Portal Sounds Ignore Walls


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Post Sunday, 23rd July 2017, 18:03

Portal Sounds Ignore Walls

This is classified as "nearby":

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But the portal is actually not accessible from this room. You need to make a long detour through a couple of corridors.

Image

Is it supposed to happen? It's quite irritating, I thought sound strength depended on walkable distance, not just absolute distance.
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Post Sunday, 23rd July 2017, 20:56

Re: Portal Sounds Ignore Walls

Portal messages aren't actual sounds. They don't make any noise.
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Post Sunday, 23rd July 2017, 21:08

Re: Portal Sounds Ignore Walls

OK, but the problem is the same: I thought that portal hints were based on travel distance, not absolute distance. (That's what I meant by the imprecise expression "sound strength", the proximity messages as nearby - distant - v. distant).
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Post Sunday, 23rd July 2017, 21:14

Re: Portal Sounds Ignore Walls

Well, that's how they're coded to work, and how they've worked for a very very long time, whether it's a good thing or not is debatable
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Post Sunday, 23rd July 2017, 23:25

Re: Portal Sounds Ignore Walls

Ah, OK, thank you. I must have usually been lucky enough to find them in vaults connected to the rooms I was in, and not have noticed how they really work.
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bel

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Post Monday, 24th July 2017, 05:16

Re: Portal Sounds Ignore Walls

The way it works right now, indicating grid distance, is probably better: you can figure out "it's on the other side of this wall", say. Walkable distance doesn't make much sense because you don't know what path it is using to calculate the distance, which makes the message much less useful.

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Post Monday, 24th July 2017, 08:07

Re: Portal Sounds Ignore Walls

bel wrote:Walkable distance doesn't make much sense because you don't know what path it is using to calculate the distance, which makes the message much less useful.


Yes you do, it would use the shortest path.
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bel

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Post Monday, 24th July 2017, 09:01

Re: Portal Sounds Ignore Walls

Yes, but you don't know what direction you want to head to follow the shortest path, or where the end point of the path is.

I don't want to claim that the information about the shortest path is completely useless, but it's probably less useful (or at least less intuitive) than the current way (for the reason I gave).

Of course, my intuition could be wrong: in principle, there's an easy way to test it. Generate a few hundred levels, and ask people to find the portal with the two different methods, and see how quickly they find the portal on average.

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Post Monday, 24th July 2017, 21:43

Re: Portal Sounds Ignore Walls

What's really annoying is when "the other side" means going around half the level in some long corridor, or going down to Orc: 2 just to cross a spot where there's one or two squares of wall in the way above (and no digging handy).

I've come to understand it works this way, but I think it's counter-intuitive and sometimes frustrating too.
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Post Tuesday, 25th July 2017, 14:33

Re: Portal Sounds Ignore Walls

It would be entertaining in some ways if portals made actual crawl-noise that would be loud enough to be heard across the level, but also you really, really don't want that to be how it works as long as portals are timed.

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Post Tuesday, 25th July 2017, 14:35

Re: Portal Sounds Ignore Walls

I always assumed it was grid distance. If I were in the SE corner and was told the portal is "very distant" then I would make a beeline NW, ignoring a tunnel that went back to an unexplored area also in the SE corner. On the other hand if I were told the portal was "nearby" and I was all out of explorable black without going a long way around, I would consider using a few charges of digging.

If textual "you hear" messages were actual crawl noise, then assassins would be waking up their prey every time they equipped a dagger of electrocution.
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Post Tuesday, 25th July 2017, 15:01

Re: Portal Sounds Ignore Walls

When you're far from the portal, shortest path distance is going to be a lot like grid distance. When you're close [e: in grid distance], they'll often be very different. The situation shown in the OP where you're very close in grid distance and very far in path distance, sometimes so far you can't get there in time, is annoying. Whether you get this situation is more a matter of chance than "technique."

It seems to me that the purpose of these timed vaults would be better achieved with an indication of distance and direction to go to pursue the shortest path. For example, it could compute a minimal path and tell you the direction in which to go to get some number of steps closer to the portal along that path, maybe with that number varying with proximity. If necessary, knock the amount of time down to compensate so that you have a good idea where to go and you actually have to do it fast.

There's a deeper problem here which is that non-encompass crawl levels have no logical structure. (Even some encompass vaults are questionable.) It's like watching snow on an old TV. Random, never repeating, yet all the same. Trying to shoehorn an element of manual exploration "technique" into this picture fails because there's nothing interesting going on in dungeon generation in the first place.
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Post Monday, 31st July 2017, 17:46

Re: Portal Sounds Ignore Walls

Maybe we could have something like Gozag's drops of gold leading in the general direction of the portal, scattered with some randomness but likely to not always be quite in sight of each other, getting more dense or spread over a bunch more local squares (but therefore also slightly more confusing) as they got closer to the portal.

It could be stones, a few rocks and an occasional axe /flail/staff for the Labyrinth, red potions (no need for the contents to be anything particular) and the occasional scroll of immolation for the Volcano, glaciated regular level monsters (which melt if you hang around too long after seeing them) and a few darts of sleeping/paralysis for the Ice Cave... If only Fedhas had its own theme branch, we could have fruits and maybe even a few M&Ms.

You do realize this was all an excuse for the M&M trail, don't you. But actually I think there might be something to this. Clues that have more logic to them and might not all be permanent, even if they aren't noise per se?
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