Is there any place left to play Lava Orcs?

[twelwe]

I know they were unbalanced beyond belief, but nothing was more fun to me that starting a LOAK, racing for a pool of lava in the abyss, and getting to level 9 before entering d:1. Unfair? Yes. Fun? Absolutely!

Moon Trolls are such a good idea to me and I still cannot understand why there is no unscored mode of play that has all these experimental species. Possessors, forge dwarves, gnomes and all the like are perhaps not balanced or anywhere near appearing in the main releases, but they sound like a blast to play. Additionally, their exposure to testing broaden the play experience, opening creativity for more species or moving good mechanics to monsters instead of playable races. I'd love to see this mode nuke robotfindskitten out of CAO

[Kate]

Well Moon Trolls and Possessors don't have a single line of code written for them as far as I know, which is sort of a barrier to them being playable somewhere.

Nomes and Forge Dwarves are both in various states of playability in branches on git, and the Lava Orc patch is here, nothing's stopping you compiling them locally or setting up a server for any of them.

[twelwe]

Well Moon Trolls and Possessors don't have a single line of code written for them as far as I know, which is sort of a barrier to them being playable somewhere.

Nomes and Forge Dwarves are both in various states of playability in branches on git, and the Lava Orc patch is here, nothing's stopping you compiling them locally or setting up a server for any of them.

Oh sorry, I meant only to talk about species already coded. I could have sworn moon trolls were somewhere already in a playable status, but I didn't even check for the posessor. As for compiling and setting up a server, I'm a casual player - never done either of those things on crawl or otherwise. I will try to figure out that lava orc patch.

I'd gladly pay for server space for someone who knows what they're doing and pay them for doing it if that's the only way to all removed/not included but coded species together. Whatever it takes.

[twelwe]

downloaded .10 andjust tried to get the lava orc patch but the download link gives 404. any other ways?

[BlackSheep]

click on the link, then on the 404 page, delete the stray right paren at the end of the line

[twelwe]

worked beautifully. lets see if i can copy and paste properly - the next step, yeah?

[Galefury]

You need the source to apply the patch. Read INSTALL.txt and the git quickstart guide for instructions.

[sanka]

Actually, I would support if something like "experimental, non-scored" features could be turned on in a regular crawl release, instead of patches and branches. Maybe only enable them from wizard mode, but maybe have an other switch, but also no scores/bones whatever, like wizmode.

Maintaining a lot of branches in a project of this size is not easy. Patches become obsolete quite fast. It's also would be much easier to get more feedback on experimental features, since I think many players are too lazy (and not experienced with programming) to patch/compile themselves. Many interesting ideas are lost if they do not make into the main branch.

Also if something like a new race is merged into the main branch, even if only into the experimental section, it's much more likely that somebody will update it regulary - if she likes it. The good side is that balancing is not very important.

Of course only those features should be supported like this which do not give the developers too much burden. Of course if something broke in the experimental section, that's not a big problem, since it's experimental, and of course if the "experimental" flag is switched off, the code there should have no effect. But still it can hinder developers, and developing the stable features are more important. In the case of species, I think it's not so hard to only enable them in experimental mode, and have them no effect in normal play. But something like a different hunger system may not be a good example to include like this.

[KoboldLord]

If designers don't bother to bug-test the 'experimental' section, the experimental section will go obsolete just as quickly as a collection of patches would. If they do bug-test the experimental section, this is a whole lot of work added to their load for a bunch of features that will probably never be added to the game proper. A collection of patches is clearly the responsibility of the patch designers to maintain, whereas once you put it in the main game any bugs will be perceived by the casual user as the devteam's fault, even if it's put in a code ghetto labeled 'experimental'. The casual user does not care about the developer politics involved; all they see is the feature they're trying to use being buggy and crappy. Then they tell all their friends about how buggy and crappy Crawl is.

[Thymos]

Why not build some of the ideas behind Lava Orcs into Forge Dwarves?

Give them some kind of innate resistance to fire as they level up, and eventually the ability to walk on fire. Also fire and earth affinities.

I also think Forge Dwarves should slowly improve the enhancement levels of their weapons, with the max enhancement they can increase it to increasing as they level up.

[XuaXua]

Why not build some of the ideas behind Lava Orcs into Forge Dwarves?

I thought the Lava Orc concept evolved into Forge Dwarves. Guess I was wrong.

[nicolae]

I thought the Lava Orc concept evolved into Forge Dwarves. Guess I was wrong.

They're a paraphyletic group, although horizontal gene transfer may have occured.