Porting ToME2 to the T4 engine

[Zizzo]

Fair enough; I probably invested more effort in the automatizer than most people. So far the artifact code is almost but not quite as bad as I'd feared; I think I'm making good progress, so I should be able to have something out before too long (factoring in that I probably just jinxed myself... ).

On the subject of a "winnable" game:

• Is it possible to have a persistent level in a non-persistent zone? I'm thinking of Mount Doom, of course.
• How attached are people to Sauron's habit of only dropping the One Ring 30% of the time, leading to potentially having to kill him multiple times to get the Ring? I always found that vaguely annoying and pointless.
• Actually, on a tangentially related persistence note, is it possible to have persistent stores in a non-persistent zone/level? Currently all the town zones are persistent to keep the stores from being regenerated from scratch every time the player arrives, but that has undesirable side effects, like townspeople not having moved while you were gone.

[darkgod]

Persistence can be set on a level basis

As for stores, well I suppose you could store them in gamestate and "put them back" in the new town level each time

[Zizzo]

Persistence can be set on a level basis

[sound F/X: source diving] Yeah, this looks like it'll do what I need. Thanks.

As for stores, well I suppose you could store them in gamestate and "put them back" in the new town level each time

GMTA. I had that idea overnight.

More questions while I'm here, this time about preserve mode. Luckily, it looks like the engine will do most of the heavy lifting for me; on leaving a non-persistent level, the zone code will put any unique actors and objects "back into circulation" by clearing their been-generated flags. I'll need to tweak that a bit to implement the preserve mode option, of course, but that leads to a couple questions:

• Does anyone actually run with preserve mode off nowadays?
• The default handling AIUI will put artifacts back into circulation even if they've been identified or *ID*'d, which is stronger than T2's preserve=on mode. Desirable as another option setting? It would make high-level Listen to the Music less dangerous, at least.

[darkgod]

I doubt it
Really IMO your first priority should be to make the game playable, not to reimplement every single silly (or not) option

[Crim, The Red Thunder]

Persistence can be set on a level basis

[sound F/X: source diving] Yeah, this looks like it'll do what I need. Thanks.

As for stores, well I suppose you could store them in gamestate and "put them back" in the new town level each time

GMTA. I had that idea overnight.

More questions while I'm here, this time about preserve mode. Luckily, it looks like the engine will do most of the heavy lifting for me; on leaving a non-persistent level, the zone code will put any unique actors and objects "back into circulation" by clearing their been-generated flags. I'll need to tweak that a bit to implement the preserve mode option, of course, but that leads to a couple questions:

• Does anyone actually run with preserve mode off nowadays?
• The default handling AIUI will put artifacts back into circulation even if they've been identified or *ID*'d, which is stronger than T2's preserve=on mode. Desirable as another option setting? It would make high-level Listen to the Music less dangerous, at least.

THIS. For the love of god, don't throw them back into circuation if we haven't picked them up. Unless we LEAVE the level with them in inventory, they go back into circulation. if we dropped them from outside the level/sold them, assume we don't care about them.

And I *NEVER* played with preserve mode off. Offhand, I'm not sure of anyone who ever wanted to, outside some bizarre challenge game, maybe.

[Zizzo]

Really IMO your first priority should be to make the game playable, not to reimplement every single silly (or not) option

(shrug Well, I'm in the middle of implementing artifacts (at least one of which we're kind of going to need to make the game winnable, after all ), and getting unique handling right is part of that, and preserve mode is directly related to that.

For the love of god, don't throw them back into circuation if we haven't picked them up. Unless we LEAVE the level with them in inventory, they go back into circulation.

*blink* ...okay, I'm confused; I think those two sentences contradict each other. From the second sentence, though, I gather that you approve of the "stronger" preserve=on mode. So that gives us two ways we could play it: (a) three allowed values of preserve mode:

• None (equivalent to T2 preserve=off)
• Partial (equivalent to T2 preserve=on)
• Full ("stronger" preserve=on)

or (b) punt "Partial", which would return it to a boolean on/off option between preserve=off and "stronger" preserve=on.

if we dropped them from outside the level/sold them, assume we don't care about them.

Selling an artifact won't clear the been-generated flag (I think; I'll have to check that), so that won't put it back into circulation. As for the other bit, it sounds like you want to be able to pick up an artifact, carry it to another level, drop it, and have it taken out of circulation as a result. That would be slightly trickier to implement.

[Crim, The Red Thunder]

Point. I tend to think of loot in t2 as so common we start dropping it on long trips, worried about clogging artifact circulation with all the dupes.

And yes, that sentence... kinda got away from me. I do approve of stronger preservation. If we see the music, we shouldn't lose an artifact.

It'd be nice if it just looked at it like a transmog chest would, where it's 'loot' until the end of the level, and 'inventory' thereafter, some sort of flag on any item that's cleared when you transition a zone would more or less take care for that. Not sure how simple that'd be to code. But maybe the recirculation wouldn't be a problem. Just think, we could have people gripe abut rng streaks as they find the same artifact 6 floors in a row, it'll be great chat-fodder for entertainment. So maybe it's not necessary.

[Zizzo]

And with some trepidation:

Release 0.1.5 "And I Shall Call You Sting"

The selling point of this release, as advertised, is artifacts and randarts. A few notes on those:

• Has anyone ever found a randart that conferred a power when wielded? Because as I read ra_info.txt, there are supposed to be randart power sets that add conferred powers like that, including some that I've never seen, like Dazzle, a LoS stun/confuse/terrify power. On examination, I think they don't appear because ra_info.txt uses the wrong names for them. Just for giggles, I've included them. Unless people think I shouldn't?

Also some other new features of varying relatedness to artifacts:

• We can now, of course, implement special levels with placed artifacts (and the achievements for completing them), fates to find randarts, and monsters that are supposed to drop artifacts or randarts, notably the Nazgul and their Rings.
• Artifact sets (I hope...).
• Preserve mode, as promised. I decided the none/partial/full arrangement I was thinking of earlier was overkill, and just went with beefing up preserve=on as described above.
• As part of getting artifacts to generate, I've finally implemented something that bears a vague resemblance to T2's object allocation algorithm. So stat potions should now properly appear in Moria.
• Some artifacts have various exotic curses on them, so I've implemented Scrolls of Remove Curse and *Remove Curse* and the CURSED, HEAVY_CURSE, PERMA_CURSE, AUTO_CURSE, CURSE_NO_DROP and TELEPORT flags, and partly implemented the TY_CURSE and DG_CURSE flags. Nothing on the CLONE flag yet; you Long Sword of the Dawn fans will just have to wait till next release.
• With all these curses, of course, you'll need to to be able to identify stuff before you wear it, so Ive implemented Scrolls of Identify and *Identify* and the Identify, Greater Identify, See the Music and Know the Music spells.
• Implemented the Narsil quest, because why not?
• Persistent stores, using DarkGod's idea of stuffing them into GameState. Which has nothing to do with artifacts, but it means I can now include the contents of the character's homes and the Mathom-house in the character sheet, which I thought was kind of neat.
• And all the usual bugfixes and internal infrastructure shuffling.

Now, I'm a little nervous about this release; it may not sound like it, but there's a lot of moving parts in this update, and thus plenty of things that could go wrong. I've done enough object allocation tests (i.e. teleporting to level 50 of Moria and letting the level generator do its thing) that I think I've flushed out all the object generation bugs, but I've thought that before... Report bugs here, of course.

And as always, the .team file for the release is available from my site, along with the Subversion repo and WebSVN front-end thereto.

[Zizzo]

So, a playable/winnable game. For that, of course we'll need the Ring plot. Now, T2 pretty much skips straight ahead to the Necromancer step of the plot, expecting the player to know what to do and where to go until they're strong enough to hit Dol Guldur. This is in contrast with, for instance, T4, which guides the player along starting right from the T1 zones. We could conceivably do something like that here, but I'm not sure what it would look like.

That, then, is the question: T2 way or T4 way? If we change this, it'll probably be the first significant deviation from T2 "canon", so I'll want some thoughts and feedback on how to proceed.

[HousePet]

Please do something more guided than T2.
I kept trying to do the Maze after the Barrow Downs.
Wasting characters due to not knowing where to go is not a fun game mechanic.

[Faeryan]

Please do something more guided than T2.
I kept trying to do the Maze after the Barrow Downs.
Wasting characters due to not knowing where to go is not a fun game mechanic.

Oh puh-lease, everyone knows you do the Orc Caves after Barrow Downs, the Old Forest and only then The Maze. :p

Nothing meaningful, just wanted to freshen the old memories of T2 with this post.

[darkgod]

Talking about charsheet reminds me; this is 2015 ! We dont do silly text sheets anymore

Wanna plug in te4.org online charsheet system?

[Zizzo]

Please do something more guided than T2.
I kept trying to do the Maze after the Barrow Downs.
Wasting characters due to not knowing where to go is not a fun game mechanic.

That's what I'm going to need feedback on: what kind of guidance do we want to give players? I mean, at the most basic, we could walk players through the mainline dungeons up to Mordor and then switch to the Necromancer plotline, but (a) that wouldn't give the player guidance about side dungeons [cf. your Maze problem], and (b) there isn't an obvious way to detect that the player has "completed" a mainline dungeon in the absence of a boss monster.

Oh puh-lease, everyone knows you do the Orc Caves after Barrow Downs, the Old Forest and only then The Maze. :p

Nothing meaningful, just wanted to freshen the old memories of T2 with this post.

Heh. I rarely even bother with Old Forest, unless I'm particularly jonesing for a dungeon town with a Forbidden Library. Maze usually happens late, when I'm picking off neglected side quests, except maybe for melee types that would want Hammerhand's helm.

Talking about charsheet reminds me; this is 2015 ! We dont do silly text sheets anymore

Wanna plug in te4.org online charsheet system?

*blink* ...I am intrigued; please elaborate.

[HousePet]

My issues were to do with a lack of general guidance. The only indication I had of where to go was the quest journal, which said that the Maze was the next easiest thing to do.
Having a list of every dungeon given to me with the order of difficulty would solve that issue, but so would giving me a level range when I encountered a dungeon on the fast travel map.

Without actually knowing the full plot line or the appropriate dungeon levels I can't give specifics here, but it does look like the player is dropped into the deep end and told that at some point they need to climb that high mountain way over there -----> Since I've never got that far, I'm not sure if the plot starts guiding you once you climb that distant mountain or not. It also seems quite weird that a budding adventurer would have a quest which basically amounts to suicide.

I'd go with some sort of plot that gives you some hints about what to do in the early zones and some sort of indication about the difficulty of all dungeons visible from the fast travel map.

[Crim, The Red Thunder]

Wasn't there some dungeon guide parchment that listed dungeons and threat levels for them?
(notably the 'depth' they equated to)

And I woudn't be amiss with adding some guidance. Guiding to BD, OF, Mordor wouldn't hurt as a baseline, though doing Mordor right after OF is often a risky proposition. One way to enforce 'completion' would be to set random qeusts from 0-98 to 3-98, and do a forced one at the bottom of each. Of course, this'd screw up mods that do special things at the bottom of BD like Theme.

Side quests are just that, side. And not so much quest as a way to get something more in the exp and loot departments then just farming the same level endlessly.

Some certain fixed artifacts are extremely useful at key points, hence the early orc caves (for special level artifacts, mostly. And so evil-slaying priests can get some desperately needed piety.), and complete and TOTAL lack of illusory castle, EVER because it's stupidly suicidal and offers a bad reward. (Well, maybe slightly better for AM, but still bad.)

I'm pretty sure you get threat value messages on dungeon entrance (floor entrance, actually), unless zizzo doesn't have that coded in. That's a loose thing to go by.

Also, a thought on persistence and preserve mode arises re: long standing mount doom bug, where you could end up with no generating sauron or ring because shenanigans. What can be done to best address this?

(Also, bonus achievement. Sacrifice the ring on mount doom without ever entering angband first. 'Just like Frodo' (or something like that). Nonsense diving into the greatest evil just to go across the world again. Not quite 'never look back and there again' but it's something for challenge-gamers.)