Progress pages like Doomrl

[Homard]

Hey all,
I've played this game a lot since the very first public linley release. I've won many many times. Crawl is the best game I've ever played. I've also played Doomrl a lot lately. They're both wonderful games presenting unique challenges.

One thing I really like about Doomrl are the challenges that the game keeps track of. Has anyone suggested or thought about making progress pages for the player accessible from the title screen. I'm talking maybe just a fancy grid of races/classes/gods won to begin with. This could be expanded later to include the tournament banner achievements, low turncount win thresholds, rune stats and various other challenges. I'm thinking of things like spell-less wins, no Lair wins, wandless wins and so on. I'm talking about the offline game of course, as I know most of this can be gotten to if you want with online tracking.
Would there be any demand for this? I'm a programmer myself and would be pretty tempted to take it on if I thought it would fit with the philosophy of the devs and be used by people.

[Homard]

There's a difference between coding it and making it a part of the game experience. If it already exists in a portable and user friendly form, then I guess I'll get cracking trying to bring it to the offline players. I'm an offline player whenever there's not a tournament due to lag. I'm a person who enjoys the recent "achievement" fad. As an online player, I only get that at tournament time. I never get it while playing at home offline. I'm not interested in making Crawl in Doomrl, but I see something like this adding value and enjoyment for myself to the game. Maybe it would add enjoyment and value for others too.

Are you telling me that Crawl already has an attractively presented summary of player achievements and challenges integrated into the default UI? Can I choose a challenge at the beginning of the game and have the game rules enforce my challenge during gameplay? If so, I have missed them completely.

I don't understand the immediate confrontational tone, but probably should have expected it. Should I gather from that tone that this has been previously discussed and scorned by the establishment?

[tasonir]

Minmay's just mostly bitter and grumpy all the time. Don't take it too seriously

I think minmay's POV is that while it's true that it doesn't exist for offline players, if it does exist online, then they should just play online. This isn't a solution for people who hate lag such as yourself. I am not too sure how the devs would react to actually adding it, so you'll have to wait for a response from one of them; their names are in orange on the forum, if you don't know.

Recreating all of the stat keeping on the local client might be tricky, but is certainly possible. What might impede it is that it will always be easily modified since the player has access to all the data on their own computer, so it might not be as "official". But if you just want to see your own stats for your own pleasure, this might not be a problem.

I'd personally rather encourage people to play online, but I also realize that will never be 100% of players.

[mikee]

It's interesting that you mention doomrl and crawl tournaments. The tier system for banners was actually inspired by doomrl's badges.

[Homard]

When I played Doomrl, the similarities to the Crawl tournament banners were too much to ignore. I think I'll grab the sources and quietly work away at a very basic stats screen for myself here at home. If I like it, I may explore enforced challenges. The enforced challenges in Doomrl certainly give the game new life from time to time. Ringless octopode here I come!

[Kate]

Some kind of stats screen on the main menu could certainly be neat, it probably qualifies as something that would be nice to have but that nobody has been interested in working on up until now (especially since as was mentioned we have the bots and tournament scripts that do a good job of tracking online games). Enforced challenges seem fairly distinct from that, not sure how desirable those would be. Crawl Light has a few such things though, no clue on how they're implemented but maybe that's worth taking a look at.

[Marbit]

Is it possible to access the morgue of characters that are being played online? If not that would be a good reason to have the morgue available to expectators (and players if they want it).

[evilmike]

I've always thought something like this would be nice for offline crawl. Improve the "high scores" option in the main menu to include more detail, track certain conducts (base it on tournament banners), and so on. I wouldn't add "challenge modes" to Crawl though.

[dpeg]

I agree with this. All developers and actually everyone who comments here (or on SomethingAwful, or on IRC etc.) plays online Crawl. However, we know for sure that many players crawl offline (actually more than play online). And for those, nifty new features like this one would be really welcome, I am certain.

evilmike: Implementable? (I.e. should we try to come up with -some- specifications?)

[Siegurt]

Yeah, I play almost entirely offline, tiles is too slow, and console mode is annoying, partially because I put my computer to sleep and wake it up a lot (Maybe every 10-40 minutes) and i hate having to log in again and again and again, and partially because I haven't found a satisfactory font (Offline I play with one of the windows raster fonts, it just looks better to me, there doesn't appear to be a TTF or OTF equivalent). It's also noticeably slower, although perhaps not unbearably so.

Plus I like to complete my trunk games entirely on one build, so I like to control when I re-build and update to the newest version.

[BlackSheep]

Do the online stat trackers operate on the morgue files or do they have access to other information?

[Galefury]

AFAIK they do not operate directly on morgue files, the data is entered into a database and accessed from there. Milestone fields for example are not in the morgue.