Porting ToME2 to the T4 engine

[Jaylow7]

So, a new bug..

I chose to have no god (selected "Nobody") at creation.

Then this happens:

Code: Select all

The voice of Nobody booms in your head:
Sarah, I have a task for thee...

And in my quest log:

Code: Select all

You have been commanded by Nobody to retrieve the pieces of his lost relic. The first piece is in a lost temple not very far to the west of Bree and a long way to the northwest of Minas Anor.

For the record, this happened when I hit character level 6, during the Thieves quest. Character is a Human Barbarian Swordmaster.

There are also issues with the in-game character sheet. blows/round and shots/round display as %d and my melee damage per round (with the starting 2d5 broadsword) is listed as 4d5+7
(according to a chardump I do have 2 attacks per round, which explains the 4d5 but bonus*2 should not be an odd number)

[HousePet]

Don't listen to the voices in your head!

[Crim, The Red Thunder]

New Joke Unique - High Priest of Atheism.

C'mon Zizzo, this is gold.

[Zizzo]

Now a thought on this. This means we till get to hunt sauron at 30% chances, rather then being FORCED to take on Ar-Pharazon, right?

That's how Jaylow7 described it, and that's how I implemented it.

So, a new bug..

I chose to have no god (selected "Nobody") at creation.

Then this happens:

Code: Select all

The voice of Nobody booms in your head:
Sarah, I have a task for thee...

And in my quest log:

Code: Select all

You have been commanded by Nobody to retrieve the pieces of his lost relic. The first piece is in a lost temple not very far to the west of Bree and a long way to the northwest of Minas Anor.

[sound F/X: source diving] ...huh. So apparently the quest code was checking that your god wasn't NOBODY. Presumably BRIAN BLESSED's imaginary friend? Fixed. In the interim, I recommend not attempting to enter the spurious quest dungeon; the 'Nobody' god descriptor is missing data that the Lost Temple zone definition expects to find therein.

There are also issues with the in-game character sheet. blows/round and shots/round display as %d and my melee damage per round (with the starting 2d5 broadsword) is listed as 4d5+7
(according to a chardump I do have 2 attacks per round, which explains the 4d5 but bonus*2 should not be an odd number)

[sound F/X: source diving] Ah, yeah, those were just stupid typos. Fixed, and an updated .team file pushed out with these fixes.

New Joke Unique - High Priest of Atheism.

It'd have to go in a JokeAngband monsters addon, though, `coz I filter those out along with the ZAng and CthAng mons.

[Zizzo]

Now, a thought on this. This means we till get to hunt sauron at 30% chances, rather then being FORCED to take on Ar-Pharazon, right?

Hmm, a though occurs; if it's just Ar-Pharazôn that bugs you, we could have Sauron's drop chance increase as you kill alternate Ring droppers. So for instance, you could pick off just Shelob and the Watcher and then go face Sauron with, say, a 50% drop chance. That would also have the potentially desirable side effect that unknowingly killing an alternate Ring dropper before getting the One Ring quest wouldn't be a complete loss.

[Zizzo]

And on an unrelated note, I've been idly brainstorming on the idea I mentioned earlier of having boss monsters in the mainline dungeons to facilitate the handling of "guidance" quests:

• For the Downs, the most thematically obvious choice would be Bill Ferny or the "squint-eyed southerner", the ones who sold out Frodo and company to the Nazg?l in Bree.? I could probably get away with making one of them as a loose palette-swap of Wormtongue (who is also right about the right level, actually, so I suppose he'd also be a decent candidate). Squint-eyes doesn't seem to have a canonical name, alas.
• For Mirkwood, I found Saenathra, daughter of Shelob, that we could borrow from one of the LotR video games. She could work as a palette-swap of an Aranea or Elder aranea (or some indeterminate mix thereof), probably with the ESCORTS flag.
• Mordor turns out to be trickier. The Mouth of Sauron would be the obvious thematic choice, but he's level 78 and +20 speed, which would probably be too powerful for the end of Mordor. Thuringwethil is closer at level 67, but she's earmarked for one of the Angband special levels. A Balrog captain could work, but all of the named ones are either earmarked for somewhere else or way too powerful (I shudder to imagine having to kill @#$%ing Gothmog to get past Mordor... ).

----
? Well, actually, the most thematically obvious choice would probably be the Wight-King of the Barrow Downs, but he's earmarked for the Bree wights quest (and is far too high-level anyway).

[Atarlost]

I would just put a recommended order of zones in the main Sauron quest description. Add the guidance without actually changing the quest structure.

[Crim, The Red Thunder]

I approve of increasing ring drop rates from sauron, for each foe who has fallen that could've potentiall dropped it. That makes thematic sense, in a way.

[Zizzo]

I approve of increasing ring drop rates from sauron, for each foe who has fallen that could've potentiall dropped it. That makes thematic sense, in a way.

Done and done, then; each alternate Ring-dropper killed now increase Sauron's Ring-drop chance by 10%, up to 70% for four out of five --- and still jumping to 100% for all five.

I would just put a recommended order of zones in the main Sauron quest description. Add the guidance without actually changing the quest structure.

That would work, certainly. Even with them just as sub-goals of the Necromancer quest, though, we'd still need some way to signal to the game that those sub-goals were "completed"; zone bosses was just the most obvious way of doing that.

[Atarlost]

I would just put a recommended order of zones in the main Sauron quest description. Add the guidance without actually changing the quest structure.

That would work, certainly. Even with them just as sub-goals of the Necromancer quest, though, we'd still need some way to signal to the game that those sub-goals were "completed"; zone bosses was just the most obvious way of doing that.

Track recall depth. If recall depth for a dungeon is on its lowest level it's "completed." Print the recall depth with the quest so the player can tell that that's what's being used for a completion indicator so they know why it doesn't say completed if they walked out for some reason.

Or just don't bother tracking. Just list the main zones and still only track the necromancer part. If the player decides that he absolutely hates forests and skips Mirkwood that's his prerogative. He's been told it's the main dungeon for those levels with the random quests but he's a big boy. A gameplay change just for the sake of being able to make an extra goal that can change color isn't needed.

[Castler]

And on an unrelated note, I've been idly brainstorming on the idea I mentioned earlier of having boss monsters in the mainline dungeons to facilitate the handling of "guidance" quests:

• For the Downs, the most thematically obvious choice would be Bill Ferny or the "squint-eyed southerner", the ones who sold out Frodo and company to the Nazg?l in Bree.? I could probably get away with making one of them as a loose palette-swap of Wormtongue (who is also right about the right level, actually, so I suppose he'd also be a decent candidate). Squint-eyes doesn't seem to have a canonical name, alas.
• For Mirkwood, I found Saenathra, daughter of Shelob, that we could borrow from one of the LotR video games. She could work as a palette-swap of an Aranea or Elder aranea (or some indeterminate mix thereof), probably with the ESCORTS flag.

UnAngband calls Squint-eyes "the Dunlending agent of the Nazgul." For Mirkwood, it uses "the Great Spider of Mirkwood."

UnAngband in general does a good job of filling out the game with in-theme monsters and ensuring that its zones and quests flow nicely together, so if you haven't taken a look at it yet, I'd recommend doing so. (Although having to fight Tom Bombadil still feels wrong.)

[Zizzo]

Track recall depth. If recall depth for a dungeon is on its lowest level it's "completed."

I can work with that, sure. [sound F/X: coding]

UnAngband calls Squint-eyes "the Dunlending agent of the Nazgul." For Mirkwood, it uses "the Great Spider of Mirkwood."

[sound F/X: source diving] Hmm, UnAngband is radically different in internal structure from Angband or T2; I'm not sure how much impedance match we can get between the two. Mordor, for instance, is apparently split into several sub-dungeons in UnAngband, with a drastically weakened Gothmog at the bottom of Udun and Ancalagon and Maeglin at the bottom of a couple others (which is no help at all in trying to choose a zone guardian for Mordor). I note with some interest, though, that according to the comments in monster.txt, the Dunlending agent actually is Wormtongue renamed (and they add their own much tougher Wormtongue much later).

[Zizzo]

Oh, something else I meant to ask about while I was here: what do people think of the possibility of mentioning the alternate Ring-droppers in the One Ring quest description, or having some in-game way for the player to gain that information? The thought occurred to me recently, though I'm not sure how it would work.

[darkgod]

sounds fine to me, obscurantism is not good

[Crim, The Red Thunder]

Some description 'We've managed to partially trace the rings history, and feel that these are the beings with enough power to potentially have come into contact with it.' Maybe? Some of those only make sense based off frodo's own journey (Shelob, Watcher) whereas some I don't know enough tolkien lore to comment on. Does this fit? (Especially given the hodgepodge of ages the game exists in)