Barkeep
Posts: 4435
Joined: Tuesday, 11th January 2011, 12:28
What if .des files for online were private?
This is not great, I think, from a design point of view. Players willing to learn a programming language and check out some text files gain a substantial advantage (eg: Do I have a chance of meeting an ice dragon or ice fiend here? Can I dig to steal the loot from this portal vault without fighting the big bad?).
So... what if the .des files were in a private repository? I can see three obvious challenges:
* Offline versions of crawl would need to have a different set of .des files.
* Contributing vaults is one of the easiest ways to get involved in crawl development, and this would make that significantly harder.
* Since the existing .des files are public and well-known, it would take a bunch of vault redesigns before the private ones would present surprises.
... but maybe the elimination of the weird vault inspection minigame would be worth it?