The Tavern

It's been like this forever, but it's a most mind-boggling design decision. IMO down-stairs in the top right corner should bring you to up-stairs in the top right corner. Same for trapdoors/springdoors and shafts.

Not all maps are equally sized or shaped.

So that you don't know where stairs will go.

I'd suggest you try coding a patch that makes staircase locations consistent, yet retains the complexity and variation of Crawl's current level generation.

I suspect that if you require the positions to match only up to a distance of 8 or so, this is not a hard thing to do. Not that I'm even mildly interested in trying it.

It's much easier to code, and it is better for level design in almost every way. Forcing the stairwells to match up on the xy axes would serve no useful purpose and would ruin the vast majority of vaults that involve stairwells that go in either direction. The only possible argument in favor would be an argument for simulationism, and even that would be a weak argument because real stairwells carved through cave networks can twist around as much as they need to before they get to the next set of usable space. It doesn't work like a house, which has an upper level intentionally built directly on top of a lower level with as little waste space as possible. When you're digging through pre-existing limestone caves or the like, you take what cavities you get no matter what your access tunnels end up having to do.

OK, the mystery of "where will I end up?" is gone right after you've peeked through the three down-staircases. Case closed.

A normal person can keep a rough multi-floor layout in their mind. Intuitive stair functionality (ie matching stairs) lets players plan a trek that visits unnecessary floors (e.g. D:5 to D:3 via D:2) to save time or avoid exclusion zones. Trapdoors also become useful for simply hurrying through cleared floors. Thing is, all of what I'm talking about is already possible. It's just something that virtually no human being can do without bogging down with pen and paper. So everybody puts on their blinders, shuts off their spacio-geometric cortex, and obeys the wisdom of Ctrl+G.

Matching staircases introduce a modicum of tactics. For example, three adjacent down-stairs would be a relatively good impetus to quaff-ID for potion buffs before going down.

So the whole reason devteam made stairs this way was to gloss over a coding challenge? Damn, this must harken back to Linley.

KoboldLord wrote:real stairwells carved through cave networks can twist around as much as they need to before they get to the next set of usable space. It doesn't work like a house, which has an upper level intentionally built directly on top of a lower level with as little waste space as possible. When you're digging through pre-existing limestone caves or the like, you take what cavities you get no matter what your access tunnels end up having to do.

That is even a weaker argument because doesn't take more than a couple auts to go across floors. A naga fleeing a spriggan on waspback should die 50 times over while traversing those cavernous passageways, but in the game you'd take a handful of hits. So non-matching stairs require a far vaster tolerance for unreality. And roughly half the levels look very much like artificial housing.

have you ever been to Shoals

the first level

Pollen_Golem wrote:A normal person can keep a rough multi-floor layout in their mind. Intuitive stair functionality (ie matching stairs) lets players plan a trek that visits unnecessary floors (e.g. D:5 to D:3 via D:2) to save time or avoid exclusion zones.

I have never seen a situation where this would have been meaningful in all the times I've ever played Crawl. Not once ever.

Pollen Golem wrote:Trapdoors also become useful for simply hurrying through cleared floors. Thing is, all of what I'm talking about is already possible. It's just something that virtually no human being can do without bogging down with pen and paper.

I don't have any trouble remembering where stairs go, and once I've cleared out the monsters it isn't important anyway. If there's a monster that's causing the problem I want to avoid, then it isn't any harder to remember which stairwell the monster is waiting under in the level above than it is to remember what part of the level the monster is in. Plus, exclusions exist specifically for this purpose, and they still continue to function even when I set the game down for a few days and come back to it much later.

Pollen Golem wrote:So everybody puts on their blinders, shuts off their spacio-geometric cortex, and obeys the wisdom of Ctrl+G.

Ah, so you object to the use of automation to deal with routine, non-challenging, non-threatening tasks. Good to know.

Pollen Golem wrote:Matching staircases introduce a modicum of tactics. For example, three adjacent down-stairs would be a relatively good impetus to quaff-ID for potion buffs before going down.

Thereby invalidating a whole load of vaults. Did you ever think that maybe the vault-writers don't want to be forced to telegraph the contents of a stair-vault a whole level in advance, so you can prep in absolute safety? If they didn't want to do that, they wouldn't have incorporated three stairwells into their design.

Pollen Golem wrote:So the whole reason devteam made stairs this way was to gloss over a coding challenge? Damn, this must harken back to Linley.

Probably, but more to the point the reason nobody has taken up the coding challenge since is because it is a bad idea in the first place.

KoboldLord wrote:Ah, so you object to the use of automation to deal with routine, non-challenging, non-threatening tasks. Good to know.

Even if I had an electric wheelchair I wouldn't use it 100% of the time. Ah, so you object to intuitive and effortless shortcuts of habit. Good to know.

KoboldLord wrote:non-threatening

As great as CTRL-g is, it doesn't give a rat's tail if your starving troll is trying to reach a stack of permafood, and won't use trapdoors.

Also if you want to know where a given staircase might go on the floor below/above and you've traversed it, you can simply hit Shift-X, use > (or <) to move your cursor to the staircase in question, then use ] (or [) to move the map to the level adjacent and your cursor will be on the square where the staircase goes. No pen & paper required.

"I don't have any trouble remembering where stairs go"-you remember which downstairs go to which upstairs? Ok, but there are 6 different ways to connect 2 inter-branch levels, none of them likelier than another. And there's a whole lot of levels. I do have trouble.

Somebody actually believes the game is better off with nonmatching stairs, that it adds something?

Pollen_Golem wrote:Somebody actually believes the game is better off with nonmatching stairs, that it adds something?

why make a thread if you are not going to read what other people post anyway

Siegurt wrote:Also if you want to know where a given staircase might go on the floor below/above and you've traversed it, you can simply hit Shift-X, use > (or <) to move your cursor to the staircase in question, then use ] (or [) to move the map to the level adjacent and your cursor will be on the square where the staircase goes. No pen & paper required.

Yes. It is functional. But there's a huge difference between:

Matching: like two boards superimposed with 3 holes drilled through them.
Nonmatching: like two boards apart with 3 nips each, in different places, with wires randomly pairing them up.

What I learned from this discussion is that some players can appreciate color-coding of already visited doors for easy matching. It is possible in tiles, not sure about console. I mean when you take some stairs, both upstairs and downstairs change and become different from other stairs, they can have some sign in the middle (1,2,3?) or just different color.

Having stairs change color after first use can be useful anyway, I often check if I have already visited the stairs by X,<,[ or Ctrl-X if it's in my LoS.

Unvisited stairs have that * symbol on their tile. But yeah, it would neat if they were numbered.

Sar wrote:
Pollen_Golem wrote:Somebody actually believes the game is better off with nonmatching stairs, that it adds something?

why make a thread if you are not going to read what other people post anyway

What I got out of responses is:
1) C'mon, it's not that bad. I agree.
2) It's too hard to change now. OK, but you can't dismiss design principles with on the basis of technical difficulties.
3) Vaults.
I'm guessing you mean this: "All three normal staircases from the 4th to the 5th floor dump you in the very center of the floor, which will be surrounded by many vault guards and other angry Vault inhabitants" Sure, just make 1 exception, no biggie, extra flavor.

so what you got out of replies is that a lot of people in fact do think that it adds something

and then you tried to dismiss them all with a rhetorical question

also "vaults" in context of Crawl (as opposed to "Vaults", note the capitalization) means "every little piece of dungeon that is not randomly generated"

Sar wrote:
also "vaults"... means "every little piece of dungeon that is not randomly generated"

vaults... stairs...
So, specifically the vaults which are closed-off rooms with a staircase or two inside?
The pros and cons about matching vs nonmatching stairs with regards to vaults, are very subjective IMO. And it doesn't pertain to 90%+ of the game's staircases.

There's a lot of vaults which place stairs very specifically. Most notably, a lot of encompass vault place up/downstairs in the centre, making you fight to get in or out. Play the game more and you'll see what am I talking about.

Oh so you mean like level-size crosses or huge open levels with pillars? Yeah, I dig these. Not a justification for using the more convoluted kind of stairs:

Pollen_Golem wrote:Matching: like two boards superimposed with 3 holes drilled through them.
Nonmatching: like two boards apart with 3 nips each, in different places, with wires randomly pairing them up.

Pollen_Golem wrote:Not a justification for using the more convoluted kind of stairs:

Why does anyone need to justify it to you?

In fairness, if it weren't a tile-to-tile correspondence (like, discrepancy of eight or so tiles or sth), it wouldn't be immediately obvious that you're going down into a three stair vault, since sometimes stairs generate somewhat close together by chance. That's not to say that I think there's a lot of merit to the proposal.

I think the OP ought to realize that the rationale for the question is really a surface level reading of game mechanics. If, for example, the point about how some vaults work didn't occur to you, it may be that your experience with the game is not adequate to make very penetrating criticisms. While there may be some "realism" or thematic reason it should be one way or another, there's no reason based in the internal logic of the game and the fact is that generating entrances and exits from stairs independently offers useful freedom in terms of level design.

Why does anyone need to justify it to you?

That's really unnecessarily defensive. It's a fair question with a straightforward answer.

Sandman25 wrote:What I learned from this discussion is that some players can appreciate color-coding of already visited doors for easy matching. It is possible in tiles, not sure about console. I mean when you take some stairs, both upstairs and downstairs change and become different from other stairs, they can have some sign in the middle (1,2,3?) or just different color.

Having stairs change color after first use can be useful anyway, I often check if I have already visited the stairs by X,<,[ or Ctrl-X if it's in my LoS.

In console stairs are marked by default, no need to change anything. Visited up-stairs are green, visited down-stairs are red and unvisited stairs are white coloured. When I switched to the webtiles, I had problem to notice that * symbol.

Pollen_Golem wrote:vaults... stairs...
So, specifically the vaults which are closed-off rooms with a staircase or two inside?

https://crawl.develz.org/wiki/doku.php? ... _of_vaults

Pollen_Golem wrote:The pros and cons about matching vs nonmatching stairs with regards to vaults, are very subjective IMO. And it doesn't pertain to 90%+ of the game's staircases.

matching stairs would be boring; there are lots of interesting/challenging vaults in Depths 1-5 and other parts of the Dungeon

nicolae wrote:
Pollen_Golem wrote:Not a justification for using the more convoluted kind of stairs:

Why does anyone need to justify it to you?

Same reason DCSS justifies its design decisions - in broad abstractions and specific examples - in the lengthy design document. They didn't have to but they did. I've done my part in justifying my arguments.

Why does anyone need to keep a code of silence around this conspicuous mechanic?

Eyesburn wrote:In console stairs are marked by default, no need to change anything. Visited up-stairs are green, visited down-stairs are red and unvisited stairs are white coloured. When I switched to the webtiles, I had problem to notice that * symbol.

I see that console is more user-friendly in that regard. I didn't know about * before reading the thread.

In a vacuum, like if you were designing a game from scratch, there's no particular reason why there should be matched vs. unmatched stairs. Potential upsides could be proposed for both, and in the end the decision would probably be mostly arbitary. In the case of Crawl, I suspect it has a lot to with how many traditional roguelikes have unmatched stairs.

Once you've made a decision, though, and start building a game around it, it becomes harder to change. Changing from unmatched to matched stairs would require a lot of work in redoing the level generators and redesigning many, many vaults (and let's be honest -- you probably wouldn't be the one volunteering to do all that work), and the benefits of doing so wouldn't be much more than "better appeals to one person's aesthetics".

There are a number of features of Crawl design whose justification for existence basically boils down to "it was an arbitrary decision at some point, but it's fine how it is, and it's not worth the effort to change", and you've neither demonstrated that it's not fine how it is, nor that it's worth the effort to change.

That's really unnecessarily defensive. It's a fair question with a straightforward answer.

Maybe. But what's going to happen if Pollen_Golem doesn't receive a justification they like?

Pollen_Golem wrote:OK, the mystery of "where will I end up?" is gone right after you've peeked through the three down-staircases. Case closed.

I'm pretty sure the point isn't "mystery", but rather that unknown stairs/hatches to the same level should not be different from each other.

Well, probably the thread will be closed or moved to CYC.

nicolae wrote:I suspect it has a lot to with how many traditional roguelikes have unmatched stairs.

It's exactly the moment they deviated from the traditional roguelike by having multiple stairs on a single floor that flabbergasts me. The whole entire reason many traditional roguelikes have unmatched stairs is that there's only one set of stairs between levels, plus limited screen space. How do you not see the weirdness that results when you throw in a couple more staircases?

Pollen_Golem wrote:
nicolae wrote:I suspect it has a lot to with how many traditional roguelikes have unmatched stairs.

It's exactly the moment they deviated from the traditional roguelike by having multiple stairs on a single floor that flabbergasts me.

what about angband

@Pollen_Golem: You asked a question, and got a bunch of design and technical answers. You may not like the answers, but I don't think this thread is going to change anyone's mind.

Are you looking for something else, or are we done here? Devs themselves don't chime in on every thread.

Pollen_Golem wrote:How do you not see the weirdness that results when you throw in a couple more staircases?

By not worrying too hard about the realism of the staircase layout, I guess.

Edit: If your argument is that the stair alignment should be changed because the lack of realism would be confusing to new players, that would be a decent starting point, but I'm not sure it actually is confusing to the majority of new players after they've tried out a few staircases. If your argument is that it should be changed because it bothers your sense of realist aesthetics, that's probably not going to gain much traction.

I didn't play Angband but it has nonpersistent dungeons, so the orientation of one level to another is meaningless there.

njvack wrote:Are you looking for something else, or are we done here? Devs themselves don't chime in on every thread.

judging by the number of responses, people are enjoying this thread as much as I am. It's not like I'm pointlessly bumping it. And I thought devs seldom even dive here. Feel free to close.

Pollen_Golem wrote:"I don't have any trouble remembering where stairs go"-you remember which downstairs go to which upstairs? Ok, but there are 6 different ways to connect 2 inter-branch levels, none of them likelier than another. And there's a whole lot of levels. I do have trouble.

If that is really your concern, I have an alternate suggestion. As others have mentioned, it's not feasible to place up-stairs so that they are close by their corresponding down-stairs, due to vaults etc. But it is probably feasible to place the stairs as they are placed now, but change the way they are linked together, so that up-stairs are likely to be linked to down-stairs on the previous level that are in a similar position.

Specifically, one could pair down-staircases on D:1 (for example) with up-staircases on D:2 in such a way that minimizes the sum of distances between paired staircases (distances measured as if both maps are overlapped with a common center). This would not involve any alteration of the location of staircases, only the way in which staircases correspond between floors. It would result in the top-left staircase on D:1 being more likely to lead to a staircase in the top-left vicinity of D:2, and a central staircase on D:1 being more likely to lead to a central staircase on D:2, etc.

This scheme would work fine with "ambush" vaults that contain all 3 stairs (wouldn't give away information about the ambush until you descended).

The advantage of this scheme would be that it might be easier to remember and get a mental picture of how the dungeon is spatially laid out.

The disadvantage of this scheme would be "Why bother?" Personally, my memory for maps is bad, so I don't care/wouldn't be much affected either way. It may be different for other people.

The Tavern

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