[Norseband] Astral dungeon: drop or rename?

[Guest]

Hmm... So you couldn't just create a new kind of vault consisting of nothing but a square with "deep hole" tiles, and make sure that it's created on every level? The exact position isn't so important, who says Chaos has to be symmetrical, after all

I didn't quite think of COMPLETELY damaging walls, more like in the Melkor temples - normal walls with randomly placed chains of nether and/or elemental tiles, making long-range travel more difficult and painful but still letting you hide in walls. When you stair-scum (and in the astral that's the sensible thing to do) you don't stay long enough on Lvl 1 anyway to HAVE to hide in walls. But the idea with shifting wall types and tiles is pretty neat as well, the way you describe it. Heh... Guess it now comes to bite me that I never went to the Heart, I just hate Mirkwood too much to even try.

With 99 Levels and uber-monsters, don't you think the Maze-like perpetual darkness is a bit over the top, though? It's hard enough to get to the next stairs as it is, even when you know where they are. Stumbling through the darkness with no inkling to where the next Greater Undead monster pit might be sounds pretty harsh.

[ISNorden]

You've got a point about the perpetual darkness handicapping players who begin in an über-challenging dungeon already; I'll scrap that feature. A "hole vault" sounds like a cool way to put a dark, unusable shaft on every floor. Still, I can see one big coding problem: how do you restrict a specific vault type to one dungeon only? (I'm assuming that the current T-Engine allows such a rule in the first place...)

[Guest]

Actually, I think you could maybe realize the "dark" feeling by simply using a level-wide lowpowered Vision spell coupled with Reveal Ways, just like in the Halls except without the general lighting up. That way you could see the rough outline of the dungeon, but not the exact tiles or even items. In a very spacious and rugged dungeon (and thus with many tiles remaining unseen) it would still feel moody without being overtly unfair.

Hmm... Sadly, I have no idea how to restrict vaults to certain dungeons. I don't think you can per se, but maybe you could make it extremely high (or low) level, like 9999 or something? That way it wouldn't crop up with any regularity in normal dungeons, but you could still insert it manually. This is just theory, though, but from looking at the v_info i'd guess vaults are indeed sorted by depth.

[Falconis]

You can't do that with vaults, unfortunately, and I don't think you can tell the game to load a specific vault from f_info.txt.

However, what you can do instead is create it as a normal lua type map and tell the game to load it and where to place it on each level.

[EDIT:] Something like this should do:

Code: Select all

function big_hole()
	if current_dungeon_idx == 19 then
		local ysize, xsize = get_map_size(hole)
		local tries = 0
		--msg_print(format("ysize= %s, xsize= %s", ysize, xsize))
		while TRUE do
			if ysize < cur_hgt and xsize < cur_wid then
				load_map(hole, cur_hgt/2 - ysize/2, cur_wid/2 - xsize/2)
				break
			else
				player.leaving = TRUE
				tries = tries+1
				if tries >= 200 then
					msg_print(TERM_VIOLET,"Warning: could not place hole")
					break
				end
			end
		end
	end
end
add_hook_script(HOOK_LEVEL_END_GEN, "big_hole", "hig_hole")

hole =
[[#!map
F:#:87:0

D:  ##  # # # #  
D:   ### ## #### 
D: ## ######## ##
D:  ############ 
D: ############  
D: ## ### ### ###
D:#   #   #   ## 
]]

It loads the "hole" map in the middle of a level. It's set up for the orc caves atm (dungeon idx 19), and places the #'s as "dark pit" feature(no.87). You can of course change it to anything else, and change the hole to look as you need.

This will create the same size / shape hole in the middle of every level. If you want a variable size, random hole on each level, then I expect I could find some means of doing that as well. This would probably be the ideal solution, since it would eliminate size problems.

I wasn't sure whether it would do this exactly as I wanted, since I was afraid that it would replace the entire rectangle (spaces included), or that it was possible to find the x and y size, but it all seems to work fine.

[EDITn+1: changed the script above to mean that it'll effectively regenerate the level if the first one is too small for the map, up to the tries limit, at which point it'll give the error.]


(For history's sake: here is the get around script that I foolishly wrote first to get around the non-existant problems...)

Code: Select all

function big_hole()
	if current_dungeon_idx == 19 then
		local i,j
		local lenm = strlen(hole[1])
		--msg_print(format("wid = %s, hgt = %s", cur_wid, cur_hgt))
		for j = 1, getn(hole) do
			for i = 1, strlen(hole[j]) do
				if strlen(hole[j]) > lenm then
					--msg_print("Increasing lenm")
					lenm = strlen(hole[j])
				end
			end
		end
		if cur_wid >= lenm and cur_hgt >= getn(hole) then
			--msg_print("Hole placement started...")
			local starty = cur_hgt/2 - getn(hole)/2
			local startx = cur_wid/2 - strlen(hole[1])/2
			--msg_print(format("starty = %s, startx = %s", starty, startx))
			for j = 1, getn(hole) do
				for i = 1, strlen(hole[j]) do
					if strbyte(hole[j], i) == strbyte('#') then
						cave(starty + j, startx + i).feat = 87
					end
				end
			end
		elseif cur_wid < strlen(hole[1]) then
			msg_print("Warning: width too small to place 'hole'")
		else
			msg_print("Warning: height too small to place 'hole'")
		end
	end
end
add_hook_script(HOOK_LEVEL_END_GEN, "big_hole", "hig_hole")

hole =
{
[[  ##  # # # #  ]],
[[   ### ## #### ]],
[[ ## ######## ##]],
[[  ############ ]],
[[ ############  ]],
[[ ## ### ### ###]],
[[#   #   #   ## ]],
}