Clouds and LOS

[Bim]

I'm currently mid way through designing a Dwarven branch, having done most of the tiles and mapping (for the bottom level), I wanted to add a few extras to make it interesting.
Firstly, I was wondering how to make clouds (like round the swamp) appear, I'd like these to be non-harmful but just to add the 'smokey' feel of a dwarven forge. I'd also like for the final level, to have -2 LOS (being very deep down). I'm afraid I'm just not sure how to put these in at all, so any help would be appreciated.

Sorry if this has been answered elsewhere!!

[mumra]

Hi Bim, don't know if you already found your answer, but you can use an LUA fog machine to generate clouds - this is actually covered in the advanced.txt file in the level design documentation (I believe).

However; there are a couple of things you should be thinking about regarding what you are building.

1. Existing work - there's already been a lot of work and discussion around dwarven branches. Just look on the dev wiki (https://crawl.develz.org/wiki/doku.php?id=dcss:issue:2359 and https://crawl.develz.org/wiki/doku.php?id=dcss:brainstorm:dungeon:branch:dwarf:dwarven_fortress). It seems to me from some of this that a lot of development has already been done, but I can't find seem to find the fork, and nothing seems to have happened in the last year. You might want to contact some relevant people and find out the current status of that work, so you can contribute your level design to that, instead of trying to get a whole branch started by yourself (which is a lot more difficult than simply mapping just one level).

2. Crawl branch development cycle. The devs do not typically want to insert an entire branch fully completed into the game. Instead, ideas are first developed as "Portal" vaults - Spiders Nest is a very current example of this. Once the portal is well developed and deemed balanced and interesting enough to expand to a full branch, things might go that way. So you should perhaps be looking at creating a number of smallish and interesting portal vaults around this theme and getting some feedback on them, I think you'd be much more likely to get something into the game on a reasonable timescale that way.

[Roderic]

About the cloud generator, I don't find documentation ot interpret each argument of the function. As I've figured out by trial the minimum size is a 3x3 area. Is not possible to locate a cloud column in a single cell ? It would be interesting to have fires or other gases located for decorative or even strategic purposes.

[dpeg]

syntax.txt has a sample cloud generator, and gives a pointer where you can find more information (the header of dat/dlua/lm_fog.lua).
By the way, I found this by a plain: grep "cloud" * in the docs/levels/ folder