Remove hunger


Although the central place for design discussion is ##crawl-dev on freenode, some may find it helpful to discuss requests and suggestions here first.

Halls Hopper

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Post Sunday, 2nd October 2016, 00:33

Remove hunger

Hunger as it is now is a pretty pointless mechanic. In almost all cases hunger is irrelevant as food is so plentiful- it effectively is a button you press on a timer. Or, have the game automatically press the button for you. It's pointless. So, I made a branch with no hunger- food still generates and butchering works but there's no reason for either unless you're a ghoul. I'm not sure what to do about vampires, though.

https://github.com/robotic-rodent/crawl-no-hunger

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Post Sunday, 2nd October 2016, 00:58

Re: Remove hunger

So apparently the devs are split on this issue -- some want to implement this type of solution where hunger simply becomes irrelevant, and others want to remove food in a way that makes hunger clock even more important than it presently is.

I think the players mostly favor this type of solution where hunger is just removed from the game, essentially giving de jure recognition to the current irrelevance of hunger/food, rather than drastically changing the game by making hunger important. Could be wrong though.

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Halls Hopper

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Post Sunday, 2nd October 2016, 01:04

Re: Remove hunger

That's basically my position- hunger is irrelevant and there's no form of hunger that's both meaningful and fun. There's no reason *not* to remove it in its current state; I put this up so people could test it out.

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Post Sunday, 2nd October 2016, 01:11

Re: Remove hunger

I have to be honest and say I'm not gonna do that, because I don't see how it would differ from an ordinary game of crawl other than not having to press c or e all the time. But good job nonetheless.

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Post Sunday, 2nd October 2016, 01:13

Re: Remove hunger

lethediver wrote:I don't see how it would differ from an ordinary game of crawl other than not having to press c or e all the time.
that's the point

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Post Sunday, 2nd October 2016, 02:52

Re: Remove hunger

I mean, i find vanilla dcss too tedious even without hunger which is why im exclusively playing hellcrawl. Would love to see hellmonk get rid of food though.
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Blades Runner

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Post Sunday, 2nd October 2016, 03:37

Re: Remove hunger

Hungerless crawl forks and patches have been around for at least a year. This argument re: food has been going even longer and nothing has happened to address it other than interface-oriented half-measures.

At the end of the day, if you want to do something about this, you have to be willing to take on maintenance of an alternate fork and online server infrastructure.
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Post Sunday, 2nd October 2016, 16:34

Re: Remove hunger

Basically everyone knows hunger doesn't do anything unless you are playing an extremely contrived character or are remarkably bad at the game. It can't just be removed, because of hypothetical optimal play concerns. What if players choose to go atheist (for no piety decay) and spend 30000+ turns per floor in lair or whatever, waiting for enemies to come to them in advantageous melee positions like in DoomRL? This will provide a negligible benefit, just like hypothetical optimal play around floor traps as we saw from the recent Ultraviolent4 game. Nonetheless, there is a desire for a progression clock for purely ideological reasons, on the same level as floor traps continuing to exist. The difference is that you can more or less ignore floor traps and be no worse off for it, but you can't ignore the need to feed without playing a Mummy or Vampire, and who wants to do that?
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Halls Hopper

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Post Sunday, 2nd October 2016, 16:46

Re: Remove hunger

The thing is, crawl already has an anti-camping mechanic that's much easier to fix than hunger- OOD spawns. If camping/scumming is a real issue (I don't think it is in 99% of cases) jacking up the OOD spawn timer and marking the player should fix it.

The obvious couterargument to that is at high levels nothing's dangerous, but spawning a pan lord or two after you've spent a couple thousand turns on zot:5 is pretty threatening. Just spawning a few very dangerous enemies after a set cap of turns (obviously warning the player first) should dislodge them.

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Barkeep

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Post Sunday, 2nd October 2016, 17:16

Re: Remove hunger

I agree with godzilla. Buff OoD spawns to create pressure onward. And/or stop spawns on a level after X turns, with X calibrated roughly toward being a bit longer than average turncount fully clearing a floor with autoexplore and resting.

That's probably a good idea even without hunger removal, but even better if it is coupled with food/hunger removal obviously.

Good work on the hungerless branch!

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Post Sunday, 2nd October 2016, 17:31

Re: Remove hunger

one issue I see if you are trying to replace food with doom clock or something is that it will make autoexplore a very bad idea and it would mean that some players like me might stop playing crawl. I see it in my current SpBe game where I don't berserk much, don't wait for full HP before autoexploring and still got dangerously low on food, that's with rPois in swamp/snake. At some point I considered entering wizard mode to acquire some food.

edit. I believe there is an easy solution: turns spent while autoexploring should not increase ood chance.
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Post Sunday, 2nd October 2016, 19:48

Re: Remove hunger

The solution was inside his proposed change. The clock would be above the average turn count. Meaning you could auto explore each level fully, and still have a big buffer of safety turns to do whatever and go down. But not enough to scum.

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Post Sunday, 2nd October 2016, 20:00

Re: Remove hunger

Steve wrote:The solution was inside his proposed change. The clock would be above the average turn count. Meaning you could auto explore each level fully, and still have a big buffer of safety turns to do whatever and go down. But not enough to scum.


That would be the idea. I think there is a big enough difference between "non-scumming, but slow play" and "actual scumming" that it wouldn't be hard to allow former while punishing the latter.

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Post Sunday, 2nd October 2016, 20:43

Re: Remove hunger

and into wrote:
Steve wrote:The solution was inside his proposed change. The clock would be above the average turn count. Meaning you could auto explore each level fully, and still have a big buffer of safety turns to do whatever and go down. But not enough to scum.


That would be the idea. I think there is a big enough difference between "non-scumming, but slow play" and "actual scumming" that it wouldn't be hard to allow former while punishing the latter.

Additionally, what constitutes slow play for one race is not for another, at least partially because of the time spent resting to recover hps (to pick races at opposite extremes, ogres will spend a rediculously greater number of turns resting than say, vine stalkers or felids)
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Post Sunday, 2nd October 2016, 21:01

Re: Remove hunger

Yes, and characters that are weak for whatever reason (bad item luck, poorly played, w/e) end up taking more damage than they need to and spend more turns resting. I think you could have OoD spawn get stronger over time in a way that doesn't unduly punish what I just described, but would prevent long-term scumming.

Yes, a player could scum right up until the OoD spawns start getting out of hand, if they really wanted to, but that's already the case now. There is almost always way more food than you need in any given game, and someone who really wanted to do so, could translate that into scumming up to a certain point. Hunger really just isn't a good "pressure" for moving forward, at all. You could remove food/hunger without changing anything else and it wouldn't break the game or anything. (Though Berserk and maybe some other things should be rebalanced following this kind of removal, sure.)

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Halls Hopper

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Post Sunday, 2nd October 2016, 21:07

Re: Remove hunger

I updated the repo with an anti-scumming timer. The first time the player spends more than 2,000 turns on a level, they get a warning ("You feel a strong need to keep moving.") After 2500 turns spent on any given level there's a 1/100 chance per turn to spawn a pan lord (probably should change this to be something else, but it should be threatening to *everyone*- scaling seems like a bad idea to me.) The exact numbers and spawns should probably be adjusted and randomized but 2000 feels decent to me after (very) limited testing. It might be worth it to change the number based off of the player's regen rate but that seems overly complex.

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Post Sunday, 2nd October 2016, 22:44

Re: Remove hunger

lethediver wrote:I mean, i find vanilla dcss too tedious even without hunger which is why im exclusively playing hellcrawl. Would love to see hellmonk get rid of food though.

I have some good news for you!

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Post Monday, 3rd October 2016, 00:10

Re: Remove hunger

Hunger in Rogue existed solely as a timer system to force you to continue diving the dungeon at a consistent rate so as to prevent the player from grinding on weak monsters forever (as all monsters would continue to give you experience no matter your level, if it is a pitiful amount). Many of the 'old school' roguelikes that spawned from that seem to have lost the whole idea of the food clock by including it, but making it irrelevant in some fashion or another:

-Angband has a food system, but it's pretty much just a limiter on how long you can be in the infinte dungeon before you have to come back to town and restock, thus really just being a couple extra tedious button presses every once in a while.
-Nethack made edible corpses, and made it an important part to gaining resistances. Even if you didn't need resistances, food was so easy to generate that you can even make a monster replicate infinitely to grind it for gems while also eating the dead corpses.
-ADOM also has edible corpses with resistances, but at least had background radiation and limited mutation cures to stop anyone outside of a wish engine from keeping the game going indefinitely.

Dungeon Crawl is no exception: food will rarely run out thanks to edible corpses, and even a corpseless/chunkless conduct can still be trivially easy to maintain if the player doesn't recklessly abuse high hunger cost abilities. It serves little to no purpose as an actual clock, and is pretty much just a tactical limiter; even with that in mind, pretty much all hunger related abilites already have their own system of tactical limitation such as MP, exhaustion, contamination, piety, rod charges, etc. Food should probably be taken in one of three directions:

1)Tie food solely to a strategic level clock, and eliminate all chunks/non-permafood sources and hunger costs. Make it the definitive clock of how long the developers want you to be able to spend going through the dungeon. If abilities need an extra cost to be balanced, tie it around other existing limiter mechanics like exhaustion or contamination or something.

2)Tie food solely to a tactical meter, and eliminate starvation and hunger over time. Make it solely a meter that governs the level of use for all special abilities (spells, god powers, etc.), and replace starvation with fainting. Let the player push themselves into fainting with any ability if they choose (with the warning if they are about to do so), and the only natural regeneration of satiation is from fainting->near fainting. The developers can then choose whether they want this system to have chunks or run solely off of permafood.

3)Remove food completely. This is identical to the first point, but with the concession that a food based strategic clock isn't needed due to other systems, or new systems, doing this job instead.


No matter what option above is chosen, all would be better than the current system, which tries to impose strategic and tactical limits at the same time, while failing to do both in a serious manner.
Last edited by Floodkiller on Monday, 3rd October 2016, 04:01, edited 1 time in total.

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Post Monday, 3rd October 2016, 01:54

Re: Remove hunger

Can anyone explain why durable summons can't be used to force players to progress? You can't grind on monsters that don't give XP...
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Blades Runner

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Post Monday, 3rd October 2016, 02:08

Re: Remove hunger

I think the problem with durable summons is that a nontrivial number of monsters you fight in the course of normal play are "OOD spawns" that appear before you've actually been on a level a suspicious amount of time. In other words, the effects of this system that's supposed to address a particular, narrow problem bleeds into apparently normal generation.

Of course, spawning durable summons after some absurdly long, we-know-with-absolute-certainty-you're-scumming interval makes sense.
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Post Monday, 3rd October 2016, 02:09

Re: Remove hunger

goodcoolguy wrote:I think the problem with durable summons is that a nontrivial number of monsters you fight in the course of normal play are "OOD spawns" that appear before you've actually been on a level a suspicious amount of time. In other words, the effects of this system that's supposed to address a particular, narrow problem bleeds into apparently normal generation.

Of course, spawning durable summons after some absurdly long, we-know-with-absolute-certainty-you're-scumming interval makes sense.


Okay. But why is the system configured this way?
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Blades Runner

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Post Monday, 3rd October 2016, 02:14

Re: Remove hunger

I could only speculate.
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Post Monday, 3rd October 2016, 03:24

Re: Remove hunger

Floodkiller wrote:If abilities need an extra cost to be balanced, tie it around other existing limiter mechanics like exhaustion or contamination or something.

There's really nothing in the entirety of Crawl that requires this extra cost. If there is, it's broken in Trunk right now.

I've tilted at this windmill before, however, and I'm pretty sure I still can't come up with better arguments than the ones I marshaled in that thread. I'm honestly not sure that anyone's mind has been changed about hunger and food since I started to read this forum, actually.

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Post Monday, 3rd October 2016, 04:41

Re: Remove hunger

tabstorm wrote:
goodcoolguy wrote:I think the problem with durable summons is that a nontrivial number of monsters you fight in the course of normal play are "OOD spawns" that appear before you've actually been on a level a suspicious amount of time. In other words, the effects of this system that's supposed to address a particular, narrow problem bleeds into apparently normal generation.

Of course, spawning durable summons after some absurdly long, we-know-with-absolute-certainty-you're-scumming interval makes sense.


Okay. But why is the system configured this way?


I am not surprised there is too much XP in crawl, for some reasons devs don't have control, they don't know what monsters will be generated and how often (it's random pick from a list and interval between spawns is random too). Even consumables are unknown since they can be dropped by ood spawns too.
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Post Monday, 3rd October 2016, 07:00

Re: Remove hunger

goodcoolguy wrote:Hungerless crawl forks and patches have been around for at least a year. This argument re: food has been going even longer and nothing has happened to address it other than interface-oriented half-measures.

At the end of the day, if you want to do something about this, you have to be willing to take on maintenance of an alternate fork and online server infrastructure.


Keep in mind that it took more than SIX YEARS of Stone Soup to get rid of the victory dancing bullshit
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Post Monday, 3rd October 2016, 07:11

Re: Remove hunger

Also, eff OOD spawns, excessive farming and scumming dungeon floors should result in random god wrath summoning effect. You're in the Dungeon for their amusement, after all! This could be tied into the idea of Xom-style effects replacing traps, the effects would get worse as you spend 1000+ or whatever turns on a single floor
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Post Monday, 3rd October 2016, 07:47

Re: Remove hunger

scorpionwarrior wrote:Keep in mind that it took more than SIX YEARS of Stone Soup to get rid of the victory dancing bullshit


This is a volunteer project. Patches are always welcome, especially when they work properly and have the intended effect and no ripple effects.

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Post Monday, 3rd October 2016, 07:55

Re: Remove hunger

Brannock wrote:
scorpionwarrior wrote:Keep in mind that it took more than SIX YEARS of Stone Soup to get rid of the victory dancing bullshit


This is a volunteer project. Patches are always welcome, especially when they work properly and have the intended effect and no ripple effects.


I didn't mean that as a slight against the devs, I agree with dpeg and others that it's a good thing changes come slowly and conservatively for the main branch. I was trying to remind goodcoolguy that things can progress even if it takes more than a year. I appreciate the hard work contributers make in their free time.
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Blades Runner

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Post Monday, 3rd October 2016, 11:33

Re: Remove hunger

@Brannock: Are you suggesting that a patch that removes hunger and food from crawl would be accepted? Is it your belief that the reason crawl has hunger in 2016 is that no one in the crawl community has been willing to step up and write the code to change that?
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Post Monday, 3rd October 2016, 14:56

Re: Remove hunger

Getting rid of chunks and make monsters sometimes drop permafood that you can only eat while "hungry" would be an easy first step that lets you automate everything without losing piety. Can we make that change first and worry about exactly what form hunger should take later?

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Post Monday, 3rd October 2016, 15:45

Re: Remove hunger

johlstei wrote:Getting rid of chunks and make monsters sometimes drop permafood that you can only eat while "hungry" would be an easy first step that lets you automate everything without losing piety. Can we make that change first and worry about exactly what form hunger should take later?

Unless you mean the piety loss caused by turns spent butchering corpses, this isn't really an issue anymore. Piety is reward on kill now for any god that used to support corpse sacrifice for piety, except for Fedhas (and I'm pretty sure that will get changed eventually as well).

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Post Monday, 3rd October 2016, 16:04

Re: Remove hunger

Floodkiller wrote:
johlstei wrote:Getting rid of chunks and make monsters sometimes drop permafood that you can only eat while "hungry" would be an easy first step that lets you automate everything without losing piety. Can we make that change first and worry about exactly what form hunger should take later?

Unless you mean the piety loss caused by turns spent butchering corpses, this isn't really an issue anymore. Piety is reward on kill now for any god that used to support corpse sacrifice for piety, except for Fedhas (and I'm pretty sure that will get changed eventually as well).

Yes I do mean the piety loss from time spent butchering corpses - sorry that was pretty ambiguous. auto_butcher accomplishes everything besides preserving my piety, I don't really care if food is removed beyond that. I think crawl should have a clock pushing you forward, I just want it automated and not related to tactical things like spellcasting.
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Post Monday, 3rd October 2016, 17:06

Re: Remove hunger

goodcoolguy wrote:@Brannock: Are you suggesting that a patch that removes hunger and food from crawl would be accepted? Is it your belief that the reason crawl has hunger in 2016 is that no one in the crawl community has been willing to step up and write the code to change that?

Not to speak for Brannock (also, congrats on getting on the dev team!), but a patch that actually removed hunger and food would be fairly non-trivial, to the point that it would be a lot of work for somebody who can't even be sure right now if the devs would accept it. All we've had so far are a few patches that just prevent any changes to characters' hunger states.

Anybody interested in tackling this project should check out the spreadsheet in the thread I linked above, which covered all of the hunger costs in the game at the time of writing. I'm fairly sure that, since then, no hunger costs have been added to the game that require much finesse to solve. AFAIK, the trickiest things to work out are Fedhas, Sp/Vp/Gh, and Gozag, though I think I'm forgetting a couple of issues.

johlstei wrote:Getting rid of chunks and make monsters sometimes drop permafood that you can only eat while "hungry" would be an easy first step that lets you automate everything without losing piety. Can we make that change first and worry about exactly what form hunger should take later?

Do you not remember the experimental branch where the monsters-dropping-permafood thing was tried? I don't think it was a hit.

Automating away food is worse than removing it, imo. Why keep the vestiges of the mechanic after you've removed all player interaction with it?

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Post Monday, 3rd October 2016, 19:01

Re: Remove hunger

A patch that removed hunger and food would be easy as hell. Replacing them with something else is another matter, but removing is easy.
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Post Monday, 3rd October 2016, 20:44

Re: Remove hunger

dowan wrote:A patch that removed hunger and food would be easy as hell. Replacing them with something else is another matter, but removing is easy.
I don't know if this is true, considering how I recently saw hellmonk complaining about how much of a pain in the ass it was to remove food from hellcrawl.

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Post Monday, 3rd October 2016, 21:25

Re: Remove hunger

Removing actual food would be a bit difficult, since you have to consider floor spawns, shops, acquirement, gozag, several food vaults, corpses, vamp weapons, vampires, spells, rods, and.... I'm probably missing a few things.
Removing the food clock is easy, you could just add a function that "locks" a characters hunger rating in place at satiated and remove the message.
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Post Monday, 3rd October 2016, 22:21

Re: Remove hunger

Floodkiller's long posting is really good, in my opinion.

You should also take into account this: while it seems that everyone and their granny agree on something (food removal here), when it comes to the details, people (developers) actually have different opinions. [History footnote: the inability to decide how to deal with the Ecumenical Temple prevented adding standard gods for several versions. Until then did we agree on overflow altars.]

I believe that a visible clock is very healthy, for any kind of game in this genre. Therefore, I like (and have argued) for something like Floodkiller's 1). Clearly, that's not everyone's opinion. We have lots of developers, and this may look like a curse for something such as this issue, but trust me, it's very good for other things. :)

Finally, people probably also disagree about how pressing this problem is. There may be concensus that the food system is inelegant, tedious, overloaded etc. But is it so bad to require urgent action? Is it Crawl's biggest problem? I don't think so, for example.

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Post Monday, 3rd October 2016, 22:54

Re: Remove hunger

dpeg wrote:Floodkiller's long posting is really good, in my opinion.

You should also take into account this: while it seems that everyone and their granny agree on something (food removal here), when it comes to the details, people (developers) actually have different opinions. [History footnote: the inability to decide how to deal with the Ecumenical Temple prevented adding standard gods for several versions. Until then did we agree on overflow altars.]

I believe that a visible clock is very healthy, for any kind of game in this genre. Therefore, I like (and have argued) for something like Floodkiller's 1). Clearly, that's not everyone's opinion. We have lots of developers, and this may look like a curse for something such as this issue, but trust me, it's very good for other things. :)

Finally, people probably also disagree about how pressing this problem is. There may be concensus that the food system is inelegant, tedious, overloaded etc. But is it so bad to require urgent action? Is it Crawl's biggest problem? I don't think so, for example.


What's the biggest problem?
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Post Monday, 3rd October 2016, 23:32

Re: Remove hunger

tabstorm: This is immediately going off-topic, but to me, the biggest problem is luring (related to, but more important than, kiting and stair-dancing). I think it is extremely unfortunate that combat (Crawl's most important gameplay aspect) is so scripted: it is tedious, reliable, counter-intuitive (if you don't know it), and prevalent (if you know and care). For some time, I believed that luring could be addressed with some rule changes (about monster behaviour), but I've been talked out of it. Contrasted with this, eating is just a minor, if irritating, interface annoyance, in my opinion.

I would love to discuss this again (and again), but this should go to a new thread.

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Post Monday, 3rd October 2016, 23:53

Re: Remove hunger

a step above the food question:
why the hell there is something like butchering?
kill = food drop + eventually hide
autopickup+autoeat is already our best friend.
Butchering is nothing more than ruining my "c" key, which is (sometimes) already under pressure about Tab.

About spell based chars:
The food concept is also a reasonable limitation to spamming spells over your actual ability. Magic school makes the spell possible, spell hunger forces a wise use of it.
Honestly, sometimes i appreciated it, since it was a solvible trouble. Stop hammering that f***in hard dungeon lvl as there was nothing else and play like a human. Use brain to find a reasonable target while lookin for a food source. It probably saved a few of my infinite deaths.

I guess the same happens to berserkers.
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Post Tuesday, 4th October 2016, 00:30

Re: Remove hunger

dpeg wrote:You should also take into account this: while it seems that everyone and their granny agree on something (food removal here), when it comes to the details, people (developers) actually have different opinions.

Finally, people probably also disagree about how pressing this problem is. There may be concensus that the food system is inelegant, tedious, overloaded etc. But is it so bad to require urgent action? Is it Crawl's biggest problem? I don't think so, for example.

I think these two things are related. First, the dev disagreement on this topic often doesn't find itself well-represented in the conversations here on the Tavern. Often, it ends up with you or another dev playing defense with a bunch of people like me complaining endlessly. And that reinforces itself; there's a bit of a groupthink problem here, in that the food problem is a popular issue on Tavern because it's a popular issue on Tavern, after a certain point.

That said, I don't think many people think it's urgent. It just seems similar to item destruction to lots of people; removing it would be a relatively simple change that would remove a serious annoyance at the small price of a marginal player buff that really comes out in the wash with the midgame drop in difficulty. And, like item destruction, it's hard for lots of us to understand why hunger is still in the game despite numerous attempts at describing its many flaws.

neverEnough wrote:a step above the food question:
why the hell there is something like butchering?

Originally? Mid-90s RPG verisimilitude. Now? Tradition.

Even if the devs disagree about hunger, I find it difficult to believe they really disagree about butchering. There has to be a better UI solution than the clumsy interface we use to gather chunks now.

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Post Tuesday, 4th October 2016, 00:42

Re: Remove hunger

archaeo: This is certainly correct!

Did you know that there are complaints about item destruction even now? I think it's much easier to see that item destruction was good for little (negligible gameplay effect, noticeable interface toll) and that's why it's gone already. By contrast, food *does* something for the game, even though the whole concept is completely muddled and the interface cost is steep. (I am saying this to stress your point about the groupthink. The tavern is quite unique, in my assessment, about the hatred for the food mechanic.)

Regarding butchering: I come from Nethack, and there, you just 'e'at corpses. Inserting another step with butchering (I think it was called 'D'issection years ago?) seems to be a Crawl idea. I am afraid it might have been added for realism alone, but that was way before my time.
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Post Tuesday, 4th October 2016, 01:19

Re: Remove hunger

archaeo wrote:
goodcoolguy wrote:@Brannock: Are you suggesting that a patch that removes hunger and food from crawl would be accepted? Is it your belief that the reason crawl has hunger in 2016 is that no one in the crawl community has been willing to step up and write the code to change that?

Not to speak for Brannock (also, congrats on getting on the dev team!), but a patch that actually removed hunger and food would be fairly non-trivial, to the point that it would be a lot of work for somebody who can't even be sure right now if the devs would accept it. All we've had so far are a few patches that just prevent any changes to characters' hunger states.

Anybody interested in tackling this project should check out the spreadsheet in the thread I linked above, which covered all of the hunger costs in the game at the time of writing. I'm fairly sure that, since then, no hunger costs have been added to the game that require much finesse to solve. AFAIK, the trickiest things to work out are Fedhas, Sp/Vp/Gh, and Gozag, though I think I'm forgetting a couple of issues.


Odd. I think the obvious answer to both questions is "no." It looks to me like devs are in a pattern of avoiding a decision on food, probably due to resistance from senior members re: removal. It simply is not the case that it's a question of coding or working out a comprehensive 5-year plan. Devs seem to recognize the possibility of corrections and revisions if a change causes unforeseen consequences, except when it comes to food. I would remind newer developers that being the guy who finally removes food from crawl will make you a folk hero in the community.
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Post Tuesday, 4th October 2016, 01:44

Re: Remove hunger

goodcoolguy wrote:I would remind newer developers that being the guy who finally removes food from crawl will make you a folk hero in the community.
He would also die of some unnatural cause within hours.

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Post Tuesday, 4th October 2016, 01:49

Re: Remove hunger

dpeg wrote:
goodcoolguy wrote:I would remind newer developers that being the guy who finally removes food from crawl will make you a folk hero in the community.
He would also die of some unnatural cause within hours.

You mean starvation?

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Post Tuesday, 4th October 2016, 02:47

Re: Remove hunger

dpeg wrote:food *does* something for the game, even though the whole concept is completely muddled and the interface cost is steep.

Look, we can disagree as to whether Crawl should have food and a hunger clock. Reasonable people can disagree about this! I think if people want a strict time limit they should play a game designed for it, like Brogue, because it's really hard to design an impactful clock in a game with a massive number of species/background/god combinations and Crawl has other vectors for the prevention of scumming.

However, the idea that food does anything at all in the current version of Crawl is hard for me to understand. What's it accomplishing, exactly, beyond killing some newbies in a slow and confusing death, or mildly inconveniencing players who were too inattentive to eat before fighting? I don't mean this in a rude, snarky way, I literally don't understand.

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Post Tuesday, 4th October 2016, 08:57

Re: Remove hunger

dpeg wrote:Regarding butchering: I come from Nethack, and there, you just 'e'at corpses. Inserting another step with butchering (I think it was called 'D'issection years ago?) seems to be a Crawl idea. I am afraid it might have been added for realism alone, but that was way before my time.

I guess it was also an attempt to differentiate weapon types, as you couldn't butcher with a blunt weapon. Which made cursed blunt weapons a bit more scary.
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Post Tuesday, 4th October 2016, 15:02

Re: Remove hunger

It stops you from using tactics that take hundreds of thousands of turns to execute. In DoomRL at least, optimal play consists of sitting in a room and waiting for monsters to wander by so you can shoot first. I think it's good to avoid such things in a reasonable fashion, I just don't want it to affect players(by say, making them press c or e or consuming their piety by butchering stuff unnecessarily) who aren't doing them.

You could make an argument that deciding when to eat up to engorged before a fight is an interesting decision. It's not one I really care for but it's there. Probably low impact.
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Post Tuesday, 4th October 2016, 16:30

Re: Remove hunger

Sprucery wrote:
dpeg wrote:Regarding butchering: I come from Nethack, and there, you just 'e'at corpses. Inserting another step with butchering (I think it was called 'D'issection years ago?) seems to be a Crawl idea. I am afraid it might have been added for realism alone, but that was way before my time.

I guess it was also an attempt to differentiate weapon types, as you couldn't butcher with a blunt weapon. Which made cursed blunt weapons a bit more scary.


Ahhh yes, starvation deaths due to a cursed weapon. That certainly brings back memories. Curses used to mean something...
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Post Tuesday, 4th October 2016, 22:06

Re: Remove hunger

Bah, butchering corpses is way less hassle than tinning them with a tinning kit. (Or hauling them to your fridge) :)
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