The Tavern

duvessa wrote:tome4 mechanics tier list

SS: admins can read from and write to any file on your computer as long as you're logged in in-game

duvessa wrote:Yes. The lead developer refuses to acknowledge it for obvious reasons, but I assure you it is true. This capability was only added after many years of development, so I think he originally really did intend to just make a game, and eventually decided that making it into malware could be a great way to get more money (or just for kicks, or maybe he's just so stupid that he doesn't realize this is a bad thing, hell if I know).

duvessa wrote:Yes. The lead developer refuses to acknowledge it for obvious reasons, but I assure you it is true. This capability was only added after many years of development, so I think he originally really did intend to just make a game, and eventually decided that making it into malware could be a great way to get more money (or just for kicks, or maybe he's just so stupid that he doesn't realize this is a bad thing, hell if I know).

duvessa wrote:The game allows the server to send an arbitrary string that gets executed as Lua code, and its environment has access to file read and write functions and the socket library that allows making HTTP connections. The relevant code is in web.c:

duvessa wrote:The game allows the server to send an arbitrary string that gets executed as Lua code, and its environment has access to file read and write functions and the socket library that allows making HTTP connections. The relevant code is in web.c:

  Code:

                case TE4_WEB_EVENT_RUN_LUA:
                        if (!luaL_loadstring(he_L, event->data.run_lua.code)) {
                                docall(he_L, 0, 0);
                        } else {
                                printf("[WEBCORE] Failed to run lua code:\n%s\n ==>> Error: %s\n", event->data.run_lua.code, lua_tostring(he_L, -1));
                                lua_pop(he_L, 1);
                        }
                        break;

docall:

  Code:

int docall (lua_State *L, int narg, int nret)
{
#if 1
        int status;
        int base = lua_gettop(L) - narg;  /* function index */
//      printf("<===%d (%d)\n", base, narg);
        lua_pushcfunction(L, traceback);  /* push traceback function */
        lua_insert(L, base);  /* put it under chunk and args */
        status = lua_pcall(L, narg, nret, base);
        lua_remove(L, base);  /* remove traceback function */
        /* force a complete garbage collection in case of errors */
        if (status != 0) { lua_pop(L, 1); lua_gc(L, LUA_GCCOLLECT, 0); }
//      printf(">===%d (%d) [%d]\n", lua_gettop(L), nret, status);
        if (lua_gettop(L) != nret + (base - 1))
        {
                stackDump(L);
//              assert(0);
                lua_settop(L, base);
        }
        return status;
#else
        int status=0;
        int base = lua_gettop(L) - narg;  /* function index */
        lua_call(L, narg, nret);
        return status;
#endif
}

This is also experimentally demonstrated by taking a look at your save file after a special event like Bearscape occurs.

Blomdor wrote:Nobody has mentioned the sole occupant of SSS tier.

Mimics. The most fascinating feature in all of Crawl's distinguished history. Whenever you read the words, "The foo chuckles and vanishes in a puff of smoke!", you feel such a rush of satisfaction at seeing this *wonderfully* interesting phenomenon. They're even more interesting than food, which is quite an achievement, since everyone should know that the primary goal of Crawl is to ultimately decide whether to eat a bread ration or a royal jelly. Ghosts, pah. Ghosts are so very wonderfully excellent in their interestingness, yes, but they would be nothing without food and mimics.

To run for an ice cave, only for it to chortle and disappear with a magnificent "poof!", then to read the message "You need to eat something NOW!!!", and then to open that most glorious of menus to decide the greatest question in the game between bread, meat, jelly, or fruit; to do all of these truly admirable and interesting things while being chased by someone's generic MiBe ghost...that, ladies and gentlemen, is the pinnacle of Crawl perfection.

I have my own tier list for them.

S+: Portal mimics.
S: Food shop mimics.
A: Other shop mimics.
B: Item mimics.
C: Staircase mimics.
D: Fountain mimics.
E: Rune mimics.

severen wrote:When ever I try to play normal crawl after doing some hellcrawl I always wind up stopping due to:

Food/hunger
Identification, curses/ashenzari

These things are burdensome in an aboslutely un-fun way and are extremely un-interesting. Chop corpse, eat, chop corpse, eat. Over and over. I have almost never played a character that is seriously truly limited by food either. Ichand curses are also uninteresting I just wind up being very conservative about what to use and it just limits my tactical/strategic options. These features have extremely significant and extremely repetitive gameplay weight (i.e you are dealing with them all the time), they have no particuarly useful effect on the overall game (i know in theory the food clock has a purpose, but in a practical sense it does very very little), and there is no interesting thought process to deal with them (you just continuously keep eating chunks or store your food or you just save your ID scrolls, that is it). You never bother trying to find that +5 scimitar because it has no brand and there is just too much clutter and not enough ID scrolls to ever make it worth while, it is literally a dead end. You might as well never bother even spawning the +5 scimitar because eventually I will find a +2 branded scimitar and just enchant it up. In hellcrawl when ID and curse is remvoed I am actually presented with much more nuanced equipment decisions, even though both weapons and scrolls are in more limited supply.

The other stuff is arguable or doesn't bug me so much (yes stair dancing is problematic but it doesn't make the game annoying to play for almost no good effect.)

duvessa wrote:nethack mechanics tier list
A: using helm of opposite alignment swapping to carry cross-aligned quest artifacts

watertreatmentRL wrote:I believe he is saying that he finds id and curses so obnoxious that he does not want to expose himself to them by doing things like wear-id'ing the large numbers of potentially useful items that generate, so he operates under the knowledge that his game suffers relative to someone who, like yourself apparently, has an unlimited tolerance for such tedious gameplay.

For myself, I did a soft version of this. I did not check out the vast majority of potentially useful items until I'd reached a late stage in the game and found my equipment sufficiently lacking that going back through that stuff felt prudent. Of course, the resources are almost always there to check as you go, but it's so disruptive of the flow of the game and the benefits generally so marginal that I would rather not deal with it. Body armor is the main culprit here.

I've started to find a more subtle behavior annoying in hellcrawl. In spite of the removal of corpses and a lot of monster equipment, it is still common to produce piles of items when you kill something like an orc sorceror which often produces a good robe. It would be really nice not to have to read a listing of the items in the pile to know what dropped or face wasted piety autotraveling back after clearing the level. I suspect item splashing would fix this issue though. Even better would be more intelligent autopickup to grab potentially useful items like this and progressively destroy obsolete ones.

severen wrote:

watertreatmentRL wrote:I believe he is saying that he finds id and curses so obnoxious that he does not want to expose himself to them by doing things like wear-id'ing the large numbers of potentially useful items that generate, so he operates under the knowledge that his game suffers relative to someone who, like yourself apparently, has an unlimited tolerance for such tedious gameplay.

For myself, I did a soft version of this. I did not check out the vast majority of potentially useful items until I'd reached a late stage in the game and found my equipment sufficiently lacking that going back through that stuff felt prudent. Of course, the resources are almost always there to check as you go, but it's so disruptive of the flow of the game and the benefits generally so marginal that I would rather not deal with it. Body armor is the main culprit here.

I've started to find a more subtle behavior annoying in hellcrawl. In spite of the removal of corpses and a lot of monster equipment, it is still common to produce piles of items when you kill something like an orc sorceror which often produces a good robe. It would be really nice not to have to read a listing of the items in the pile to know what dropped or face wasted piety autotraveling back after clearing the level. I suspect item splashing would fix this issue though. Even better would be more intelligent autopickup to grab potentially useful items like this and progressively destroy obsolete ones.

Yeah pretty much.
Checking every little thing is a waste of my time. The fact that Siegert thinks that being able to trivially, eventually, find the nature of a weapon actually proves the whole things a pointless waste of time. Mostly similar for chunks. Sure you can autobutcher etc. and hit o etc but you do get stretches where you just don't generate a corpse or whatever and need to start managing hunger etc. Its an annoying distraction that, in practice, almost never limits my actually real gameplay at all. There are only some fairly small number of corner cases where it matters, granted its very important for those small set of cases. But overall they are both of trivial use while also being significantly annoying. I mean you can easily get nagged about hunger every 30 seconds (real time) and in a place like Spider lair where most corpses are in edible this get to be rather tedious and annoying. Its like playing a game while a toddler pokes you in the arm and keeps asking you questions about inane stuff (except I am far more inclined to be patient with a toddler and at least they are usually cute).

Shtopit wrote:How does distortion interact with id?

duvessa wrote:now that i think about it, the tome tier list should probably include "the author's obsession with injecting his forced impregnation fetish in as many places as possible"

charlatan wrote:

duvessa wrote:now that i think about it, the tome tier list should probably include "the author's obsession with injecting his forced impregnation fetish in as many places as possible"

wait what

duvessa wrote:nethack mechanics tier list

SS: writing down the unidentified descriptions of items in case a mind flayer attacks you
S: elbereth
A: using helm of opposite alignment swapping to carry cross-aligned quest artifacts
B: jousting
C: wresting one last wish from a wand
D: whatever that supposedly abusable lava bug was, man I wish I had figured out how to abuse that

KoboldLord wrote:Pet management should probably move to a prominent space on this list now, not sure why it wasn't already there.

in a place like Spider lair where most corpses are in edible this get to be rather tedious and annoying.

After long discussion, we came to the conclusion that inedible
chunks are an experiment worth trying, at least for a week or so.

bel wrote:

in a place like Spider lair where most corpses are in edible this get to be rather tedious and annoying.

I can't believe DCSS still has "poisonous corpses are inedible" feature. It's been, what, 2 years? I do believe that it's that way purely out of spite.