Snake Sneak
Posts: 91
Joined: Saturday, 8th January 2011, 00:21
Re: Trouble understanding vaults? Read this!
I noticed a couple of things reading the documentation:
- Reading paragraphs and paragraphs of text in notepad is not pleasant
- I would definitely have appreciated a tiles version of the example temple vault (the one with plants, stones and butterflies)
- Having not designed a vault before, I had no clue where to start trying out vaults - it would be nice for them to give an example - something like "Try creating a vault that has a long corridor full of dart traps and doors with a small pile of gold at the end" (or a list of several such ideas), though not a good vault, would have given me something to start with to see if I could do it.
- It took me ages to find out that the keywords were available in the syntax.txt file - I was looking in section C that listed the .des files since it seemed to list all the files I'd need to start vaulting. I remembered I'd read about a file that would tell me what the commands did, but not where in the document the location of that file was given. Perhaps a note at the bottom of the document that says "Now you've read this, get started! Go to docs/develop/levels/syntax.txt for syntax info, dat/des/variable/entry/entry_simple.des for some example entry vaults, or dat/des/variable/entry/entry.des for information about creating new entry vaults" (probably in the form of a list I guess)
- I loved that syntax.txt has information about the behavior/properties of each of the items in the list at the top (eg which walls are diggable, which walls reflect cold and fire, which walls can be melted, what can be seen through and what can't).
- Syntax.txt refers to "dummy" vaults, which I had no idea what they are until reading further along in the file. Explaining what they are earlier, or even saying (see TAGS section of this document) would've reassured me that I hadn't missed reading something.
- Syntax.txt is so full of things and explanations and everything that I didn't read through all of it, I just looked for the headings you asked me to include and learned about each in term. I think a list giving a quick overview of what each command does, preferably divided by complexity, would be kind of neat.
- The instructions say that no matter how rare you make something, it will still be seen by tons of people and/or piss them off. In one of my vaults I wanted to make it produce a randart 1% of the time, but decided not to do that just in case that would be far too much. A ballpark figure for how often randarts should be generated in vaults (even if it's never!) owuld be great.
- I wasn't sure which file to place non-entry vaults into (ended up using float.des but I'm not even sure if that's the right place)
To answer your specific questions:
1. NSUBST and SHUFFLE were a little bit hard to figure out, but with shuffle I got there without too much trouble. I understand the basics of NSUBST but my eyes sort of glazed over when it came to the more advanced parts of NSUBST.
2. Very easy to create the vaults and put PLACE:1 on them, saw them in the game! Wizmode even let me put my vault in tons of times on the same level, which was great for figuring if SHUFFLE was moving the founts of water/blood around correctly.
Here's my trap corridor, it doesn't fit your rules but I wanted to make something that I could see . On that note, holy crap, I made a little tunnel and it appeared in the dungeon and my demonspawn dude walked through it! This is the happiest day of my life!
Here's my vault which I'm going to name Sigmund's House.
I picture Sigmund as having a pet rat named Fluffy, okay?
Slightly off-topic, but I want to say my favourite entry vault ever was one I got a few days ago - I was on one tile surrounded by lava. "What? Am I going to have to quit?!" I said to myself, and started searching for secret doors. Then a kobold came from around a corner and hit me with a dart of blinking! What a cool idea that one was
Hope that was helpful for you, it was fun to do!
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