The Tavern

As a Draconian Death Knight in 0.9.1, I animated the remains of Jessica, and when I examined the zombie, the description said that she was small... Is this a bug? Or are human zombies intended to be small?

There's only small and large zombies, and every body gets slotted in somewhere. Where do you think the line should be drawn?

A human zombie is pretty much the same as an orc or goblin zombie, except with a few extra hit points. An ogre zombie clutching a giant spiked club is potentially another matter entirely.

Huh, strange, so there's no medium-size zombies? Seems odd that a human zombie is the same size class as a rat zombie...

These are rodents of unusual size we're talking about here! Besides, an orange rat zombie has more hit points and hits harder than a kobold or goblin zombie.

More seriously, in ASCII the difference between small and large zombies are z vs. Z. There's no medium-sized version between lower-case and capital letters. The various body shapes of zombies do get special tiles in the tiles version, which is very nice.

KoboldLord wrote:These are rodents of unusual size we're talking about here!

Rodents Of Unusual Size? I don't think they exist...

KoboldLord wrote: The various body shapes of zombies do get special tiles in the tiles version, which is very nice.

Speaking of which, a (very) little bit more differentiation might be helpful. It's slightly disconcerting to be facing draconian zombies in the Crypt that look identical to the orc zombies you were mowing down in the early dungeon. It's led to a few "that enemy was tougher than I thought it would be" moments.

I've always thought it would have made more sense for zombies to take the glyph of the base monster, with a special color reserved for zombies. That would require some pretty big changes at this point, though.

Danei wrote:I've always thought it would have made more sense for zombies to take the glyph of the base monster, with a special color reserved for zombies. That would require some pretty big changes at this point, though.

That is a really good idea. It may require dismissing some monsters (subtypes) for overly full letters but it would definitly be worth it.

Danei wrote:I've always thought it would have made more sense for zombies to take the glyph of the base monster, with a special color reserved for zombies. That would require some pretty big changes at this point, though.

+1 for this idea. White for skeletons and grey for zombies would seem the most logical to me, but there are a lot of whites already.

minmay wrote:I'm not convinced. Zombies lose all their abilities other than movement and melee - a stone giant zombie and an ogre zombie have more in common than a stone giant zombie and a stone giant. Therefore, it makes sense to have them on the same glyph.

I agree, but for me the flavor of having multi-glyph mindless undead outweighs the ease of reading Z/z.

Wyvern zombies are surprisingly lethal. For me, the change would be not just about flavour but also improve gameplay. It brings both useful and not so useful additional information; the former is worth it, in my opinion.

it's not just flavour (even though there's plenty). it'd help discriminate the strength of monsters (or allies): there's a difference from an orc zombie and a saint roka zombie (edit: i failed so spectacularly at this i'm not going to change it). and being able to guess movement speed at a glance would be helpful too.

you'd need two colors though, one for zombies and one for skeletons, for consistency. white could work for skeletons (necrophages and ice beasts can't be raised), and a few monsters could be moved away from brown to reserve it for zombies (ettins, and probably plenty more i forget about). (if anyone can find glyphs and colors in the code in a readable form, please point it out.)

i don't like, but it's always possible to flicker between two colors, like simulacra do.

absolutego wrote:it's not just flavour (even though there's plenty). it'd help discriminate the strength of monsters (or allies): there's a difference from an orc zombie and a saint roka zombie (edit: i failed so spectacularly at this i'm not going to change it). and being able to guess movement speed at a glance would be helpful too.

you'd need two colors though, one for zombies and one for skeletons, for consistency. white could work for skeletons (necrophages and ice beasts can't be raised), and a few monsters could be moved away from brown to reserve it for zombies (ettins, and probably plenty more i forget about). (if anyone can find glyphs and colors in the code in a readable form, please point it out.)

http://koti.welho.com/jarmoki/crawl/index.html

excellent, thanks.
it also looks that much harder now, of course.

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Human zombies are small?

Human zombies are small?

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