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SlyFrog posted:So they added something mostly irrelevant that people whine about to fix something mostly irrelevant that people whine about. Are they going to introduce a cat to catch the mouse that ate the cheese soon? I don't really understand what you're opposing here. Are you mad that a dev voluntarily fixed something instead of leaving it broken? Just because only a crazy person would spend 15 minutes jumping against this particular door seam to fall out of bounds doesn't mean you shouldn't patch in a solid object placed to prevent them doing so. Is it "clumsy design" that they just stuck an untextured black cube behind that seam -- where nobody but said crazy person could ever possibly detect its existence? And when said crazy person rants about how this hidden black cube is just so emblematic of how lazy and backwards the developers are, are we supposed to go "oh yeah, man, when does it end, they're gonna have to put another cube to hide that cube, dude"? Tiny, stupid problems can be safely ignored, sure, but it seems silly to oppose a tiny, invisible, side-effect-free solution.
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Dec 28, 2020 03:07
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Though the particulars are all over the place, I do feel it is a blessed state of affairs that between Gooncrawl, bcrawl, and apparently kimchi...at the least in terms of liveliest folks...Good Answers to nigh all problems and edge cases and whatnot always seem to manifest sooner or later. Mainline does good work on a fair few core and exotic bits(like frozen ramparts and fox fire!) no matter what other inscrutable bits tend to somehow hang on and risk the soup boiling over---but it would be cool if it didn't seem to exist in such a precarious state as the black box of Streamlining within Roguelikes compared to the classic black box that is Nethack's interactions/machinations. Thin out a soup enough and you are back to a pot of water, thicken it enough to beget a stew that would choke out the gods themselves. Ultimately, the next tournament in, what, Some Weeks will probably shine a definitive light on the solution* to the food clock---especially as the various attempted extended games start to pour up for actual broad data points.
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Dec 28, 2020 03:25
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megane posted:I don't really understand what you're opposing here. Are you mad that a dev voluntarily fixed something instead of leaving it broken? Just because only a crazy person would spend 15 minutes jumping against this particular door seam to fall out of bounds doesn't mean you shouldn't patch in a solid object placed to prevent them doing so. Is it "clumsy design" that they just stuck an untextured black cube behind that seam -- where nobody but said crazy person could ever possibly detect its existence? And when said crazy person rants about how this hidden black cube is just so emblematic of how lazy and backwards the developers are, are we supposed to go "oh yeah, man, when does it end, they're gonna have to put another cube to hide that cube, dude"? Tiny, stupid problems can be safely ignored, sure, but it seems silly to oppose a tiny, invisible, side-effect-free solution. I mean, they could have addressed the problem directly, instead of a clumsy global timer. It is inelegant and clumsy, like I said. It also can't be irrelevant and relevant. Pick one.
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Dec 28, 2020 03:33
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I'm going to repeat myself: it's not actually true that hunger as a mechanic was marginal or barely ever came up or was only relevant as a balancing mechanism for mummies or whatever. Just because the actual times in which you have the red starving indicator on your HUD were few and far between doesn't mean the fact of the hunger clock wasn't shaping all your play. There were things you simply couldn't do and risks you'd be pushed to take specifically to prevent yourself from having to eat permafood because, in the back of your mind, you knew that starvation was a loss condition. This affected not only spellcasting and ability use but the frequency with which you'd be willing to rest, which branches you went to first, what kind of gear upgrades you prioritized (aha, poison resist! now I can eat green corpses!), and so on. It was a really big deal for OG vampires because if you spent a lot of time in places like Crypt and Tomb you'd actually lose the ability to regenerate! Streamlining the food system could have involved condensing all rations into the same item type and making there be no such thing as "chunks" such that all characters just hit 'e' to butcher and eat a corpse at their feet, vampire style. But nope, some vague anxiety that Crawl isn't Brogue meant the whole thing had to get the axe and get replaced with several weird and arbitrary kludges like toggle vampires and the zot clock. Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 05:27 on Dec 28, 2020 |
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Dec 28, 2020 05:03
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SlyFrog posted:I mean, they could have addressed the problem directly, instead of a clumsy global timer. It is inelegant and clumsy, like I said. I have no idea what you mean about "relevant" and "irrelevant." I haven't said either of those things. People called it out as bad game design, but it isn't.
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Dec 28, 2020 05:11
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Ferrinus posted:This affected spellcasting and ability use but the frequency with which you'd be willing to rest, which branches you went to first, what kind of gear upgrades you prioritized (aha, poison resist! now I can eat green corpses!), and so on. It was a really big deal for OG vampires because if you spent a lot of time in places like Crypt and Tomb you'd actually lose the ability to regenerate! I'm surprised it took this long to get to the most fundamental of changes made by the Zot clock and it was one's ability to rest: can I make it to the next encounter? If I berserk again, will that drop me under enough to start fainting? Can I get away with one more Iron Shot or Crystal Spear? Should I evoke something instead? How will I handle Pandemonium? It's one of the things that made the undead so particularly appealing to begin with (remember Ghouls?) and what added not only flavor to other species, (Kobolds and their ability to not only consume rotten chunks, but recover more quickly in doing so? Troll Berserkers?) but also improved their ability to act in certain roles. I never played enough Vampire to know wholly the difference between their various states, but I know there was a balancing act in bottling blood and picking how alive you wished to be.
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Dec 28, 2020 05:20
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It is absolutely ridiculous that playing a vampire no longer has you care which of your enemies have blood in their bodies (except for your random chance to get a random chance to get a tiny bit of in-combat lifesteal sometimes). What the gently caress.
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Dec 28, 2020 05:28
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megane posted:It's a tiny patch that fixes the problem with the minimum of effort and affects absolutely nothing else, that's like the definition of "elegant" and "directly addressing the issue." It's still silly, but that's because the problem itself was silly. We agree. It definitely was the absolute minimum of effort. And thoughtfulness toward the game, its theme, etc.
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Dec 28, 2020 05:30
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My blood is up so I want to write a little more here - this all loops back into the generic rhetorical strategy the Crawl devs have used to justify basically every removal, which is that if you can describe the response to a threat or ideal use-case of a tool in a short enough sentence while completely ignoring context then that game mechanic is trivial and needs to be removed. That's how we got oh, a boulder beetle? You can just step out of the way of that. Deleted! Without any consideration that what makes boulder beetles interesting isn't how you defeat a single boulder beetle in a blank 10x10 room but how the pressure put on you by an approaching boulder beetle interacts with the pressure put upon you by a yak you're fighting in a choke point and the fact that you're channeling a searing ray and the fact that there's a lindwurm around the corner and... (Yes I know they put boulder beetles back in eventually) And you can play this stupid game with anything. Fireball? You just cast it on bunched-up monsters, boring! Melee weapons? You just equip the one that does the most damage and walk into monsters, dull! Dungeon walls? You just use them to limit how many enemies can attack you at once, yawn! Cut, cut, cut! So you get these geniuses who are like woah, holy poo poo, I just realized that all you need to do to beat the hunger clock is press the e button! Which is true, if you fail to consider the context of the entire rest of the game.
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Dec 28, 2020 05:38
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I've got one more and it's that a majority of all of these changes have been tied into what is the most banal attribute in the game: experience. Every single one of these things before this had something which would visibly affect something that you had control over; now, it's just hack-and-slash, cast and burn, kill 'em all and hope that the last one restores your abilities, whatever it may be. It's just a counting game now, the way it is. It's a speedrun-centered fork of a dungeon crawling roguelike.
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Dec 28, 2020 05:44
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SlyFrog posted:We agree. It definitely was the absolute minimum of effort.
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Dec 28, 2020 19:00
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Ferrinus posted:My blood is up so I want to write a little more here - this all loops back into the generic rhetorical strategy the Crawl devs have used to justify basically every removal, which is that if you can describe the response to a threat or ideal use-case of a tool in a short enough sentence while completely ignoring context then that game mechanic is trivial and needs to be removed. That's how we got oh, a boulder beetle? You can just step out of the way of that. Deleted! Without any consideration that what makes boulder beetles interesting isn't how you defeat a single boulder beetle in a blank 10x10 room but how the pressure put on you by an approaching boulder beetle interacts with the pressure put upon you by a yak you're fighting in a choke point and the fact that you're channeling a searing ray and the fact that there's a lindwurm around the corner and... (Yes I know they put boulder beetles back in eventually) Food and it's acquisition is a part of the narrative of the game too. TSO's conduct against cannibalism says something about the world we never see in crawl. The concept that your player character is constantly hitting a level of hunger where the disgusting bodies of monsters and how some races, even when driven by hunger, can't stomach it as well as ones who eat nothing but flesh is part of how the dungeon is given tactile life. Life as a ghoul hunger pushes you hard. A kobold always feels at home at whatever level of the dungeon he so chooses. Or used to when endless monsters would come offering their sweet, sweet flesh. And a vampire must plan, so carefully, to leave little treats for themself when they dive into the cold bloodless chambers, lest they wither and die. The ecology in the dungeon isn't meant to be a real life sim, but you sometimes see little set pieces that imply the monsters in the dungeon do eat and when you do it's a small bubble of reality that enhances the alien, hostile nature of the dungeon even when the surroundings are mostly mundane stone and brick: Everything else in there has found a weird truce except you. You are the only food. A food system nods to the reality of crawls journey you get the idea your character's quest has an element of survival and the hunger rate suggests days and or weeks to clear each level. I think the experience of the game for someone who's not so bored of it that it's a pile of numbers is hurt when the system isn't there at all to make you consider the dungeon a physical reality. The removal of races because they are 'too generic' discounts the player's journey being at all able to generate a story or find meaning in the mcguffin at the bottom of the dungeon. Ironically pushing the experience closer to the hypothetical optimized man who needs not item descriptions or details on what a monster looks like.
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Dec 28, 2020 23:39
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Well, talking about this game got me to fire up Gooncrawl webtiles again as an Artificer. I'm loud, I'm noisy, and I'm also carrying 37 charges in a wand of disintegration. Invo/Evo sort of low at 10 each at the moment, but I did want to reach competence with these weapons first, especially the hand crossbow, which after mulling over whether or not hitting up an old-fashioned Labyrinth was a good idea, showed up at the very end. edit: I got bored, so I decided to take on a titanic slime creature in hand-to-hand. You can't shield that kind of damage. Victory Position fucked around with this message at 00:38 on Dec 29, 2020 |
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Dec 28, 2020 23:54
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Whaleporn posted:The removal of races because they are 'too generic' discounts the player's journey being at all able to generate a story or find meaning in the mcguffin at the bottom of the dungeon. Ironically pushing the experience closer to the hypothetical optimized man who needs not item descriptions or details on what a monster looks like. To paraphrase a friend of mine, nobody commissions a painting of themselves as a palentonga!
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Dec 29, 2020 00:07
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Yeah, still got it. Just went through a funny bit where two orcish knights had arbalests, so after falling to some high-level casts from the wand of clouds, every single orc behind them went and picked them up to fire them at me. I think I've mulched through about a hundred of them before I finally confiscated them. I can't remember if picking up something generates ammunition or not, but I'm the owner of 450+ crossbow bolts now. Different build, this time. Tengu of Ashenzari, just to show that artificing can take on a few other forms. edit: I'll leave this here because I will be heading back to see what these offer up. Well, after picking up a shard of Zot from D:8. 
Victory Position fucked around with this message at 04:27 on Dec 29, 2020 |
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Dec 29, 2020 04:20
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Ferrinus posted:I'm going to repeat myself: it's not actually true that hunger as a mechanic was marginal or barely ever came up or was only relevant as a balancing mechanism for mummies or whatever. Just because the actual times in which you have the red starving indicator on your HUD were few and far between doesn't mean the fact of the hunger clock wasn't shaping all your play. People lost more characters to due to over-prioritization of Spellcasting than from getting into bad tactical situations due to actual hunger limits. That's a big strike against it.
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Dec 29, 2020 11:26
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kaschei posted:That's actually the best argument for removing hunger: people were constantly thinking about hunger when it was usually a marginal concern past the extreme early game. It consumed a lot of player attention, but autobutcher autoeat showed that the actual meaningful decisions were rare. PMush Perfect posted:Thinking about it, removing the hunger clock’s not inherently a bad idea, as long as A) purple chunks remain, and B) you come up with a more nuanced way to deal with the way its absence impacts balance. The hunger mechanic is something that doesn’t matter at all until suddenly it does, and that “does” has all kinds of small knock-on effects. Spell hunger, Trog hunger costs, regen balancing, vegetarian races, ghouls eating raw flesh, Gozag... I’m not against the idea of streamlining or theoretically even removing the need to
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Dec 29, 2020 11:33
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kaschei posted:That's actually the best argument for removing hunger: people were constantly thinking about hunger when it was usually a marginal concern past the extreme early game. It consumed a lot of player attention, but autobutcher autoeat showed that the actual meaningful decisions were rare. First off, that's the opposite argument for removing hunger that everyone seems to use. They were all like oh it doesn't matter, it's pointless, it doesn't do anything - but actually it did tons. It had a massive effect on the game. So were they just lying? All along it was that they didn't like and didn't want to deal with hunger, rather than believed it was marginal and extraneous? Second off, that's not at all what autobutcher showed. Autobutcher showed that the default game interface was bad, but "should I eat this grey corpse if my hunger is yellow" was never a decision hunger asked you to make. Hunger asked you whether to cast a powerful spell or go berserk or enter a particular branch or even rest rather than push on between fights. And these meaningful decisions were being made constantly. Maybe people found the pressure of making them stressful, but it's disingenuous to pretend that the mechanic was pointless or trivial.
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Dec 29, 2020 16:12
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So, now that mummies don’t have the superpower of telling the food clock to go do one, what will they be gaining to compensate? Aptitude bump? Consume scrolls to heal?
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Dec 29, 2020 17:30
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They'll probably be removed from the game altogether.
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Dec 29, 2020 17:37
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They weren't given anything when haste was reduced to a potion and they won't be given anything now.
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Dec 29, 2020 18:17
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Playing Gooncrawl, and I'm having some trouble with the controls. If I use any keyboard command, the mouse controls stop working. Or rather, they act like I'm always pressing shift. I have to press shift and ctrl before the mouse clicking works properly again. Until I use any other key. Then it's back to not working. No, there is no goon juice sticking up my shift/ctrl keys
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Dec 29, 2020 19:36
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How many of you have actually played the game without hunger lol Maybe I'm just unimaginative or a bad player or something but it mostly just feels like there's one less superfluous thing to keep track of, which lets me focus on the part of the game that I like, which is the tactical decision making.
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Dec 29, 2020 20:05
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Modding hunger out of the game was literally one of the first things I did back in like 2010 when I compiled it from source for the first time instead of just downloading a pre-packaged executable. So, you know, yes. It's an old and tired change to me, actually. Taking the hunger clock out of Crawl allows you to concentrate on "tactical decision making" in the same way that infinite ammo cheats allow you to concentrate on your marksmanship in an FPS. Simpler? Yes. Less stuff to keep track of? Yes. If that's what you prefer, then hey, go you. To me, though, it genuinely just made the game feel shallower.
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Dec 29, 2020 20:23
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Yeah I mean I can accept that it mainly makes the game easier and that's why I like it. I was just getting the impression that a lot of criticism was coming from the imagined effects of removing hunger rather than the actual effects, but maybe I was being unfair
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Dec 29, 2020 20:32
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Honestly, I'm all for making hunger something that can just be toggled on or off in Gooncrawl though the rc file if there are enough people here who think it's a good change. Overall, it's just that I simply like having it in the game. It influences so many things - there are entire player races that just don't really work anymore without it, because their special way to gently caress with the hunger clock is the entire gimmick that they were designed around. The game feels more rich for having it present as something that you need to plan around. After a while, you get a grip on it, but back when I first started playing Crawl, figuring out how to not starve to death felt like a meaningful challenge. Early-game Amulets of the Gourmand were a big find for me at the time, which I think speaks of something. I personally also wouldn't want to see it be completely removed simply because toggling it off is easy, just a single-line change in the code pretty much. Implementing it as an optional mechanic that you need to toggle on, on the other hand, is not nearly as trivial once the game starts to be developed around its absence.
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Dec 29, 2020 20:46
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Honestly I'm just still mad that they removed purple chunks.
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Dec 29, 2020 20:52
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Whaleporn posted:A food system nods to the reality of crawls journey you get the idea your character's quest has an element of survival and the hunger rate suggests days and or weeks to clear each level. I think the experience of the game for someone who's not so bored of it that it's a pile of numbers is hurt when the system isn't there at all to make you consider the dungeon a physical reality. The devs are like the opposite of that scene from The Matrix: "...there's way too much information to decode the dungeon. You get used to it, though. Your brain does the translating. I don't even see the orcs. All I see is attack 5, 20, and 32. Hey uh, you want a drink? Oh wait nevermind we removed food lol"
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Dec 29, 2020 20:55
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I have refused to play dungeon crawl, despite how good it is, since the traps change. Frankly, their "implementation" of traps is bullshit and is basically a stat check to determine if you can survive terrible encounters regardless of how careful you are. Blink traps triggering on enemies too is complete bullshit, particularly since that can occur, repeatedly, in tomb and zot, and kill you.
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Dec 29, 2020 22:04
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Yeah current traps are miserable. They’ve been tweaked and tweaked for years but I haven’t liked any of the changes.
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Dec 29, 2020 22:18
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I lost a very strong formicid and a very strong mage when the first got shafted on depths 2 to depths 5, and landed in the final vault and promptly got gibbed by about 7 dragons, and the mage I lost when I decided to do tomb as my last rune, the enemies repeatedly walked over blink traps and juggled me into melee range with basically everything.
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Dec 29, 2020 22:56
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You're right. I got so caught up in the hunger thing, I almost forgot about the other, significantly less defensible changes and removals.
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Dec 30, 2020 02:11
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Traps were actually more fun in ~.10 with the stupid T&D skill and surprise 50 damage blade traps.
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Dec 30, 2020 02:23
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bees x1000 posted:Traps were actually more fun in ~.10 with the stupid T&D skill and surprise 50 damage blade traps. I mean hey at least T and D let you spot traps and not walk onto them. I sure do love going though zot and stepping on an alarm trap in zot 5 that decided it was underneath me on a 1 in 400 chance, causing 3 orbs of fire and tiamat to beeline for me, promptly running across 3 zot traps and paralyising me and summoning demons next to me. edit: re hunger: just follow the CoQ approach: You can *always* find something to eat locally ("You scrounge some cave mushrooms, some meat off a corpse and some rock salt, and boil it in a pot") but it has a time cost and can't be used in combat, so you'll never actually starve to death from ambient "Can't find food" problems. Then make it so real food only takes a turn to eat and can be eaten in combat, and if you spend time cooking with the food you get some kind of minor benefit depending on the food type (Example, 10% extra regeneration, 10% more MP for the duration, 5 more HP, etc). This way, spell hunger is still a problem since it limits how many spells overall you can cast in an encounter, unless you stock up food for it, foodless classes still have the innate advantage of not needing food since they don't suffer from hunger at all, the endless problem of "oh no I'm dying from not having food in hell" kinda vanishes. Drone_Fragger fucked around with this message at 14:55 on Dec 30, 2020 |
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Dec 30, 2020 14:39
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Yeah, I mean, traps were always a bit annoying and no one missed them that much when they were gone, but the new Schrödinger's traps that are both there and not-there until the stars align and the game decides that you will step on one? They're literally idiocy.
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Dec 30, 2020 14:52
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Drone_Fragger posted:edit: re hunger:
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Dec 30, 2020 15:47
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This is definitely good advice, yeah. Cooking in Qud is surprisingly involved, useful and at times even powerful. It's exactly the kind of fully new and complex mechanic that the Crawl devs would never be willing to implement in the game, though. Might be an idea for Gooncrawl, but it would rely on re-implementing tons of different foodstuffs, which Qud has but Crawl no longer does.
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Dec 30, 2020 15:49
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I'm not sure if a full cooking system is something we should expect any time soon, but auto-hunger feels like it's actually doable.
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Dec 30, 2020 15:59
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Spells are already limited in encounters by MP, and other skills are limited by exhaustion. I've never believed hunger costs are a good reason to keep food.
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Dec 30, 2020 16:02
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Well, the biggest problem I see with sticking just to the basic idea is that it would basically reduce hunger to a tertiary resource that is only relevant in combat and adds no pressure to the game outside of it, which hunger is supposed to do. It would also make it even more irrelevant to melee builds. Without some degree of additional complication to it, you basically end up with effectively the same situation as if hunger was entirely absent from the game and might as well just go with that instead. If there was some clear cost to not using your limited food resources, like reducing your HP/MP to 70% of your normal max until you eat some proper food again, I suppose it could work. Soulslike games use that kind of limitation and it works well for them, but then again, they also don't have permadeath. bees x1000 posted:Spells are already limited in encounters by MP, and other skills are limited by exhaustion. I've never believed hunger costs are a good reason to keep food.
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Dec 30, 2020 16:03
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