"squelch" monster gear (was: Trim pointless monster gear)


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Post Friday, 24th March 2017, 15:38

"squelch" monster gear (was: Trim pointless monster gear)

If you want to further paper over the structural problems of persistent levels and items, the way forward is an intelligent item squelching feature. The fact is that it is completely possible to determine when the marginal item dropped is absolutely worthless to the player and the game should make an effort to do so.

For example, as soon as a +1 dagger or +0 dagger with a brand has dropped, all other daggers with plus 0 or less are absolutely worthless. They should not appear in search listings or on the map. If there is a concern about information leaks arising from this because of the identification system, change the rules so that doesn't happen. It is absolutely worth it to remove aspects of the identification system to get this gameplay improvement.

It's been mentioned before, but item splashing to prevent piles from forming on monster deaths would massively improve item management gameplay, preventing many trips to the item search and pile pickup menus. Piles are bad.
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Post Sunday, 26th March 2017, 07:10

Re: Trim pointless monster gear

While I think item squelching in general is a good idea, there are some weird cases that could make it complicated. For example, the existence of brand weapon scrolls can make duplicate weapons not necessarily worthless in some weird cases. It's rare, but still worth considering whether it is literally impossible for an item to be useful for the player, or just useless in all but some extreme corner cases, and then consider whether those extreme corner cases are worth preserving or not.

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Post Sunday, 26th March 2017, 13:48

Re: Trim pointless monster gear

You would want a toggle so that in the unlikely event the player wants to brand a +0 dagger, they can find it. Feels like the kind of situation where they would deserve a trip to the autopickup menu.
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Post Sunday, 26th March 2017, 18:03

Re: Trim pointless monster gear

watertreatmentRL wrote:It's been mentioned before, but item splashing to prevent piles from forming on monster deaths would massively improve item management gameplay, preventing many trips to the item search and pile pickup menus. Piles are bad.

I would rather search through a single pile of stuff to pick out things that i wanted than travel to several different squares to do so, personally.
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Post Sunday, 26th March 2017, 18:27

Re: Trim pointless monster gear

If you thought about it, I think you would see that is not actually the choice that is presented in looking at the status quo vs. item splashing.
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Post Sunday, 26th March 2017, 19:06

Re: Trim pointless monster gear

watertreatmentRL wrote:If you thought about it, I think you would see that is not actually the choice that is presented in looking at the status quo vs. item splashing.

It is a lot of the time. Say i stop at a choke point and kill a large pack of orcs, presently i step on that square and bring up a list of the things on the square, if there are things i want to pick up, i do so. If items explode all over the place, i can see them all in one menu, but i have to travel to each one i want to pick up individually.


Maybe i have a different idea of what "splashing" means.
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Post Sunday, 26th March 2017, 19:33

Re: Trim pointless monster gear

Siegurt wrote:It is a lot of the time. Say i stop at a choke point and kill a large pack of orcs, presently i step on that square and bring up a list of the things on the square, if there are things i want to pick up, i do so. If items explode all over the place, i can see them all in one menu, but i have to travel to each one i want to pick up individually.


Killing a large pack of orcs at a chokepoint is not a representative use case, but let's roll with it. In that case, you would expect to see something like three or four unsquelched items if you're lucky and a pile of corpses, which are okay to stack. It is easy to place them so that they are all visible on the map in normal circumstances. This way the player interacts with the map (good) instead of a menu (bad). It cannot be overstated how much menu interactions disrupt the flow of the game.
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Post Sunday, 26th March 2017, 19:50

Re: Trim pointless monster gear

watertreatmentRL wrote:
Siegurt wrote:It is a lot of the time. Say i stop at a choke point and kill a large pack of orcs, presently i step on that square and bring up a list of the things on the square, if there are things i want to pick up, i do so. If items explode all over the place, i can see them all in one menu, but i have to travel to each one i want to pick up individually.


Killing a large pack of orcs at a chokepoint is not a representative use case, but let's roll with it. In that case, you would expect to see something like three or four unsquelched items if you're lucky and a pile of corpses, which are okay to stack. It is easy to place them so that they are all visible on the map in normal circumstances. This way the player interacts with the map (good) instead of a menu (bad). It cannot be overstated how much menu interactions disrupt the flow of the game.

It's my opinion that you just overstated it :) I don't think menu interactions are any better or worse than non-menu interactions, they are all just different ways to input information into the game, you choose the interface that's most convenient for the player. You're suggesting a less-convenient interface because it doesn't 'disrupt the flow of the game' which is just a made up perception on your part, the inventory menu or spell list is no less a part of the game than the map, you represent positions on a map, you represent lists of things in list menus.

I know it's *easy* to place them so they are all visible on the map, it's also substantially *worse* from an interface point of view, it takes more work for me to get the things I want into my inventory, it's as simple as that. It cannot be overstated how bad making the interface worse to increase a made-up sense of the "flow" of a game.
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Post Sunday, 26th March 2017, 21:49

Re: Trim pointless monster gear

Siegurt wrote: I don't think menu interactions are any better or worse than non-menu interactions, they are all just different ways to input information into the game, you choose the interface that's most convenient for the player. You're suggesting a less-convenient interface because it doesn't 'disrupt the flow of the game' which is just a made up perception on your part, the inventory menu or spell list is no less a part of the game than the map, you represent positions on a map, you represent lists of things in list menus.


The entire point of this thread is that interacting with lists is inconvenient to the player. Look at the word you choose, "inconvenient." You're talking about a workflow, not a game.

Going from interacting with the map to interacting with menus involves a context switch. Instead of entering input as directions or with a mouse, now you're choosing arbitrarily allocated letters for different options, perhaps even paging the menu. You're reading. You can't see the map. You can't dispense with the map, but you can eliminate the lists. That means you should. Even if you don't see a distinction between interacting with menus and interacting with the map in a game whose central focus is the map, you still want to minimize switches between the two.

I don't know what else to tell you. If "the flow of the game" strikes you as not a real thing, you're lost.
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Post Monday, 27th March 2017, 00:29

Re: Trim pointless monster gear

watertreatmentRL wrote:
Siegurt wrote: I don't think menu interactions are any better or worse than non-menu interactions, they are all just different ways to input information into the game, you choose the interface that's most convenient for the player. You're suggesting a less-convenient interface because it doesn't 'disrupt the flow of the game' which is just a made up perception on your part, the inventory menu or spell list is no less a part of the game than the map, you represent positions on a map, you represent lists of things in list menus.


The entire point of this thread is that interacting with lists is inconvenient to the player. Look at the word you choose, "inconvenient." You're talking about a workflow, not a game.

Going from interacting with the map to interacting with menus involves a context switch. Instead of entering input as directions or with a mouse, now you're choosing arbitrarily allocated letters for different options, perhaps even paging the menu. You're reading. You can't see the map. You can't dispense with the map, but you can eliminate the lists. That means you should. Even if you don't see a distinction between interacting with menus and interacting with the map in a game whose central focus is the map, you still want to minimize switches between the two.

I don't know what else to tell you. If "the flow of the game" strikes you as not a real thing, you're lost.

When Items are spread around the map, I don't know just by looking at the map squares which ones I want and which ones I don't, *I still need to pull up a list* to see which ones are identified or not and are possibly types that I might want to pick up, in both cases I see a list, it's just that in the current case, I see a list, and pick the items I want to pick up from it, and in your proposed change, I pull up a list, then select one of the items I want to pick up, then travel to it, then I have to pick it up, then I have to *pull back the list again to travel to the next item in the list* at least the status quo lets me deal with all the items at once.

If all information about an item that was needed to decide whether I wanted to pick it up was conveyed by the icon on the map (Which it isn't remotely in console, and is only slightly closer to in tiles) Then it would at least be as easy for a mouse user to pick stuff up from the map as it would be from a list (It'd still take far more keypresses for the non mouse user), however since it isn't, it's actively harder for both mouse users and keyboard users to pick things up when they are spread around, then when they are all in a single stack.

If your primary access to the game is mouse-driven and offline, it's probably closer to equal in terms of convenience (Since at least you can hover over items with the mouse to see if you want them in offline tiles) However you still have to mouse over everything to see what it is rather than simply seeing a list of all the items.

It's not that "the flow of the game" isn't a real thing, it's just that for me, interacting with the menus is just as much a part of the flow of the game as interacting with the map. The point of this thread isn't that lists are bad, it's that stuff appears in the lists that we don't care about and don't need or want to see.
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Post Monday, 27th March 2017, 01:19

Re: Trim pointless monster gear

You do not need to navigate a menu if there's only one item on each square, you just need to walk over it or use x.

You have this whole thing backwards. The fact that other shortcomings of (the worst, least popular version of) the interface swamp out some of the benefit of splashing and squelching is just the flip side of the fact that addressing those shortcomings actually accomplishes something once you have splashing and squelching. Who would bother fixing the visual identification from map tile issue when your nice new glyphs and tiles are going to be buried most of the time anyway, not even visible on the map?
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Post Monday, 27th March 2017, 02:53

Re: Trim pointless monster gear

It's been mentioned before, but item splashing to prevent piles from forming on monster deaths would massively improve item management gameplay, preventing many trips to the item search and pile pickup menus. Piles are bad.


If anyone wants to try a roguelike that has a one item per square limit to see what it is like in practice, larn had this, and you can even play it online in a web browser these days.

FWIW, I loved larn back in the day but on revisiting it recently, this was the mechanic that stuck out to me as the single most painful thing about the game, by far.

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Post Monday, 27th March 2017, 03:03

Re: Trim pointless monster gear

Sil also has only one item per square. You sometimes lose items because there's no space for them to spawn.

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Post Monday, 27th March 2017, 03:29

Re: Trim pointless monster gear

watertreatmentRL wrote:You do not need to navigate a menu if there's only one item on each square, you just need to walk over it or use x.

You have this whole thing backwards. The fact that other shortcomings of (the worst, least popular version of) the interface swamp out some of the benefit of splashing and squelching is just the flip side of the fact that addressing those shortcomings actually accomplishes something once you have splashing and squelching. Who would bother fixing the visual identification from map tile issue when your nice new glyphs and tiles are going to be buried most of the time anyway, not even visible on the map?

So when multiple things are visible on the screen at once (In the slime, or elf vaults, for example) you think it's better to walk to each item (or navigate to them with x) than it is to see them all at once with control-X (or Control-F,. if you want to see the whole level instead of just LOS)

I mean that sounds really awful to me, it is a whole heck of a lot more steps to accomplish the same goal.

I would say that that's the worst of the possible interface options, personally.
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Post Monday, 27th March 2017, 14:59

Re: Trim pointless monster gear

Siegurt wrote:So when multiple things are visible on the screen at once (In the slime, or elf vaults, for example) you think it's better to walk to each item (or navigate to them with x) than it is to see them all at once with control-X (or Control-F,. if you want to see the whole level instead of just LOS)


I am saying that you should not need to enter an ancillary menu or pop-up display, like ctrl-x or ctrl-f or g on piled tiles, to determine what useful items are in line of sight. It should be clear from looking at the map. With squelching, splashing, and graphical improvements, this is totally achievable.

I haven't played larn in a long time, but I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that the real issue there is overabundance of useless items with lack of automation, not limitations on number of items per tile.
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Post Monday, 27th March 2017, 15:38

Re: Trim pointless monster gear

watertreatmentRL wrote:
Siegurt wrote:So when multiple things are visible on the screen at once (In the slime, or elf vaults, for example) you think it's better to walk to each item (or navigate to them with x) than it is to see them all at once with control-X (or Control-F,. if you want to see the whole level instead of just LOS)


I am saying that you should not need to enter an ancillary menu or pop-up display, like ctrl-x or ctrl-f or g on piled tiles, to determine what useful items are in line of sight. It should be clear from looking at the map. With squelching, splashing, and graphical improvements, this is totally achievable.

I haven't played larn in a long time, but I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that the real issue there is overabundance of useless items with lack of automation, not limitations on number of items per tile.


It isn't achievable, partially because you can't make sufficient improvements to the graphics.

For one thing, a significant amount of the users use console, there is limited amount of information you can convey (you are limited to exactly one symbol, which can't overlap with a monster symbol, a background and a foreground color, and have a limited set of choices for those)

For another you have a *lot* of information that needs to be conveyed, think about how many attributes a randart has, trying to convey all of that in a single glyph would result in a horrible unreadable mess.

Plus new players would have to learn a whole system of graphical information to understand before they could take advantage of the whole "know what the items are at a glance" thing and would have to revert to walking (or moving a cursor) over to things to see what they were, instead of, you know, being able to read it in plain English all at once. Communication is only effective if it can be understood, and there simply aren't enough ways to inuitively convey the required information, and adding more barriers to the learning curve to just interpret the interface makes crawl less appealing, not more.

Crawl items are too complicated to ever have all of the possible attributes about them be displayed on screen, particularly in console.

Item squelching does reduce the number of cases where there are multiple items in the first place, but all that means is if items are squelched, there are less cases where there are multiple items to display, it has no bearing on whether "stacks" or "splashed" is the better way to go when there are multiple items, and "splashing" obviously doesn't, since that is the very mechanism we are taking about.

I don't particularly like the idea of squelching to begin with (having the items that drop be dependant on what you already have is awkward, spoilery, and non inuitive, and i personally have zero problems ignoring things i don't want, plus the game deciding for me what i do and do not need isn't appealing) but even if a mechanism like that were added, it doesn't contribute to the discussion of what to do when multiple things dropped, it only lessens its impact.

Also i have played a number of games in more than one genre where items dont stack, and having to go to travel to pick them up annoys the crap out of me every single damn time. Far and away more than looking at a list or menu has ever felt like it took me out of the game itself, picking up items isn't "playing the game", and isn't tactical. Why should we want to represent it in our tactical display?

I also suggest to a mod that this thread regarding multiple items per square be moved to its own thread, it is a separate discussion, and not dependant on the original discussion of squelching redundant items, and seems like it might be slightly overwhelming that discussion.
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Post Monday, 27th March 2017, 16:39

Re: "squelch" monster gear (was: Trim pointless monster gear

archaeo wrote:
Siegurt wrote:I also suggest to a mod that this thread regarding multiple items per square be moved to its own thread, it is a separate discussion, and not dependant on the original discussion of squelching redundant items, and seems like it might be slightly overwhelming that discussion.

I did this, but only on the condition that y'all stop using the word "squelch" because it's gross.

watertreatmentRL, if you want a different thread title, I assume it'll work if you just edit what's now the OP of the new thread.

I don't like the term much either... although this thread is about "splashing" not "squelching" anyway :)
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Post Monday, 27th March 2017, 18:38

Re: "squelch" monster gear (was: Trim pointless monster gear

I think anyone who looks at the console interface of crawl and thinks seriously about how items can be more faithfully represented by terminal characters will realize that there is a lot that can be done. What is needed is to be able to distinguish different items that appear close to each other on the map with high probability and to be able to identify them based on their appearance and recent in-game cues, for example messages describing the weapons monsters have. In this direction, an idea that has been mentioned before in these pages is listings of items in line of sight along the lines of the monster listings that already appear. I am sure I don't need to mention that the overabundance of items that would appear there without squelching and the tendency of items to become buried in other items so that they don't appear on the map at all probably both have a lot to do with the nonexistence of this feature to date.

I have said all I want to say about this matter.
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Post Tuesday, 28th March 2017, 02:24

Re: "squelch" monster gear (was: Trim pointless monster gear

advil wrote:
It's been mentioned before, but item splashing to prevent piles from forming on monster deaths would massively improve item management gameplay, preventing many trips to the item search and pile pickup menus. Piles are bad.


If anyone wants to try a roguelike that has a one item per square limit to see what it is like in practice, larn had this, and you can even play it online in a web browser these days.

FWIW, I loved larn back in the day but on revisiting it recently, this was the mechanic that stuck out to me as the single most painful thing about the game, by far.


You don't need to reach as far back as Larn. Just play Brogue. The one-item-per-square limit combined with always-on autopickup is a horrifyingly bad interface feature. Combine that with a "meaningfully" low inventory limit and no less than five items you have to constantly pick up (scroll of enchanting, food rations, mangoes, potions of strength, potions of life), and what is otherwise a fun and streamlined roguelike turns into a tedious slog of inventory micromanagement. It's even worse than Larn, since you have to do a silly little dance in order to drop multiple items, whereas IIRC in Larn you can just drop a bunch of items on one square and they will all splash around correctly.

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Post Tuesday, 28th March 2017, 03:27

Re: "squelch" monster gear (was: Trim pointless monster gear

Brogue's inventory management is tedious to the extent that you're greedy. Since you have a very small inventory size (21-26), you are forced to continually juggle stuff (if you want to carry all you want). There are ways to get around the inventory limit, like throwing items down chasms, or throwing them down in front of you as you walk.

I fail to see what one item per square has to do with tedium. It would be about the same level of tedium if Brogue had multiple items per square.
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Post Tuesday, 28th March 2017, 08:23

Re: "squelch" monster gear (was: Trim pointless monster gear

Putting corpses on one tile and items on the other would probably be good, especially if corpses did not react to the g command. It would be a pile less to check, and you'd be sure that a pile of corpses only contains corpses.

Splashing would only work after spam removal, however. Right now, it's just too much stuff.
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Post Wednesday, 29th March 2017, 04:56

Re: "squelch" monster gear (was: Trim pointless monster gear

bel wrote:Brogue's inventory management is tedious to the extent that you're greedy. Since you have a very small inventory size (21-26), you are forced to continually juggle stuff (if you want to carry all you want). There are ways to get around the inventory limit, like throwing items down chasms, or throwing them down in front of you as you walk.

I fail to see what one item per square has to do with tedium. It would be about the same level of tedium if Brogue had multiple items per square.


Brogue's auto-travel has a strong tendency to reuse the same paths, so in order to get rid of a bad item, you have to make sure you drop/throw it outside of such a path. This is tedious.

If you want to drop multiple items, you have to do a stupid little dance because dropping an item on a square that already contains one picks up the item that was there. This is tedious.

Also forgot to mention: Brogue's autoexplore attempts to pick up everything, so if you want to use it, you can look forward to (trying to) pick up every single useless potion of hallucination and leather armor in the game. This is tedious.

Unless a roguelike imposes gameplay penalties for carrying too many items (i.e. encumbrance), it's always optimal to carry as many items as possible. Brogue doesn't impose any gameplay penalties for doing so, but it makes it especially tedious. Moreover, having a freaking "pick up item" key would entirely solve the first problem and mostly solve the third, while having a "pick up which item" menu would entirely solve the second problem. These are slight interface complications that make for an overall much smoother experience. Brogue's developer(s) took the concept of stripping down the interface to an absurd degree, removing features that *were* actually improvements.

Honestly, while I do think the changes proposed in this thread are overall good, it should definitely be pointed out: Crawl's inventory management system is actually a LOT less bad than many roguelikes. It's not lacking some basic functionality (Brogue), and it manages to avoid allowing and incentivizing the player to carry hundreds of mostly-useless items (NetHack). It's not perfect by any means, but it's one of the better ones out there.

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Post Wednesday, 29th March 2017, 05:23

Re: "squelch" monster gear (was: Trim pointless monster gear

ion_frigate wrote:
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Brogue's auto-travel has a strong tendency to reuse the same paths, so in order to get rid of a bad item, you have to make sure you drop/throw it outside of such a path. This is tedious.

If you want to drop multiple items, you have to do a stupid little dance because dropping an item on a square that already contains one picks up the item that was there. This is tedious.

Also forgot to mention: Brogue's autoexplore attempts to pick up everything, so if you want to use it, you can look forward to (trying to) pick up every single useless potion of hallucination and leather armor in the game. This is tedious.

Unless a roguelike imposes gameplay penalties for carrying too many items (i.e. encumbrance), it's always optimal to carry as many items as possible. Brogue doesn't impose any gameplay penalties for doing so, but it makes it especially tedious. Moreover, having a freaking "pick up item" key would entirely solve the first problem and mostly solve the third, while having a "pick up which item" menu would entirely solve the second problem. These are slight interface complications that make for an overall much smoother experience. Brogue's developer(s) took the concept of stripping down the interface to an absurd degree, removing features that *were* actually improvements.

Honestly, while I do think the changes proposed in this thread are overall good, it should definitely be pointed out: Crawl's inventory management system is actually a LOT less bad than many roguelikes. It's not lacking some basic functionality (Brogue), and it manages to avoid allowing and incentivizing the player to carry hundreds of mostly-useless items (NetHack). It's not perfect by any means, but it's one of the better ones out there.

You are talking about why you think Brogue's inventory management system and autopickup mechanism are bad. I still fail to see what this has to with whether items should squelch or splash in Crawl. Indeed, your own proposed solutions to Brogue's mechanisms solve (or mostly mitigate) the problems without touching the "one item per square" system.

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Post Wednesday, 29th March 2017, 05:35

Re: "squelch" monster gear (was: Trim pointless monster gear

ion_frigate wrote:while having a "pick up which item" menu would entirely solve the second problem.


I wasn't referring to a stash tracker, but rather allowing more than one item on a square, and displaying a "pick up which item" menu when there is more than one item on a square. Although even Larn-style splashing would be a better solution than what Brogue has now.

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Post Wednesday, 29th March 2017, 05:49

Re: "squelch" monster gear (was: Trim pointless monster gear

Yes, Sil does this, if you drop items on a square which already has one.

It has its own problems. One, I mentioned before. Others are: for instance, when you get disarmed by an orc champion and your weapon ends up on some other square and you can't get to it. Luckily, disarming is not present in Crawl.

This is offtopic, but I think the main problem with Brogue's inventory system is that it is meant achieve the goal that you have to make choices about what to carry. But there are stupid ways to get around the problem, like throwing an item in front of you so you can pick it up while walking, or throwing items down chasms. It would be best if there was really a hard limit on what you can carry; any time you drop an item, it gets destroyed. There would need to be some sort of prompt to prevent doing this accidentally, of course.

Dungeon Master

Posts: 3618

Joined: Thursday, 23rd December 2010, 12:43

Post Wednesday, 29th March 2017, 05:55

Re: "squelch" monster gear (was: Trim pointless monster gear

I am in favour of avoiding stacks. There's a reason which has not been brought up yet (I think/hope): it helps blind players. The command to check LOS (Ctrl-X) already exists and is, according to my source, one of the reasons why Crawl is playable by the blind.

The best method to avoid stacks is by having less items. Here I speak about superfluous items. That's why I have brought up this thread (or rather, its parent) to the c-r-d mailing list. In my opinion, the least controversial part should be fixed, implicit (i.e. not a genuine item) armour on monsters. We could still have ego items which then we appear as actual items. There's some suspense of disbelief but I am absolutely sure that to a new player (the only player that counts in this regard), it wouldn't matter. This is not Angband style squelching, as I understand it; for that, we'd have all the monster items as now, and decide upon death which ones should disappear.

Another method is item splashing which is more radical because it has advantages and drawbacks. I'd like to reap the low-hanging fruit before going into this.

Vaults Vanquisher

Posts: 443

Joined: Thursday, 16th February 2017, 15:23

Post Wednesday, 29th March 2017, 16:07

Re: "squelch" monster gear (was: Trim pointless monster gear

@dpeg: That sounds reasonable, but I would point out two things.

1. You would avoid mechanical interactions, like the Jiyva issue raised in the other thread, if the mechanism of this change were hiding the items in the user interface rather than removing them. Less work, less space for controversy as you can always just disable the suppression if you like +0 daggers, clubs, etc.

2. As long as you have corpses, you will see a lot of piles with current item dropping mechanics. You can't reduce incidence of piles very much by reducing the number of uninteresting items alone.
*Lana Del Rey voice* , video games...

Snake Sneak

Posts: 92

Joined: Friday, 14th January 2011, 18:32

Post Wednesday, 29th March 2017, 16:43

Re: "squelch" monster gear (was: Trim pointless monster gear

Lots of times monsters drop nothing, sometimes they drop stuff. We know why, no mystery there.

Here is a proposed mystery:
  Code:
When a monster dies and their stuff is going to be dropped:
for each item:
    if item is stackable then
        drop
    else
        if exact-same* item is already dropped* :
           if item is not special* then squelch else drop
       else drop

* exact-same obviously has a semantic component:
* already-dropped can be a function that depends on type, i.e, all wands,potions always drop
* special is a function that includes branded/inscribed/etc. although exact-same and already-dropped can also be tweaked for much the same purpose

Why 3 functions? Just implementation details. Just depends on how one might want to implement user control of this via configuration.

With this scheme the user never knows anything odd happened unless they start going back and trying to count foes v. drops. All messages are still valid, no gameplay choices are removed, but clutter is reduced for the big-pile use cases.

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