subcategories or shortened. A scroll bar would be better though.
Re: Some feedback from an angband dev
Just activate cheat mode, and put game.player:incMoney(4000) into the console. http://te4.org/wiki/t4modules-debugging. As SageAcrin said, it may invalidate your character though.fizzix wrote: Either I figure out how to hack the savefile to get my money back (how hard is this?)
Re: Some feedback from an angband dev
Thanks. that was surprisingly less painful than I thought it would be.lukep wrote:Just activate cheat mode, and put game.player:incMoney(4000) into the console. http://te4.org/wiki/t4modules-debugging. As SageAcrin said, it may invalidate your character though.fizzix wrote: Either I figure out how to hack the savefile to get my money back (how hard is this?)