My first vaults - feedback

[forest]

Hello

I have noticed cool feedback that lasty got on vaults contribution few weeks ago, so I told myself to give it a try. Even though i tried to do as much work by myself, looking stuff up, there are few things I cannot solve. I started with simple idea for orc entry vaults - a stream flowing around the mines that carries away some gold coins to be washed by player.

  Code:

NAME: orc_gold_pond
TAGS: orc_entry no_monster_gen
ORIENT: float
KFEAT: 0 = enter_orcish_mines
KFEAT: ? = W
KFEAT: ! = W
KITEM: ? = gold q:1 / gold q:2 / gold q:3 / nothing w:40
KITEM: ! = gold q:1 / gold q:2 / gold q:3 / nothing w:20
MAP
             XXXXX
      XX    XXwwwX
     WWXX   XwwXXX
   WWWWWXXXXXwXX         
 WWWWWWW!XXXWWX                 
WWWWW!!!!!XX?0X             
WW!!!!!!?????XX           
 !!!!??????XXX                 
  !???????XX                     
   ??????XX                   
    ??XXXX                     
ENDMAP


NAME: orc_gold_river
TAGS: orc_entry no_monster_gen no_item_gen
ORIENT: float
KFEAT: 0 = enter_orcish_mines
KFEAT: ? = W
KFEAT: ! = w
KFEAT: 1 = W
KMONS: 1 = orc band / orc warrior band
KITEM: ? = gold q:1 / gold q:2 / gold q:3 / nothing w:40
KITEM: ! = gold q:1 / gold q:2 / gold q:3 / nothing w:40
MAP
        XXXXXXX                         
      XXX???!!XX                       
    1?X???????!XX      XXXX               
  X1?????XXXX??!X     XX!!XXXXXX       
  X?!!XXXXXXX???XX    X!???XXwwXX     
  XX!!!XXXXXXXX??X   XX!?X??XXwwXXXXXX 
 XX!!!!XXXXXXX???XX XX??XX??XXXwwwwwwXXX
XX!!!!!!XXXXXX???XXXXX??XX!??XXXXXXXw?0X
X!!!!!!!!XXXX??XXXXXX??XXXX??XXXXXXX1?XX
X!!!!!!!!!XX!?XXXXX???XX X??XXXXX???1XX
XX!!!!!!!!XXX!???????XX  X!????????XXX
 XX!!!!!!XXXXX!!???XXX   XX!???XXXXX
  XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX     XXXXXXX
ENDMAP


1) there are tons of remarks on wiki, that when designing vaults with water/lava, no_monster_gen is a must. I could not find out why. I guess I would not mind a fish in the river.
2) Testing the vaults is kinda hard. I have to go to wiz mode, then generate the vault, do magic mapping, CTeleport in the vault. If I want to see another generation, I have to reset the level and repeat the commands. What I would love to see, if there is some command, the will regenerate the level, keeping the same vaults - it would be handy, especially for begginers to vault to have, you could interactively see what SUBST, NSUBST, KITEM, ... and other headers does.
3) is there a command in wiz mode to turn of the "fog of war"? To have "scrying" on whole map
4) I seem to be repeating lost of code... such as gold quantities... is this ok?
5) orc_gold_river features some gold that is in deep water. I thought it was thematic. However, the parser does not appretiate it, complaining about buggy item placement. I can remove it from the deep water, no problem, I was just curious if there is a way to tell him, this is not a bug, but a feature;).
6) Both vaults were designed playing with ASCII in Gedit editor. I was wondering what editor do you use? Or are you using some app that is designed for vault creation?

EDIT: (thanks for the feedback)
7) I have some saves in the wiz mode (with my vault) and I made some changes in tha vault file. Now, any attempt to load the save ends with core dump crash (SIGSEGV). How do I remove the saves from filesystem? (Its kinda annoying to see two save on main screen that I cannot load)
(SOLVED - found them in home directory)

Thanks for any feedback

[nicolae]

1) there are tons of remarks on wiki, that when designing vaults with water/lava, no_monster_gen is a must. I could not find out why. I guess I would not mind a fish in the river.

It's a must for entry vaults, and also for vaults where water monsters would be unthematic (like the Temple), but if your vault would not be ruined by a fish, lava fish, or electric eel, might as well go nuts.

2) Testing the vaults is kinda hard. I have to go to wiz mode, then generate the vault, do magic mapping, CTeleport in the vault. If I want to see another generation, I have to reset the level and repeat the commands. What I would love to see, if there is some command, the will regenerate the level, keeping the same vaults - it would be handy, especially for begginers to vault to have, you could interactively see what SUBST, NSUBST, KITEM, ... and other headers does.

There's a command to generate a level around a vault, I think it's &Ctrl P. You can also use &L to place a vault, or use a PLACE: or WEIGHT: 50000 directive in the vault definition. It's a pain but you get used to it. That said, a command to make this much easier would be nice (for instance, a command to reload the map definitions so I don't have to restart Crawl every time I tweak the vault...)

3) is there a command in wiz mode to turn of the "fog of war"? To have "scrying" on whole map

There's &Ctrl V which scries in your LoS but I don't think there's one that does the whole map.

4) I seem to be repeating lost of code... such as gold quantities... is this ok?

You can combine KFEAT and KITEM directives, I think:
KFEAT: ?! = W
KITEM: ?! = gold q:1 / gold q:2 / gold q:3 / nothing w:40

[galehar]

When generating the vault with &L, put an * before the vault name to generate it at your position.

[claws]

Of course, if you use &L(*) then one doesn't see the level builder build around the vault, monsters already present will end up inside walls (although this is probably a bug to fix), and random generation won't actually place anything in the vault. &^P for level re-building currently crashes on mini-vaults because nobody wants to bother to make a mantis issue about it or patch/commit so that wizmode just refuses or skips minivaults and thus one probably should manually reload crawl stuff if they want to see more accurate representations of vaults or whatever (although I'm possibly the only kind of vaultmaker meticulous enough about minivaults to do this sort of thing).

Other random thoughts about stuff in this topic because these totally end up going over well in other feedback places:
The generic water monsters are frustratingly designed and need lots of improvement; big fish and goldfish hit hard for the earliest levels but don't actually kill anybody properly excercising caution, electric eels being ranged but locked down in movement resembles making a more acceptable but equally annoying early statue, jellyfish are harmless, and the lava monsters combine the previous problems with item destruction further de-incentivizing fighting them. Even accepting these faults in circumstances where these "threats" are acceptable, few vaults should let the level builder spam these all over any given pond when only a few would work, too.

I test vaults in local tiles builds almost solely because with a little macroing and added tiles information seeing what a vault looks like is much faster with the ability to interpret tiles combined with actual monster or wall-make-up; I'd still kill for wizmode X to show stuff like detected monsters beyond glyph, or a detect items similar to &D detecting creatures. You'll just have to get used to looking through vaults more manually for now, I guess, give or take stuff like macroing &*R&D&}&{&*E (reset level, detect monsters, detect traps, map out floor, state which vaults the floor built with).

I'm not going to say anything about trying to place items in deep water where only spoiled fedhas players or two species would notice it and gain from it (even if the gains are absolutely minimal): a lot of the time, despite my griping, Crawl's limitations have reasons behind them (and one can't work around it forever, obviously). I don't want to blather on about design philosophy, but there's no worthwhile gain from deep water gold compared to a little shallow water gold that works as is.

[tsarwash]

I have not noticed a lot of vaults for the Orc Mines, and think that more of them would make the portal less predictable and more interesting.

One idea that I just had, (and I'm sure that I'm not the first), would be for a graveyard, mortuary within the level somewhere. You could just fill it with Orc, Goblin and Hobgoblin zombies, and scattered gravestones and such, along with altars to the Orc god, (maybe a Hungary Ghost too.) Perhaps some of the Orcs could be buried with some of their best treasures, and perhaps the vault could be walled in, so that you would need to dig to find it. If it had stone walls, you would need to dig around until you found the entrance.

[mumra]

4) I seem to be repeating lost of code... such as gold quantities... is this ok?

You can combine KFEAT and KITEM directives, I think:
KFEAT: ?! = W
KITEM: ?! = gold q:1 / gold q:2 / gold q:3 / nothing w:40

The question is, do you really need to be specifying gold quantities? You could just let the rng choose.

A good editor is VIM, there is a syntax highlighting file available for it for des files. There should be some more information on this in the documentation.

[nicolae]

The question is, do you really need to be specifying gold quantities? You could just let the rng choose.

Not usually, no, though occasionally if I want to give the impression of a few scattered coins (like, say, coins tossed into a fountain) I'll specify tiny amounts.

[mumra]

Ah right yeah I guess it makes sense for the "gold river" theme!