Vaults Vanquisher
Posts: 454
Joined: Thursday, 1st November 2018, 02:33
rethinking layouts
What I want to talk about is how to make good layouts from dcss layouts. I understand layouts have not been a focus of development for a number of years and perhaps institutional knowledge about the technical side of it has declined, but my view is that crawl layouts are generally too big and too intricate. They rely too heavily on narrow chokepoints, 1-tile hallways, straight lines and boxes. They tend to go for "aesthetics" or "feel" over tactical interest and variety. What they get right is generally technical stuff like connectivity or just writing something down. The good ones are usually based on noise functions and the "ruin" effect applied to simple, open layouts (think lair layouts).
My view and attitude is that simple transformations can turn these overwrought, repetitive, easily-exploited art projects into something more varied and organic, with fewer exploitable features (narrow chokes, 1-tile halls, circuits).
For example, take those "loops" layouts with the weird diamond-shaped hallway junctions (highly exploitable). What if we took one quadrant of one of those, cut off hallways leaving that quadrant, and scaled it up by a factor of 2, then applied the lair ruin effect to round off corners and break things up? No more weird diagonal halls, larger, less intricate features, few or no 1-tile chokepoints. I think this would be an improvement.
Or suppose we have a satisfactory layout and we just want to make it smaller. How about just cutting out a quadrant of it or maybe two half quadrants out of opposite corners, filling in with walls or decorative, no-entry vaults? This addresses the size issue.
Do you have one weird trick that reduces the floor space, generally busy-ness, incidence of 1-tile halls and chokes, and circuitousness of a generic crawl layout? Sound off in the comments.