[proclick] new fork, hellcrawl


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bel

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Post Tuesday, 15th August 2017, 06:16

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

A while back, monster generation was changed so that no monsters generate after the initial generation.
Hellmonk wrote:Monsters no longer spawn over time, except in abyss. This kills the out of depth clock, which was supposed to encourage progression but mostly interrupted autotravel to make you fight ogres at xl 16.

Now that stairs are no longer a thing, it is worth reconsidering this. The new monsters that spawn over time could be made durable summons to avoid farming for XP.

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Post Saturday, 19th August 2017, 11:38

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

Minor bug/documentation report: lrd's spell description still refers to "bars of power" instead of numerical spellpower.

I needed lrd to be below a certain power so I could spam it to kill enemies on the opposite side of walls in vaults without those walls breaking. On a related note this gameplay is completely degenerate, and partially the product of several overlapping degeneracies which remain in the game/have been buffed by otherwise 'good' removals. Piety is an insufficient clock for many characters/gods, so w/o an out of depth clock or food the logistical extremes of hyper defensive play can be explored. Monster detection and out of los damage are also broken, but even if you remove them I guarantee you that new degenerate camping strategies will emerge in response to the lack of a progression timer. The solutions to this are 1) to nerf broken strategies as they appear and/or 2) to add a progression timer back into the game.

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Post Saturday, 19th August 2017, 12:15

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

Control via a timer is too passive and allows you to get away with directionless, homogeneous dungeon layouts. Now that there is no backtracking across levels, the next logical step is to remove backtracking within levels. This opens the way not only for faster, cleaner gameplay, but also removal of teleportation.

With linearized dungeon layouts, you have a notion of "behind the player," i.e. farther from the downstairs than the player is, which can be used to place spawns in a way that makes sense for pushing the player forward. But you don't have to place spawns, there are other, probably better ways. For one, you could place indestructible statue-type monsters that activate after the player has past them so that backtracking becomes dangerous. Another possibility would be doors that lock when the player goes through -- the vault warden mechanic can probably be used there.

My feeling is that when space is more constrained, a lot of the worst problems with game time-oriented scumming will go away.
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Post Saturday, 19th August 2017, 13:20

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

I think hatches and very small floors work better than doors (at least as doors exist in current dcss). You also have to prevent monsters from 'backtracking' to get to you, or else it is always going to be optimal to camp.

I disagree with you a little re: backtracking within levels. A game with a nonlinear path of progression and a well-communicated noise/stealth mechanic (so known monsters do not always directly approach you) opens up more tactical options than a game where every fight is immediately mandatory and tactics are reduced to "pick the best available position and stand still while the file of monsters pours through to test your strategic decision-making up to this point."

Square levels big enough to accommodate a variety of terrain and a nonlinear approach strategy (i'm imagining 20x20, but they could honestly be even smaller) + wandering monsters = an environment where sometimes the reward for moving on outweighs the risks of staying still. Of course, there are other ways to incite tactical dilemmas. Modern crawl incentivizes dangerous play (barely) with strategic benefits, such as timed portals and piety. Another option to encourage progression would be to create an easy game with the assumption that the 'challenge' of the game comes from playing for score/speedrunning.

As I've alluded in this post, my problem with ultralinear levels stems from a dislike of 'strategy' as it appears in crawl. At best, crawl strategy is a puzzle with right answers framed in the context of character building. At worst, it is a war of attrition where you are punished for incorrect decisions made thousands of turns ago. I see the removal of strategy as distinct from tactics as a desirable design goal for the future of the rogue-like or crawl-like genre, whereas the "no backtracking or sidetracking" ethos seems to "militarize" in a game with only strategic decisions instead of tactical ones. That being said, at either endpoint you have games where tactics and strategy are indistinguishable, which would be an improvement on the status quo.

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Post Sunday, 20th August 2017, 05:33

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

amaril wrote:Minor bug/documentation report: lrd's spell description still refers to "bars of power" instead of numerical spellpower.

I needed lrd to be below a certain power so I could spam it to kill enemies on the opposite side of walls in vaults without those walls breaking.

Does this actually work in hellcrawl? I know DCSS had a patch put in a couple of years ago to prevent LRD from doing damage to things on the opposite sides of walls if the walls don't break (Maybe it's broken in DCSS too?)
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Post Sunday, 20th August 2017, 22:28

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

Siegurt wrote:
amaril wrote:Minor bug/documentation report: lrd's spell description still refers to "bars of power" instead of numerical spellpower.

I needed lrd to be below a certain power so I could spam it to kill enemies on the opposite side of walls in vaults without those walls breaking.

Does this actually work in hellcrawl? I know DCSS had a patch put in a couple of years ago to prevent LRD from doing damage to things on the opposite sides of walls if the walls don't break (Maybe it's broken in DCSS too?)

It doesn't work in hellcrawl. There are few edge cases, but those are mostly not important.
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Post Thursday, 24th August 2017, 11:05

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

Do you need to go through the Hells to win after getting the Orb? I grabbed it, read another ?mapping in case some < spawned, then shrugged and entered Hell, where I got pulverized by Panlords and Seraphs.

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Post Thursday, 24th August 2017, 13:10

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

The Orbrun is through Hell. You go into the Vestibule and find the entrance to Hell (one out of four is open). The exit is on the seventh floor of Hell.

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Post Monday, 28th August 2017, 02:27

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

New update will be live soon.
  • Confusion reform: The confusion status no longer extends its duration when recast on the player, you get a short immunity from it when it wears off, and the max duration is 15 turns instead of 40. Potions of curing no longer cure it, but it can still be cured by potions of cancellation.
  • Potions of cancellation are slightly more common, potions of curing are very slightly less common.
  • Animate Dead functions as a permabuff. It's Dchan junior. The chance to raise a zombie is pretty bad at low power.
  • Spectral Weapon functions as a permabuff. You'll summon your spectral weapon when you hit something with the buff active. Still can't summon more than one weapon at a time. Unwielding dismisses the weapon but does not cancel the buff. Cancelling the buff will also dismiss the weapon. The weapon does not share damage with you anymore. Spell is moved to level 5 charms/summoning.
  • Updated the permabuff code to just take every spell as an int all the way through. The displayed amount of reserved mp should always be accurate (unless you're melding items that affect spell success) now. This change also lets you reserve your mp all the way down to 0 rather than forcing a minimum of 1 mp to remain unreserved.
  • Added ozocubu's armour to the book of battle.
  • Monsters don't leave corpses any more.
  • Kiku's receive corpses ability is gone. Yred's animate remains and animate dead abilities are gone.
  • Kiku gets a new 1* ability. For a short time, your melee attacks have a chance to drop a miasma cloud on the thing you hit. Effect duration and chance of a cloud scale with necro skill. Costs the same as receive corpses did.
  • Yred grants injury mirror at 1* instead of 2*. Doesn't bother letting you recall undead slaves until 3* since you prob won't have any until then.
  • Removed spells: Animate Skeleton, Corpse Rot, Simulacrum.
  • Monster movement speed is displayed numerically.
  • Piety is displayed numerically.
  • Merged potions of might and potions of brilliance into potions of augmentation, which provide the effects of both.
  • Removed potions of agility.
  • Evocable invisibility is gone from cloaks and randarts. The ring of shadows gets dex +13 instead.
  • Removed rings of magical power and staves of power.
  • Magical power is available as an armor ego on cloaks and hats.
  • New monster, Elevengu. These bird people make tengu look like sevengu. Show up rarely in Pan, packing some of the cool classed demonspawn spells: Legendary Destruction, Random Bolt, Sap Magic.
  • New monster, Diesel Robin. Slightly better AC and Hp than other robins, but only resists fire and "only" has AF_FIRE on its attack. Spawns where other robins spawn.
  • New unique, the Combo Robin. Spawns in Zot, deals ridiculous amounts of damage and has a gigantic pack of robins to back it up. Have fun.
  • Demonspawn enemies will no longer randomly spawn in Pandemonium.
  • Trog will no longer accept worship if you're in a permanent form or have a permabuff active, and will continuously give you penance if you sustain a permabuff while worshiping.
  • You will now get a warning if you try to throw a frenzy dart while worshiping Chei.
  • Cancelling the Darkness spell correctly updates vision range.

Already have some bugs I want to fix in the next one. Re: clocks and forcing the player forward, I'm going to look into shrinking level sizes somewhat. Linearizing individual floor layouts does not make much sense to me at the present time, though it's possible that future changes will make it more appealing. I will probably implement some form of passive durable summons antiscumming timer as well. The solution is not ideal but I know how to implement it and it should stop the really degenerate stuff while being nonintrusive in the course of normal play. Something else that's being looked at in regular DCSS is spawning some monsters awake when the level is generated, so I will monitor that and see if it accomplishes anything. I have vague plans to rework weapon brands and remove monster invisibility soon as well.

E: I think this update jacked up savecompat again, so you might lose your old saves, sorry.
Last edited by Hellmonk on Tuesday, 29th August 2017, 02:31, edited 1 time in total.

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Post Monday, 28th August 2017, 03:36

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

That's a good idea for how to do spectral weapon. Sounds like quality all around, will look forward to checking it out.

edit: *takes drag from cig post normal mode duzh MfSk win* that's the good shit....
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Post Monday, 28th August 2017, 04:57

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

Hellmonk wrote:New monster, Elevengu. These bird people make tengu look like sevengu. Show up rarely in Pan, packing some of the cool classed demonspawn spells: Legendary Destruction, Random Bolt, Sap Magic.
goddammit

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Post Tuesday, 29th August 2017, 19:28

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

>removes recast charms
>gives kiku a recast charm god ability

(for real tho good shit removing corpses u r a legend)

Low piety cost buffs are hardly better than charms, as are summons in general. I think you could move away from old school mp costs on everything other than conjurations, and make a lot of low cost god abilities passive with minimal drawback.

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Post Wednesday, 30th August 2017, 01:34

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

Yeah I feel you. Would be good to get a more fleshed out Kiku rework together rather than some shit I came up with in 5 minutes. At least 3 piety is not technically free I guess.

Summons need to move to some variant of the permabuff code but there is enough work involved that I'll probably put it off for a while.

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Post Wednesday, 30th August 2017, 08:49

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

The way attacking triggers the spectral weapon spawn is convenient from an interface perspective and plays very fast. The more I roll the current implementation over in my mind though... On the one hand, I question the way it produces allies that can be used to block and hinder monster movement with no marginal cost to the player on a per-ally basis outside of a turn spent meleeing, so you might be led to make it despawn if a monster walks onto it/tries to attack it, let monsters switch places with it, or make it try to blink behind monsters instead of moving normally (which would have the additional benefit of removing some of the advantage of polearms over other weapon classes). This all seems pretty fancy though, when you could also just make the effect give you an extra melee attack with the usual spectral weapon properties, dispensing with the ally completely.

Then you might ask about battlesphere. Why not give battlesphere the new spec weap mechanics? Or why not make battlesphere "double" your eligible ranged magic attacks if you buy the reasoning of the previous paragraph? In the end, you get to something like the dithmenos shadow attacks. The question is whether these attack mimicking allies are there just to be different or cute, without actually succeeding in being different from the dithmenos passive in a way that is good.

A different take on this might be to make a dead spectral weapon more consequential. If it's going to spawn whenever you attack, you don't want it to make you take damage, but it might be fair enough if there's a cooldown on respawning. Something like a -Weap status where it will not respawn for a while and you lose the ability to cancel the spell. Probably cancelling shouldn't let you get around the cooldown either, so people won't cancel a spec weap about to get killed.

As far as permasummons, I like the way the spectral weapon spawns when it's needed and doesn't hang around forever. This is much better than having a Hepliaklqana style ally that you have to manage with recall. A mechanism to conveniently and reasonably intelligently trigger summon spawns would be pretty good, could be as simple as spawning when a monster sees you. They could then despawn as usual and perhaps have a respawn after kill/cancel cooldown as described above. For simplicity, I would favor a one ally per spell summon limit.
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bel

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Post Wednesday, 30th August 2017, 09:39

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

What is the interaction between Gozag and the new "no corpses" system?

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Post Wednesday, 30th August 2017, 10:09

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

It looks like gozag blocks animate dead, gold from kills goes straight to your gold total, no piles.
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Post Thursday, 31st August 2017, 12:40

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

Idk if this has been brought up yet, but charms with drawbacks (ozo's, statform, every charm that costs mp...) break the permacharm system. You should still cancel charms (for free) after every fight, and then recast them when an appropriate threat shows up.

The strict remedy to this is 'all memorized charm spells cannot be turned off,' although this is sort of fiddly b/c you can't tell how much mp you are going to lose based on fail rate so it is tough to know when a charm is worth learning. Another solution: charms take a long time to cast, like equipping armor. However I suspect that stat form etc would still be worth keeping 'off' most of the time on certain characters.

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Post Thursday, 31st August 2017, 13:50

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

The solution to this has been removing drawbacks from charms. For example, the dcss half-measure of adding ponderousness to ozo's has been removed, spectral weapon does not have the damage sharing property, etc. You make a good point on statue form though. I don't believe there's an advantage to be gained by toggling charms a lot to manipulate mp availability. Except for statue form, I don't see any of the available permabuffs as merely situationally useful. The only ones I've ever turned off for mp reasons are infusion and invisibility. edit: Or rather, situational in a way that offers an advantage from toggling on an encounter by encounter basis rather than something like "most monsters aren't going to take significantly more damage from this anymore" or "everything that's actually dangerous has see invisible now."

I don't remember whether I posted about the long casting/cancelling duration you mention, but I suggested this a while ago. I think it's a good idea.
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Post Friday, 1st September 2017, 16:44

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

Most transmutations are situationally useful because they impact your defenses. Also I feel like the theoretical optimal player would turn off regen between encounters because the benefit to regenerating a negligible amount of hp per turn is less than the benefit of three additional mp which may be used for conjurations. Following this logic, I think that (for characters with non-charm spells) keeping charms on at all times becomes increasingly suspect if you have the option to toggle them. I remember you posting somewhere the idea that spells could be treated like equipment, and that is where the similar idea in my previous post came from. Sorry for not attributing you. This is a good idea, but it is difficult to imagine it being applied to all spells without sacrificing 'conjurations' as they exist in crawl.

The concepts of 'different encounters' and 'resting' ought to be examined, because as long as they exist (especially alongside the mechanics of stealth and movement delay) the prospect of toggling spells or equipment with arbitrarily long equip/casting times in response to specific enemies becomes viable. I believe that your 'no backtracking' idea comes from a similar dislike for resting/escape mechanics. My response to this problem is that each floor should be treated as a distinct encounter in which every action taken has tactical consequences.

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Post Friday, 1st September 2017, 18:02

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

At least in hellcrawl games I've played recently, I've generally gone appendage -> spider -> blade hands and never found myself downgrading or deactivating for tactical reasons. I don't even bother with ice form. I suppose there's something to be said for using ice form to get resistances or whatever even if personally don't bother to do it. Probably removing poison susceptibility from spider form would be good to cut down on the switching nonsense too. Anyway, if I understand you, you're raising the possibility that being in a form at the start of a fight that you want to switch forms may leave you with insufficient mp to do the switch, so to leave the option open the player may opt to cancel after fights. In that case, maybe the cost of casting the new spell should be the difference in costs between the new form and the active form.

About regeneration, even if someone is turning it on and off like you suggest, they're still interacting with the spell less than they do with dcss mechanics. As for leaving mp available for conjurations via weird toggling behavior, in my opinion, the way conjurations are priced is one of the central problems of the crawl magic system. The way you dump so much mp in every fight (which must therefore be carefully conserved, recovered after and during fights, motivating extra reset cycles) and the way you can switch attacks constantly is insanely tedious.

This is why I've pushed this virtual weapon concept to fold conjurations into the permacharm model and move the interface from the spell menu to equipment management and ranged/melee weaponry. Maybe conjurations that work like forms in that they are mutually exclusive would be better though. So you cast the conjuration once, you get some status and when you attack or throw, it shoots something like a dcss conjuration spell at no additional cost (or there could be a cost substantially lower than the usual one). This would keep you from switching a lot in combat because switching costs mp. To avoid the possibility that canceling between combat gives you some advantage, I would say maybe the best thing is for the status to wear off over time. Then you just make attacking recast the last spell after expiration and you're more or less set. You get convenient spell spamming, you discourage switching spells.
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Post Saturday, 2nd September 2017, 09:27

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

What a rush! +LOS and Frail 1 from nuclear crabs had me at the edge of my seat through Tar. Super intense - made me think of Infra Arcana's panicked pace.

Playing Hellcrawl as a (conjurer-type) caster must be the missing Hard-mode, I can't imagine how that'd work out. Fights can drag on forever in Z: and whichever hell branch you get. No time to regen MP.

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Post Sunday, 3rd September 2017, 05:20

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

MackTheKnife wrote:Playing Hellcrawl as a (conjurer-type) caster must be the missing Hard-mode, I can't imagine how that'd work out. Fights can drag on forever in Z: and whichever hell branch you get. No time to regen MP.

I have played a fair number of conjurer types and they are not any harder than melee. Vehumet gives MP on kills and Sif gives channeling. Sublimation of Blood is useful too.

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Post Tuesday, 5th September 2017, 05:30

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

Won on berotato:

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Statuepode with perm haste/rege/dmsl is pretty nice. The permabuffs actually balance out alot better than I thought they would Int drain can really suck if you are running at 8 or so MP left. You can get dumped out of everything since haste cast chance skyrockets.

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Post Tuesday, 5th September 2017, 06:23

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

Does Sif Muna decrease MP cost for permabuffs?
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Post Tuesday, 5th September 2017, 07:40

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

Yes, by providing vanilla ash style skill boost.

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Post Wednesday, 6th September 2017, 04:38

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

Did this one almost entirely as Dragon Form focusing on Int instead of str/dex like statuepode (which had like 12 int) also with permabuffs (dmsl,haste,regen,ozo armor). It worked pretty well too. Had about 28 AC with 10->15->22 EV by end. So not killer defenses. Not sure which stat allocation was best.

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Post Saturday, 9th September 2017, 19:06

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

I've been playing v 3.33 offline and really enjoying the changes. No food, no ammo, and auto-ID makes the gameplay smoother and faster. No upstairs deters stashing and grinding. Fewer branches also speeds up the game. I've only started messing with casters but I like the removal of Conj so far. Overall, great job, Hellmonk! Thank you for this.

Looking forward to getting a downloadable version with the permabuff changes!

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Post Sunday, 10th September 2017, 23:34

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

Couple bugs with Ozo Armor:

1) You can forget ozo armor while its cast and it will stay around
2) You can cast statue form while ozo armor is up and stack both AC together. If you do reverse order then it is disallowed.

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Post Monday, 18th September 2017, 02:24

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

Alright, got a minor update for everybody. A lot of this is just bugfixes. Should be live soon.
  • Antiscumming clock. You will start getting nasty, durably summoned stuff dropped on you after ~2500 turns on a floor, with appropriate warnings given out beforehand. Duration of "safe" time on the floor and the monster set might get adjusted later. The goal here is to avoid impacting reasonable play as much as possible while preventing people from waitscumming for 20,000 turns or whatever other tedious nonsense.
  • Potions of ambrosia slow you instead of causing confusion. Fixes a bug where !ambrosia would fail due to the invisible status that prevents repeated confusion, and I think slow might be more interesting tactically.
  • Removed the assassin background. Gladiators get a couple of their darts to hopefully bring them more on par with fighter.
  • Removed wands of slowing, finally.
  • Added a couple vaults.
  • Changed Sword of Power's base type to a double sword.
  • Removed a couple really useless unrands.
  • Fixed a bug where you could waste 4 mp casting animate dead with the effect already active.
  • Fixed a bug where corpses would get placed for monsters revived by lost souls.
  • Fixed some bugs with permabuff interactions and forcibly end permabuffs and forms when forgetting the spell.
  • Correctly display damage from awaken forest.

Didn't get to start any of the big projects I wanted to, also I still need to figure out how to put a downloadable version together. I will try and tackle that next, but I wanted to get this update out for the 1 (one) year anniversary of hellcrawl. When I started this project I didn't expect to be working on it a year later, but it's been a fun ride and I don't plan on stopping any time soon. Anyone who is interested in forking crawl should really give it a try. There are lots of cool directions that you can take DCSS in and a more active forking scene will only make the community stronger, imo.

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Post Monday, 18th September 2017, 09:37

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

*drunk at birthday party voice* if somebody told me... a YEAR ago... that today there would be a version of crawl with no food and no identification and no curses and no upstairs... i woulda said... get outta here....

Seriously though, you've moved the ball forward on crawl a lot in a year. So many of the things in hellcrawl now had been talked and talked about for years, all "theorycrafting" if you like. Now we know what happens if you remove food, identification, and a hell of a lot of other junk from crawl: It gets better. You showed that it pays off never to choose a half-measure, when you could've gone all the way.

I'll second what you say about forks too. Seeing the last year of crawl, you have to recognize the potential. People with the energy to go it alone can make an impact and the way to do it that keeps that energy going into development rather than discussion is to get a github account, come up with a name, and put it out there. There's so much scope for rethinking crawl. In my opinion, hellcrawl has the mechanical side of it well in hand, but if you want to talk content, there's so much dcss content that could be vastly improved or replaced. Pretty much all the lair branches are a mess, several gods in current crawl, several other gods that never made it, lots of bad dungeon generation, etc. A fork that does nothing but fiddle with layouts would be awesome.

Anyway, awesome year, hellmonk. Look thick. Solid. Tight.
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Post Monday, 18th September 2017, 12:39

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

My view is as follows:

First, great work on creating a fun fork. I have played many games of hellcrawl and I like it a lot.

I divide the changes in Hellcrawl into two broad categories:
  1. Removal of clearly vestigial and useless mechanics like food, curses and identification, or simplifying stuff like buffs and charms. Quality of life improvements like wand stacking also come in this category.
  2. Shortening the game and removing options. The biggest one is removing Lair, but one can think of others, like removal of gods and so on.

In my opinion, the first category comes under "unambiguously a good thing".

The latter, I am not so sure. I initially liked the idea of cutting Lair. But on reflection, I realized that one can already skip Lair if one chooses. Therefore, removing Lair is equivalent to a mandatory conduct imposed on a game of normal Crawl.

Is the latter a good thing? I don't know. The correct answer probably is: "it depends". People play the game in many different ways, and there is a danger that removing options could cut out something worthwhile. Since Hellcrawl's original design purpose was to incorporate Tavern memes, and Tavern memes are often just the prejudices of some people on Tavern (I, of course, include myself in that category), the possibility mentioned above should be kept in mind.

In general, successful forks are generally a sign of health. The fork is based on (mostly) the work of one person, so their views on what is worthwhile and what isn't matters for the fork. I hope some of the ideas from Hellcrawl are implemented in DCSS. The success of the fork would lead into pressures to incorporate both the "good" and the "bad" (IMO of course). I certainly hope food and curses are removed. I would not like the "anti-scumming" measure to go into Crawl, or the removal of monster generation over time (which has already been done), for reasons described elsewhere.

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Post Monday, 18th September 2017, 13:29

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

Ok, here are my thoughts as well. Initially I was playing hellcrawl a lot, it was fun without hunger/food, with wand stacking, item identification etc. Removing Lair seemed ok at that point because it was still crawl, though weak characters died in a very frustrating way because they had nowhere to run, main Dungeon was too hard and they could not reach Orc. Normally you can try to earn some XP using different stairs in Dungeon OR Lair OR Orc. Then Orc got moved to D:15 and the game became even more linear. I was (and still am) enthusiastic about removing upstairs but IMHO it does not work that great in hellcrawl: when you make game harder by a small margin in many different ways (no upstairs, harder monsters, diving to survive makes you lose much XP and is kind of slow suicide, faster piety decay, less consumables, higher dependence on loot etc.) you end up making it MUCH harder than every small margin can suggest.
Basically I no longer play hellcrawl because it is not crawl anymore IMHO. Similar thing happened to circus animals (permaforms were OP there too :-)), the tactics and strategy have become very different from those of normal crawl. Every time I survive an early orc high priest I think about stupid AI and my luck, every time I lose to it I think it was too close to unavoidable death: no HP, no skills, no items, no piety.
Unfortunately I can no longer play normal crawl either, it is so annoying and easy after hungerless hellcrawl that I lose attention and die tabbing :(
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Post Monday, 18th September 2017, 22:08

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

There could very well be a fork that aims to be a more dcss-like version of hellcrawl. Obviously I'm a lot more gung ho on hellcrawl than even other superfans, but in my opinion the ability to win very bad combos often with weird conducts is part of the problem with dcss: You can always juice the game with more luring and scumming so that you can do whatever you want. This doesn't take a lot of skill or intricate knowledge, it just takes a willingness to play a long, tedious game.

Trying to play hellcrawl like dcss is obviously a natural thing to do, but I think it's the things you can do in hellcrawl that you can't do in dcss that are the best parts. For example, in hellcrawl you can play a game with no branches and no runes. I won a game like this at xl 22 in 1 hour and 27 minutes. It had a consistent difficulty level all the way through and I escaped from hell with 11 hp left after blowing monsters off the exit with a fan. It reproduces a lot of the feel of a turncount speedrun in that you're way underleveled and you can't backtrack constantly and use degenerate dcss-style mechanics to grind your way through everything. But unlike a turncount speedrun where 1 in 100 characters might be viable and a run still takes about as long as a normal dcss game, 4 hours or so, the no runes, no branches hellcrawl conduct makes nice short games without a whole lot of start scumming. Probably two thirds of characters are viable in my opinion, assuming you pick a reasonably strong combo. It's fast, but not hurried like a dcss realtime run. That kind of game doesn't exist in dcss. The closest thing is a duhz run, but there you're talking about four times as much screwing around in a much less intense version of hell, easier depths, easier zot, easier dungeon.

We need to have a willingness to look at what crawl can be rather than what it has been. Whenever a cut is the right way to move a fork toward the vision it pursues, it should be made without hesitation. Crawl from Linley's to today's DCSS .21a will always be there. We have only our chains to lose, forks.
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Post Tuesday, 19th September 2017, 01:56

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

watertreatmentRL: agree re: a content-focused fork. It would be extremely interesting to see a new dungeon branch get developed from the ground up, something that is unlikely to happen in mainline DCSS to my knowledge (although gammafunk is working on some swamp revisions). I think the "maximalist fork" idea that gets kicked around every now and then by people who fall more on the content-heavy/roleplaying side of the spectrum would have potential to contribute in this direction. There have been a few forks that re-add species or implement some new ones, Yiufcrawl being the most recent, but not one that really experiments with radically different item, god or branch concepts. Of course it's a lot more work to create a bunch of content than to remove stuff.

bel: The more I mess with hellcrawl the more I think that someone needs to make a DCSS fork built for turncount speedrunning (or score, if you prefer). There is a lot of potential there but I don't think DCSS realizes it well and there's heavy cultural pressure against score-based metrics of optimal play etc for various reasons. Hellcrawl is not likely to move in that direction, but I think some of the ideas in Implojin's post in this thread are pretty compelling, and most of the non-real-time ones sound like they would be implementable. Mentioning this because I know you've pushed for more focus on score as a solution to problems with degenerate "optimal play" strategies. I think if you make the scoring system a major emphasis of the design and try to build around that you are likely to end up with something compelling, but probably quite a bit different from DCSS. Also agree that the antiscumming clock would not work in mainline DCSS, though I am glad that they're trying out nospawn. Some hellcrawl changes only make sense once you've fallen down the rabbit hole a ways; a hard per-floor timer like the antiscumming clock would be absolutely terrible in a game where backtracking to old floors is possible (and really I'm not 100% sure it'll work here, given that it's only been in the game for a couple days).

VeryAngryFelid: Do you think this could be addressed through the difficulty selection? Casual mode only boosts player exp but I know circus animals difficulty altered consumable drop rates and some other things as well. I am wondering if it would be possible to recapture the feel of a normal DCSS game with tweaks to casual difficulty or by adding another difficulty mode that alters stuff like monster spawn and item generation, or if it is just a matter of too many mechanics being different.

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Post Tuesday, 19th September 2017, 04:48

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

Yes, difficulty levels might help indeed. I forgot to mention another source of frustration - shops. When I see an armour/ jewelry shop in hellcrawl I instantly know that it will have great items but they will be too expensive at this point and I won't be able to return later. Is it possible to make those shops like spell books i.e. you always have access to them?
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Post Tuesday, 19th September 2017, 07:05

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

Gotta agree. Order forms/catalogs would be a good alternative to shops both in hellcrawl and DCSS. If shops are going to exist, and I don't think they have to, you can just give the player more items through generation, then saddling the merchandise with a physical location in-game is unnecessarily sloppy.
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Post Tuesday, 19th September 2017, 07:17

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

Shops do have some place in crawl as often you want several items to buy but don't have enough gold so you have to choose.
Early shops in crawl are great because you can plan accordingly (join Chei for dragon king's armour, for example or train crossbows for hellfire) but early shops in hellcrawl are almost useless.
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Post Tuesday, 19th September 2017, 07:22

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

Sure, but if you find an order form/catalog on d:4 that has AoDK, that's the same deal except that you don't have to leave it behind forever, as in hellcrawl, or walk back to d4 after clearing orc, as in dcss.
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Post Tuesday, 19th September 2017, 07:24

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

My objection was that generating more items is not a replacement for shops. Order form is what we need indeed.
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Post Tuesday, 19th September 2017, 12:47

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

VeryAngryFelid wrote:Is it possible to make those shops like spell books i.e. you always have access to them?

I would suggest, rather than constantly-available shops or "order forms", adding a short intermission hallway between floors that has a bazaar with access to every shop previously found in the game.

This has all manner of pacing benefits that wouldn't come with an always-on shopping list: It would provide a break between levels, it would allow the player to keep moving while they are actively clearing a floor (instead of feeling like they should be checking their shopping list and thereby inducing a modality shift away from playing the game every time they pick up some gold), it would provide an opportunity to mix tilesets inside of the intermission hallways for less-jarring branch transitions, it would prevent players from feeling like they have to do silly things like holding enough gold for on-the-spot purchasing from consumable shops, and it would retain the balancing option to lockout intermission bazaar availability during areas of the game intended to induce player tension such as Zot or Hell.

An intermission area would also provide a neat opportunity to drop unexpected bonuses on the player, like a city-of-gold trove or a branch-skipping reward shortcut for quick play. (This is all a shameless rip of Spelunky, but when the shoe fits..)

Hellmonk wrote:I am wondering if it would be possible to recapture the feel of a normal DCSS game with tweaks to casual difficulty or by adding another difficulty mode that alters stuff like monster spawn and item generation, or if it is just a matter of too many mechanics being different.

I would be very careful with bumping item generation. In my early Blitz testing, this played poorly enough that I reverted it and began exploring alternate approaches to Dungeon compression.
_So_ many problems with DCSS can be traced back to excess item availability. In my current opinion drastically fewer but more impactful items is the way forward, even if it forces a hard break with the older DCSS feel.

Altering monster density, monster action probabilities, or further tweaking the player power curve through XP gain or statgain adjustments, seem more probable spaces to explore as difficulty fixes without horribly unwanted pacing-destroying knockon effects.

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Post Tuesday, 19th September 2017, 13:28

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

A side question, is possible to add hellcrawl to one of EU server?

The ones on which is currently available have a terrible lag for me, and I really prefer to play online rather than offline.
I played hellcrawl only like tens versions ago, so I'd like very much to test all new changes directly.
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Post Tuesday, 19th September 2017, 15:41

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

Implojin wrote:
VeryAngryFelid wrote:Is it possible to make those shops like spell books i.e. you always have access to them?

I would suggest, rather than constantly-available shops or "order forms", adding a short intermission hallway between floors that has a bazaar with access to every shop previously found in the game.
Man, I was just finishing a comment that made pretty much just this suggestion, and I thought I was so clever and original.

However, I wonder if this would best be done just using the normal bazaar system, rather than an intermission level. That is: all floor shops are replaced with (timed or untimed) portals to a single bazaar, to which the player returns each time they enter a portal. This bazaar has very few shops at first, but gains additional shops each time it's entered or as the player clears more levels. Thus the player can be pretty confident that they'll have another chance to buy items they can't yet afford, at least in early game. But since they don't know when that chance will occur, they will have to choose between delaying and taking a risk, or buying a less attractive item they can afford right now.

Actually there are lots of other possible ways to implement shops in hellcrawl, e.g.:

  • Shops are generated as normal. However, item prices are scaled to the total amount of gold generated in the game thus far, so that everything is in principle affordable.
  • Shops are generated as normal. However, the player has the option of purchasing an item on layaway if their current gold is greater than 0 but less than the item's cost. Doing so sets the player's current gold to a negative number, which increases as normal as the player finds more gold. Once the player has amassed enough gold to get back in the black, they are magically delivered the item after a certain number of terms, akin to god gifting.
  • Shops are never randomly generated in the dungeon. Instead, all players gain Gozag's Call Merchant ability automatically. This works more or less as normal, except that both the prices of using the ability and the prices in the shops are reduced to account for the fact that the player is only getting gold the normal way, and that each shop generated is guaranteed to have at least one item the player can afford (given the minimum amount of gold threshold for using the ability and the actual cost of the shop). As the general corporate sponsor of hellcrawl, Gozag is removed as a regular god choice, so no more gold distraction, potion petition, etc.

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Post Tuesday, 19th September 2017, 16:55

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

watertreatmentRL wrote:*drunk at birthday party voice* if somebody told me... a YEAR ago... that today there would be a version of crawl with no food and no identification and no curses and no upstairs... i woulda said... get outta here....

Seriously though, you've moved the ball forward on crawl a lot in a year. So many of the things in hellcrawl now had been talked and talked about for years, all "theorycrafting" if you like. Now we know what happens if you remove food, identification, and a hell of a lot of other junk from crawl: It gets better. You showed that it pays off never to choose a half-measure, when you could've gone all the way.

I'll second what you say about forks too. Seeing the last year of crawl, you have to recognize the potential. People with the energy to go it alone can make an impact and the way to do it that keeps that energy going into development rather than discussion is to get a github account, come up with a name, and put it out there. There's so much scope for rethinking crawl. In my opinion, hellcrawl has the mechanical side of it well in hand, but if you want to talk content, there's so much dcss content that could be vastly improved or replaced. Pretty much all the lair branches are a mess, several gods in current crawl, several other gods that never made it, lots of bad dungeon generation, etc. A fork that does nothing but fiddle with layouts would be awesome.

Anyway, awesome year, hellmonk. Look thick. Solid. Tight.


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Post Tuesday, 19th September 2017, 18:53

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

If we go with loans (negative gold), we can make player suffer from "gold draining" which is similar to normal draining except its severity depends on dept and is removed with gold automatically. Of course you would need to spend more gold if you purchase something in credit :) And of course you cannoy buy other items in credit while you still owe money to shop
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Post Thursday, 21st September 2017, 11:11

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

@Implojin: That's a good alternative I hadn't considered. It could be something like your "mega man" level, could house dungeon branch entrances as well and you'd just get dumped back in it when you finish one. (Of course, it would be important not to allow the player to reenter branches.) "Let's all go to the lobby..."

I don't know about everyone else, but I'm starting to feel like most of the low-hanging fruit has been taken at this point. There's still lots of scope for major reform. Hell, I'd like to see total overhauls of the skill and combo systems, but those are both major projects.

Some more small bore stuff I'd like to see:

Yred/Hep merger -- I'd like to see Yred moved away from the ally spam model and toward something like the hep ancestor or better the new spectral weapon mechanics (with a hep-style cooldown on ally death, spawn triggered noiselessly on seeing a monster if out of cooldown). Essentially, you'd drop the permanent ally gifts and animate dead abilities in favor of a respawning spectral thing from the enslave soul ability and drain life/pain mirror mechanics expanded to work with the ally. Maybe even allow two spectral things, for a cost of -10% hp a piece? I don't know, but I think this would make yred a much more attractive and interesting option.

Layout reform -- My god there are some bad layouts in crawl. The layout_basic generator is awful. The maps look like a radiator or something. layout_loops*, layout_roguey, the stock version of layout_rooms, and layout_cavepods (?) are also problematic. I hacked up a version of layout_rooms where corridors have width 2 and you get something more reasonable, but probably too open for early dungeon. layout_gridville and the various city generators could be easily improved by forcing all doors to be two tiles wide. The basic issue is that there are way too many chokepoints and 1-tile corridors in crawl and monsters with "corridor resistance" are not the answer. This isn't that small bore as a comprehensive solution would take a lot of work, but nibbling around the edges isn't that hard. Of course, I still think more structured/linear layouts have a lot of potential.

Soft uskayaw removal -- I've never been a fan of this design, I don't think the timescale the piety growth and decay operate on works with crawl combat or travel between encounters. The discovery of the "cblink line pass" bug is funny, but I wonder if this can be made into a good mechanic instead of thrown out as a bug. If it takes *** piety is it still a problem? You can only blink along a line that contains an adjacent monster, so calling it cblink is a bit overwrought. With the new versions of song of slaying and cigotuvi's embrace, there's a lot possibility for a momentum-based playstyle. Rethinking Uskayaw could be part of building that.

Get down to a reasonable number of species -- Still way too many poorly differentiated species. Many of the worst offenders are gone, but more progress can be made by merging a human-like species into a not very human like one or putting the properties of two or more humanish species together into one. As an example, an octopode with merfolk aptitudes and mutations.
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Post Thursday, 21st September 2017, 23:30

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

Is this "The dungeon lashes out against you" a Hellcrawl? If so remove it. Its stupid and doesn't work. I had it trigger on me on a rather large D15 and I was clearing large packs of ogres in a workmanlike fashion and then bam I get 2 groups of Deep Elf high priests summoned on me before I can even uncover the entrance to Orc.

Edit: Jesus christ a third time, I can't even go 10 turns. I mean just fucking kill me if you find a long floor so offensive.

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Post Thursday, 21st September 2017, 23:36

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

The only time I've run into the timer naturally was on vaults:3, so I just cleared out before fully clearing it (this strikes me as a good side effect). You really spent 2500 turns on d:15 without seeing any exits?
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Post Friday, 22nd September 2017, 00:50

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

The 2500 turn timer may be too short with chei, or perhaps is too short in general. I can extend the timer if that's the case. There are, of course, other antiscumming options that could be explored instead of a semi-hard turn cap. Spawning durable monsters over time the way normal spawns used to be generated has been proposed several times, most recently by bel. I think that this would feel intrusive in the course of normal, non-degenerate play but it is possible that I am wrong or that the upsides outweigh the drawback. Mainline crawl is talking about some sort of "experience debt" as an antiscumming measure, which may or may not be worth investigating. I will revisit this and put an update together this weekend.
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Post Friday, 22nd September 2017, 01:04

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

You could not increment the timer if the player is doing non-bad actions like autoexploring, attacking or casting spells. So the limit would be more like "unproductive turns on the level" and could be considerably shortened.
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Post Friday, 22nd September 2017, 06:05

Re: [proclick] new fork, hellcrawl

chequers wrote:You could not increment the timer if the player is doing non-bad actions like autoexploring, attacking or casting spells. So the limit would be more like "unproductive turns on the level" and could be considerably shortened.

You just have to be clever with how unproductive is defined. For example, if autoexploring is ok, the player could just forget the map and autoexplore it again if they wanted to buy more time to spend on the level.
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