Lair Larrikin
Posts: 27
Joined: Thursday, 5th May 2011, 18:52
Suggestion: Review vault / branch generation weights
One of the things I love about Crawl is that I never know what I'm going to get, especially stepping into branch ends, portal vaults and the like. Except in my experience, I feel like I get the same layouts a lot of the time.
Although anecdotal evidence, I'm sure many of you will agree that you see the same (usually older) portal vaults and branch ends again and again. I was just reading up on vault generation (haven't made one in a couple of years) and I was surprised to discover that, as an example, the sewer portal vault contains roughly 16 unique vaults!
https://gitorious.org/crawl/crawl/sourc ... /sewer.des
Now, in the case of sewer vaults, most of them don't have a weight which defaults them to 10, IIRC. But why does the kobold camp vault at the top have a weight of 35? As a relatively casual player this is the one I see again and again. This may indeed be a familiarity bias on my part but if the numbers are correct here, why does it have a bigger weighting (35 vs 10) than the others? It looks like a lot of newer additions forego WEIGHT headers altogether, but the older vaults have been left with specific weightings. In another example in temple.des, why has minmay_temple_forest_path_12 got a weight of 3 and circular_temple_ a weight of 40?
My main concern is that I've played hundreds of games and a large handful of the vaults in these .des files I've never seen. I would like to see more variety, and I think this can be solved by putting all these vaults on an equal chance of generation.
Some questions:
1.What are people's thoughts in tweaking the weights for these .des files?
2. Would removing all the WEIGHT headers put everything on an equal chance of generation? Or is the algorithm based on additional factors?
3. Are there reasons for particular vaults why you would want to increase or decrease the weight?
What I would like to do is see if it's possible to write a script or do something in wizmode that would allow me to generate say, the sewer portal vault again and again so I can get some accurate statistical weightings to support this intuition. Is that easy to do? Even if it's a manual task, if it's relatively quick I could generate a decent sample.
EDIT: Here's a spreadsheet with ongoing analysis:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc ... sp=sharing