Coders Wanted for Crawl Fork -- Inquire Within

[Foobie Bletch]

The intent of this fork will be to diversify playstyles and reward experimentation, generally raising the strategic headroom of the game. A wider variety of threats, and a wider variety of tools to deal with those threats. The current plan is to start by backporting features from early versions of Stone Soup onto Linley's Crawl, and expanding from there -- yes, expanding, there will be a bias toward adding rather than taking away.

It'll be weird. It'll be experimental. It'll be heretical. Xom willing, it will be awesome. Either way, it should turn out interesting.

Join the discord server here if you're interested.

[Foobie Bletch]

Reserved.

[Hellmonk]

This will either be a trainwreck or a magnificent work of art. If I ever find some free time I can contribute some extremely dank monsters or something.

[chequers]

Are you going to contribute code? If not, what will you be contributing?

[Foobie Bletch]

Hopefully, we will at least end up with a magnificent trainwreck.

And yes, silly, I will be contributing code.

[Rast]

If you're going to fork Crawl, you should start with the current codebase because of all the QOL improvements.

[johlstei]

It's an interesting idea but I don't think it will work at all if you try to backport features rather than, uhh, "forwardport" them. I doubt I'd be willing to play without all the quality of life stuff from DCSS.

[Foobie Bletch]

The QoL features are the first things on the list to backport! Unless there have been some major overhauls in the codebase (have there been?) before those QoL improvements such that it's harder to backport those features rather than forwardport content, we're going the other way: Linley's Crawl is much better-documented.

[Implojin]

Unless there have been some major overhauls in the codebase (have there been?).

lol

[Foobie Bletch]

Unless there have been some major overhauls in the codebase (have there been?).

lol

Such that it's significantly easier to go one way than the other? With the state of the documentation of the more recent releases, going forward looks like a nightmare.

[tasonir]

It's not so much forwards/backwards that matters, it's that you're trying to readd several relatively small things (add MD back, add high elves, add boulder beetles) vs a much more nebulous idea of "port forward 5+ years* of active development". Can you even list all the things that have changed in 5 years? I mean, there's official change logs, but they don't cover everything. You're better off identifying what removals you want to revert, and just revert those.

I hope you enjoy solving merge conflicts, because I sure don't.

*Using 5 years here as roughly the timeframe since MD were removed, it's closer to 15 years since it split from linley's crawl, of course.

[Doesnt]

The current plan is to start by backporting features from early versions of Stone Soup onto Linley's Crawl, and expanding from there

what on earth

just take stone soup as it is now and tack the old things you want back on

[Foobie Bletch]

you're trying to readd several relatively small things

But I'm not.

I suppose I should have expressed this in the OP, but this is meant in part as a sort of return-to-the-roots of Crawl. It's not just a matter of conglomerating all the content that was removed. It's about taking the game as it was toward the beginning of its development and taking it in a different direction. Specifically, a direction that lets the player play the way they want to play and trusts the player to play the game in a way they personally find fun -- which is my biggest gripe with DCSS's development right now; it removes interesting things based on a highly subjective standard of tedium, which in effect says to players, "I don't enjoy this, so no one should be able to enjoy it." But remedying this is not simply a matter of adding back a bunch of squatted content. You're right that it would be easier to tack mountain dwarves back onto the current stable release of Crawl, but what about revisiting the concept of active skill allocation and the EXP pool? That would be a lot harder to transplant onto .19!

Realistically, the early phases of this project are going to involve studying the the changes between the source codes of different early versions, and collecting the features from those. "Backporting onto Linley's Crawl" will initially just mean tweaking 0.1, making nothing desirable was removed in that version, and then moving on to 0.2, and so on.

I realize that it'll be a lot of work. Why do you think I'm soliciting for developers?

[Shard1697]

but what about revisiting the concept of active skill allocation and the EXP pool? That would be a lot harder to transplant onto .19!

not to be too blunt but nobody will play this fork if it has oldschool victory-dancing style exp pool and all your work will be wasted

[chequers]

Removed features from ancient crawl and modern QoL fixes are going to be completely incompatible whatever you do. So whatever codebase you start with, getting the other features in will require coding them essentially from scratch.

I think it's worth defining more concretely what features you want from old and new crawl. You can make the fork you want, but the nostalgia branch and yiufcrawl fork exist which allow playing modern(ish) crawl with popular removed features. How is this project different?

[duvessa]

So you have an idea for a fork with extremely vague design goals that nobody else wants to play, and to top it off you want to base it on a terrible 15-year-old codebase that very few people are familiar with. Given that, how do you expect to persuade people to code it for you? Are you paying? This really seems like a pipe dream to me.

[watertreatmentRL]

If you don't have a coherent critical perspective on crawl, you're not going to come up with something better starting from crawl.

The popularity of these complaints about removing things that you see at the character creation screen gives you a clue of where this stuff comes from. "Food should be removed" is a perspective that comes from experience with the game, playing the game a lot, understanding what makes a difference and what doesn't in successful play. "I want to play as a dwarf" doesn't. It is not grounded in a mechanical critique or even in experience with the game. It is a statement about the imagination of the person making the complaint. It says that the imaginative aspect of playing as a dwarf outweighs the actual experience of the game, which is far from perfect and which you would think would inspire more penetrating criticism than "I wanted to be a dwarf" in a reasonably perceptive player. I have come to the conclusion, for myself, that this kind of complaint almost uniformly comes from a very surface level engagement with the game.

The OP brings up the idea of victory dancing as something worth revisiting. This is an idea that makes sense if you are in this imaginative mode where the important thing is feeling like you're in a dungeon doing real life dungeon stuff. It makes no sense from the perspective that you're a guy at a computer hitting keys and making progress in a single player game, not that different from a crossword puzzle or solitaire game. There's a way to make your skills do exactly what you want, it's just a question of how much knowledge of game mechanics and how much manual effort it takes to make it happen. It was correctly decided that you want those to be as minimal as possible, regardless of what impact this has on the highly imaginative player's ability to use ritual to reify their head canon of dungeoning. If anything would improve crawl, it would be further reducing the amount of manual micromanagement in skill training.

Both of these indicate a superficial perspective on crawl, which I would not expect to go anywhere. As others have noted, this crawl with more stuff, especially old stuff, exists and there appears to be little actual appetite for it, in spite of the fact that everywhere you go that crawl is discussed you see people whining about old removals, the devs' idea that they know what's fun better than anyone else, and whatever. That's an audience that seems big and vocal, but is actually engaging with the game at, again, a superficial level, doesn't really play, won't play a new fork. Unless you have an existing internet following and big ideas you're going to go out promoting, you will not reach anyone outside of the DCSS sphere of influence and the audience you will reach will be hardcore players, like the hellcrawl audience. They're not going to think the problem with the game is no ogre mages or stalkers.

[luckless]

This is an idea that makes sense if you are in this imaginative mode where the important thing is feeling like you're in a dungeon doing real life dungeon stuff. It makes no sense from the perspective that you're a guy at a computer hitting keys and making progress in a single player game, not that different from a crossword puzzle or solitaire game. There's a way to make your skills do exactly what you want, it's just a question of how much knowledge of game mechanics and how much manual effort it takes to make it happen.

Everything you say is true and important, and I agree with it.

That said, a really well-designed immersive roguelike a la Sil can be a wonderful experience (the first ten or so times you play it), in part because of its inefficiencies; from what I know of Linley's Dungeon Crawl it could conceivably have gone in that direction rather than the one it did. So in principle there's room for that sort of thing, hard though it is to actually accomplish (especially on a massive scale).

[tabstorm]

This is an idea that makes sense if you are in this imaginative mode where the important thing is feeling like you're in a dungeon doing real life dungeon stuff. It makes no sense from the perspective that you're a guy at a computer hitting keys and making progress in a single player game, not that different from a crossword puzzle or solitaire game. There's a way to make your skills do exactly what you want, it's just a question of how much knowledge of game mechanics and how much manual effort it takes to make it happen.

Everything you say is true and important, and I agree with it.

That said, a really well-designed immersive roguelike a la Sil can be a wonderful experience (the first ten or so times you play it), in part because of its inefficiencies; from what I know of Linley's Dungeon Crawl it could conceivably have gone in that direction rather than the one it did. So in principle there's room for that sort of thing, hard though it is to actually accomplish (especially on a massive scale).

in Sil the different races are explicitly difficulty levels, and the different houses have affinities that make you slightly biased towards certain skill sets over another. the main problem with it is that there isn't a ton of variety in ways to play, since it's focused on melee and there's only so many ways to bump into enemies. in Tolkein, Noldor were more powerful/wise than Sindar and Naugrim, and the Edain were the weakest and most easily killed, which you see in Sil - Noldor are good and Edain are really bad. the flavor and gameplay are coherent.

in Crawl the complaints about Mountain Dwarfs for example are purely due to wanting to imagine being a dwarf in the dungeon, since races aren't a difficulty level in quite the same way as they are in Sil. A given race might be terrible in one archetype but very good in a different archetype. In Crawl there are way more races than there are archetypes, so there is some redundancy. There's nothing wrong in principle with this sort of game where flavor is of great importance, but it seems like the opposite of what Crawl would be going for according to its design principles.

also, since you mentioned Sil, i like to use this comparison of Sil and DCSS:

Sil was developed from a bad game (Vanilla Angband is awful) and fixed up the gameplay into something good while making the interface even worse.
DCSS was developed from a bad game (Let's face it, the original pre-DCSS Crawl was not good at all) and fixed up the interface and some of the bad gameplay, while leaving other elements of it intact. For example, victory dancing, item destruction, and secret doors were removed, but we still have food and floor traps.

[TrumpTrain]

I want to contribute,

I am good with math and stats.

I took 2 courses on C++

How can I help?

[Sprucery]

(Let's face it, the original pre-DCSS Crawl was not good at all)

It was good at that time. It's just that DCSS is so much better. Pre-DCSS Crawl was still one of the best roguelikes of its time.

[stoneychips]

I would actually like to see some things added/reintroduced in the new-ish context (there's a lot I like about 0.17-0.20 too), although I'm not a coder and I'm not very good at parsing some of the arguments everyone is making here to be honest. I don't think my understanding of the game is purely superficial, unless the bar for that is winning an absolute large frequency of attempts or going to extended. (I rarely go to extended at all lately, but I'm also playing some more backgrounds that are forks, or which I just haven't pursued in the past.)

I'd be down for some new monsters, and trying an XP system that follows what players do in the game more and what listings they toggle for the future less. As it is, the game seems to assume people are making huge leaps of training for the future (if they wish) with things they may barely ever practice at any serious level on screen. All you have to do is pick up Shock and voila, go ahead now train 20 levels of Air and get your cloud spells down to 1% fail if you are now killing big enough mobs with your demon blade often enough. Karma is all you need, right? Someone will be along shortly to say "it's not good play" to be at all confused by this logic, but I would think an argument could be made that it would be a much simpler interface if one's future was more closely linked to one's past. There would still need to be some rationale for however people do get whatever "leaps" they are expected to make if it's not a totally rigid track for each skill... But perhaps there's another way to go about it than making all experience mostly fungible. And perhaps automatically bumping some base stats, or channeling a fraction into that "invisible track" that most of the successful players seem to follow for each species or background would save a lot of "Oh, drat, time to bump Fighting another 5 points cause everyone's saying I just need the HP for this next branch where suddenly mobs just hit sooo much harder and any half informed character in the world would have surely known that."

Is any of that what you're all arguing about already, or that just another insane set of thoughts? I'm not sure if it has anything to do with the whole "victory dance" business. I feel a bit forced to stick my neck out when people go insisting "no one" wants "any of it" in language I can barely understand from either side, though. Tosses up hands a little. There you are.

[Floodkiller]

-snip-

That is victory dancing in a nutshell, yes. When you earned experience by killing a monster, it was placed into a generic XP pool. From there, experience was allocated to skills as they were used; it was done this way because not every skill directly kills a monster (Traps & Doors, defensive skills, etc). The pool had a cap to prevent people from just gathering a bunch of experience and then dumping it into a single skill all at once (like your example of learning Shock and dumping all of your experience to instantly get cloud spells). In theory, this meant that players would spend experience as they gained it only on the skills they are actually using. In practice, it meant finding an easy monster to 'dance', or perform the skill-raising actions, in front of in order to ensure that you allocate all of your experience into the correct skills while also avoiding hitting the pool cap and wasting experience.

It wasn't necessary to do this to win the game. As long as you stuck to simplistic playstyles like heavy armor fighter or blaster mage you would still be fine, if not perfectly optimal, with the automated allocation. However, if you wanted to optimize your defenses to improve your chances of survival, use something new you found that you haven't already been using since the beginning of the game, or be able to use support spells that aren't cast nearly as often as a damage spell (Haste vs Fireball), dancing for victory was the way to go.

If this system is still interesting to you despite the above, you can have something similar to it in current Crawl. All you have to do is leave skill training on auto and never open your skill menu for anything (other than maybe checking skill numbers, but that might lead to frustration if you don't like how it is allocating things).

[johlstei]

you're trying to readd several relatively small things

But I'm not.

I suppose I should have expressed this in the OP, but this is meant in part as a sort of return-to-the-roots of Crawl. It's not just a matter of conglomerating all the content that was removed. It's about taking the game as it was toward the beginning of its development and taking it in a different direction. Specifically, a direction that lets the player play the way they want to play and trusts the player to play the game in a way they personally find fun -- which is my biggest gripe with DCSS's development right now; it removes interesting things based on a highly subjective standard of tedium, which in effect says to players, "I don't enjoy this, so no one should be able to enjoy it." But remedying this is not simply a matter of adding back a bunch of squatted content. You're right that it would be easier to tack mountain dwarves back onto the current stable release of Crawl, but what about revisiting the concept of active skill allocation and the EXP pool? That would be a lot harder to transplant onto .19!

Realistically, the early phases of this project are going to involve studying the the changes between the source codes of different early versions, and collecting the features from those. "Backporting onto Linley's Crawl" will initially just mean tweaking 0.1, making nothing desirable was removed in that version, and then moving on to 0.2, and so on.

I realize that it'll be a lot of work. Why do you think I'm soliciting for developers?

Active skill allocation would be easier to forwardport 0.20 than backporting half the things you need to make linley's crawl, well, any fun at all. The hardest part would be only having yourself to playtest it because nobody wants to use the exp pool.

[Shtopit]

Can't active skill allocation just be used through clicking "+" on a menu? It's not the best because you need to interrupt game flow, but better than how victory dancing sounds (back when it was still there, I played, but didn't know how it worked, so it didn't change the way I played). Or just having an interface that allows you to choose where to allocate your skills with exact percentage of your choice, and up to which level.

[Doesnt]

I decided to look through the Stone Soup changelog and list features I thought were Good Ideas over linley's crawl:

-You won't start the game with an ogre in LOS.
-Reaching is no longer a special brand and instead is a property of all polearms. It also does not cost MP or hunger to utilize.
-Okawaru and Trog give ammunition, allowing full-ranged builds.
-Controlled Blink isn't a level 4 spell anymore (what)
-Sif Muna is now much less mediocre than it once was; channeling used to be in Vehumet's domain, leaving Sif with just miscast protection, amnesia, and books. Also, you lost piety for miscasting.
-Scrolls of immolation are now scrolls of fun tactical shenanigans instead of just hurting the player.
-The hassle of dealing with brown chunks that randomly sicken you for no benefit is no more.
-Axes cleave now. Long blades do...their thing that makes them look like distinct weapons instead of being maces that can butcher.
-Lugonu, the god of the abyss, and its associated class Abyssal Knight. Abyss in general has been given a bunch of tweaks.
-Demigods, Centaurs, and Ogres don't have to eat constantly without actually being any better at eating.
-Trog's book burning shtick and most of its current abilities; old Trog was boring and just gave you Berserk, Might, and Haste.
-Nemelexites aren't expected to haul everything in the dungeon back to the temple.
-Beogh exists.
-Annoying mechanical traps are much, much less common. No more randomly losing a promising run because of a blade trap.
-Player ghosts are able to cast most spells instead of just some of them. They also don't do absurd things like cast Torment.
-Scroll of fog, a tactical option for blocking line of sight.
-Vampires as a playable race.
-The confusing mess of hand-and-a-half weapons is simplified into just one-handed and two-handed weapons.
-Enchantments split means the best hexers aren't also the best buffers, and vice-versa, making both types of character distinct and thus more interesting (in theory anyway, rip charms).
-Randart spellbooks, which open up different paths for casters to grow.
-Deep Dwarf race. This probably shouldn't be on the list though tbh, it was a bad idea
-Artificer background, which has a rather unique earlygame.
-Orb of Destruction, an oddly satisfying attack spell, exists.
-Shoals and Spider's Nest branches; old crawl just had Swamp and Snake. Its version of Swamp was also radically different; levels were much less like what we have now and more like big rooms of randomly placed water.
-Slime creatures can now fuse, thus making them more than just a yak recolor.
-Ugly things now come in colors and change colors and are fast, making them more than just a yak recolor.
-Jiyva, god of all things slimy and lord of the Slime Pits. The only god the player can kill.
-Fedhas, no wait this was a bad addition
-Cheibriados, god of slowness; encourages followers to take it easy.
-Overflow altars open up fun decisions with god choice.
-Basically everything nice about the local tiles interface.
-A bunch of cool spells: Passage of Golubria (basically a weak portal gun), Malign Gateway (summon tentacle), Tornado (what it says on the tin), Darkness (reduces LOS for everyone on the level).
-Hellfire/Damnation ignores AC, making it the scary thing it is.
-No more chain paralysis, thank god.
-Ashenzari, god of divinations and curses.
-Felids, a literal cat race.
-i'm only like halfway through the changelog zzzzz do you really want to add all of this back or think it's worth removing outright

[Siegurt]

I decided to look through the Stone Soup changelog and list features I thought were Good Ideas over linley's crawl:

-You won't start the game with an ogre in LOS.
-Reaching is no longer a special brand and instead is a property of all polearms. It also does not cost MP or hunger to utilize.
-Okawaru and Trog give ammunition, allowing full-ranged builds.
-Controlled Blink isn't a level 4 spell anymore (what)
-Sif Muna is now much less mediocre than it once was; channeling used to be in Vehumet's domain, leaving Sif with just miscast protection, amnesia, and books. Also, you lost piety for miscasting.
-Scrolls of immolation are now scrolls of fun tactical shenanigans instead of just hurting the player.
-The hassle of dealing with brown chunks that randomly sicken you for no benefit is no more.
-Axes cleave now. Long blades do...their thing that makes them look like distinct weapons instead of being maces that can butcher.
-Lugonu, the god of the abyss, and its associated class Abyssal Knight. Abyss in general has been given a bunch of tweaks.
-Demigods, Centaurs, and Ogres don't have to eat constantly without actually being any better at eating.
-Trog's book burning shtick and most of its current abilities; old Trog was boring and just gave you Berserk, Might, and Haste.
-Nemelexites aren't expected to haul everything in the dungeon back to the temple.
-Beogh exists.
-Annoying mechanical traps are much, much less common. No more randomly losing a promising run because of a blade trap.
-Player ghosts are able to cast most spells instead of just some of them. They also don't do absurd things like cast Torment.
-Scroll of fog, a tactical option for blocking line of sight.
-Vampires as a playable race.
-The confusing mess of hand-and-a-half weapons is simplified into just one-handed and two-handed weapons.
-Enchantments split means the best hexers aren't also the best buffers, and vice-versa, making both types of character distinct and thus more interesting (in theory anyway, rip charms).
-Randart spellbooks, which open up different paths for casters to grow.
-Deep Dwarf race. This probably shouldn't be on the list though tbh, it was a bad idea
-Artificer background, which has a rather unique earlygame.
-Orb of Destruction, an oddly satisfying attack spell, exists.
-Shoals and Spider's Nest branches; old crawl just had Swamp and Snake. Its version of Swamp was also radically different; levels were much less like what we have now and more like big rooms of randomly placed water.
-Slime creatures can now fuse, thus making them more than just a yak recolor.
-Ugly things now come in colors and change colors and are fast, making them more than just a yak recolor.
-Jiyva, god of all things slimy and lord of the Slime Pits. The only god the player can kill.
-Fedhas, no wait this was a bad addition
-Cheibriados, god of slowness; encourages followers to take it easy.
-Overflow altars open up fun decisions with god choice.
-Basically everything nice about the local tiles interface.
-A bunch of cool spells: Passage of Golubria (basically a weak portal gun), Malign Gateway (summon tentacle), Tornado (what it says on the tin), Darkness (reduces LOS for everyone on the level).
-Hellfire/Damnation ignores AC, making it the scary thing it is.
-No more chain paralysis, thank god.
-Ashenzari, god of divinations and curses.
-Felids, a literal cat race.
-i'm only like halfway through the changelog zzzzz do you really want to add all of this back or think it's worth removing outright

Don't forget no longer needing to wield a bladed weapon to create chunks!

[stoneychips]

-snip-

...
If this system is still interesting to you despite the above, you can have something similar to it in current Crawl. All you have to do is leave skill training on auto and never open your skill menu for anything (other than maybe checking skill numbers, but that might lead to frustration if you don't like how it is allocating things).

A weird thing about the training system, is it seems to be based on whatever you happen to have in inventory as much as what you actually use. For example, if you pick up a wand and don't turn off Evocations, boom you are training it. I'm not sure how many things this holds true for -- is it as many classes of item as you pick up? But again, the system doesn't seem concerned with what you're actually practicing in this sense either.

I don't know if there's some elegant compromise that would both allow players to choose a substantial chunk of their own futures (pick some things they've rarely used to "study" simultaneously per the current model, when desired) and reward actually being practiced in some things too. I'd like to think so but it feels to me like that's been dismissed either out of hand (in one angle, with the excuse that "we're game players, not characters never mind all the references to character" ahem), or because no one has gotten it to work out. I don't know.

I'd like to think it should be possible to remove a bit of the tedium of say, training Fighting or Spellcasting for the first few levels on classes that are obviously going to need them. How many casters really get by with less than 4-5 spellcasting by D:8/Lair? How many melee types don't want at least 5 weapon skill or 5 fighting, or both by then? Yet everyone is apparently supposed to "put in their time" and manually scale up to that in a focused way. Or when they don't, experienced players tend to jump on them in droves, "Omg drop everything and train that up NOW!" What am I missing here? Perhaps a bit more of this could be built in since so many people do regularly insist that it's almost always minimal. And perhaps there are other common "track" pursuits that could be added to the regular progression, without disrupting the feel of having control over one's future too much -- indeed, rather freeing up time to actually experience more of it.

[ZipZipskins]

expanding from there -- yes, expanding, there will be a bias toward adding rather than taking away.

Ohhh you mean like DCSS, I get it now