This page is for managing short and middle term development planning. Not everything that's on here is going to get into 0.17, or perhaps any release at all. These are just a list of changes that are worth considering for the near future.
See the Future Versions and possibly 0.16 Development and Release Plan for ideas, moving said entries here as necessary.
Lair Branches — (reaverb) Shorten the lair water and poison branches to 4. Done!
Orc reform — (PleasingFungus) Make orc a more interesting branch post-lair by turning the mobs of completely trivial orcs into perhaps smaller mobs of less trivial orcs.No word that PleasingFungus is still working on this, so not going in 0.17 (,sadly). Remains a viable idea for 0.18.
Elf Reform — (gammafunk) Rework elf monsters so that there's not such uniformity of “squish spellcasters”, but rather more of a range of resistances/defenses. Try to keep the magical theme, and avoid the reformed version feeling like “3 extra branches of vaults/depths”. I still want to do this, but definitely won't get to in 0.17.
Moon — Some would say that the earth is our moon. But that would belittle the name of our moon, which is “The Moon.” The Moon Landing was not faked!
Attributes — Possibilities include halving their absolute values to make them more meaningful (cf.
IRC discussions). Partial implementation:
https://github.com/crawl/crawl/pull/159 can be reviewed once 0.18 development starts.
Not being address in 0.17. .
Stat drain — (MarvinPA) Turn it into a drain-like status, where stats are restored with XP gain. Then remove potions of restore abilities (but keep sustain abilities). Done! Drain is xp-based, restore-ab is gone, deterioration mutation triggers based on damage. Further adjust to numbers may happen.
Food — food generation (both permafood and chunks) was changed significantly in the past year or two and may need tuning or rebalancing. For example, should non-magic-using non-spriggan characters be able to survive a full game on permafood alone? On chunks alone? Fortunately we have been measuring eaten food in action count dumps, so there is data to analyse. There's been discussion about having crawl use hunger only as a progress clock and removing hunger costs, or alternatively lowering chunk and/or permafood availability. A major food change isn't likely for 0.17, at this point, but is a good item for 0.18.
Eating — A (very speculative) larger reform would be trying to split the meaningful ability food costs (spell hunger, berserk, sif channel, other relevant god abilities) into some kind of separate cost based possibly on monster kills/corpses, and use permafood only for the turn clock. See entry above.
SquareLOS — There is general agreement that squarelos would be good. We need (yet another) implementation. Done! Testing is now being done in trunk.
cTele and -cTele — Remove it, banish it from our midst. Zot:5 and players with the orb would likely still have a special status that made all controlled blinks random. Other -cTele levels would probably just lose that status. The cBlink spell and passage of golubria might need revisiting, but could probably remain unchanged. Done. cTele spell/ring and -cTele levels are gone, and there's a -cTele effect for a player with the orb.
GDR reform — an invisible number. if it's significant, it should be exposed to the player in some way. (“plate armour provides somewhat more protection against melee attacks than a choko”…?) It might be nice to simply associate it directly with AC, or remove it altogether, but there are significant balance considerations involved. Nothing changed here, not clear if there are specific plans to change gdr at this point.
Acid tweaks — make the slay & ac penalties for corrosion stacks the same number? (current situation causes confusion.) Decrease chance for further corrosion stacks based on the number the player already has? Make rCorr halve the effects of corrosion, rather than halving the chance? (Perhaps something similar for rPois…?) Make acid stacks wear off one-by-one, rather than all at once? (doy). There's now decreased chance for corrosion stacking based on the current count. Corrosion now applies -4 to both slay and AC. No specific plans for further changes.
Shield skill requirements — I think I'd like to see these become stepdowned or something of the sort, rather than hard breakpoints on the penalties, the way armour strength requirements were changed. –wheals — seconded -PF No specific proposal as of yet, so not likely for 0.17. Good candidate for 0.18.
Banishment — should take severity/power of the banishment source into account: early banishment (distortion weapon on D:4) should send characters to Abyss:1, Elf:3 banishment to Abyss:3. Can either use absdepth of the banishment source, or player XL, or banisher HD, or perhaps another scale. [Rationale: Abyss:1 is an interesting challenge for early game, but falls flat later on; the Abyss levels work well to distinguish between escape and rune hunt; the only missing piece is sending different characters to different levels). ebering put a
patch on Mantis implementing this.
Unlikely for 0.17, as there hasn't been further discussion of this. It is simple enough to implement once a formula for the target abyss depth is final, if we can all agree that it's a good idea.
Ranged Combat Reform Part Deux The damage formulas for ranged have been change to make them act like melee. The items below are further proposals to improve ranged combat as a play style. A full overhaul including all the items below are unlikely for 0.17, but tweaks to e.g. throwing damage might happen in this version. The larger items are good candidates for 0.18.
Unlimited ammo — Should basic ammo for launchers be made unlimited? Primarily affects the early game - big buff for arkane markspeople.
Automulching ammo — Make all ammo mulch on hit, multiply generated quantities? Makes playing hunter involve less tedious running around after ammo, but lots of side effects, not all desirable.
Brands — interactions between launcher & ammo brands are complex & unintuitive (which brands stack? which conflict?). Possibly launcher & ammo brands should be switched to non-overlapping sets (launchers → strict buffs, ammo → situational effects?), or perhaps either launchers or ammo should lose their brands entirely.
Strategic consumables — move these out of the inventory? (ID game issues?) Still a desire to do this, but it's unlikely for 0.17.
Spellbooks — make these tactically relevant in some way (a reason to carry books around), or turn them into strategic items (per above)? There's not broad agreement that spellbooks are a problem or a specific proposal at this point. They would possibly be moved to strategic inventory, if that's implemented.
Ground item interactions — let players universally interact with (wield, read, quaff, etc) items on the ground? (remove annoyances from full inventories. (MarvinPA): ground item interaction/menus similar to angband. Still a desire to do this, but it's unlikely for 0.17.
?EW — The removal of enchant weapon scroll failure was definitely a boost for player sanity, but has also resulted in significant weapon enchantment inflation - most players now seem to have +9 weapons before they enter the Depths. Reducing generation even further is one option, but I'd rather experiment with making higher enchantment levels cost more scrolls in a deterministic fashion. There's not broad agreement that ?EW are problematic. No specific plans to implement something like this right now.
Gozag – Some aspects that may need adjustment:
Duplication Will any form of this ability work? Disabled in trunk, may come back in another form in the future.
bribe branch Make it useful. Bribes now work on any intelligent monster with a check based on HD and a branch-specific factor, and the allies are restricted to stay in their branch.
shop placement Don't bury the shops so deeply, or maybe at all.
Nemelex
Card balancing Some cards may need balancing (e.g. Pentagram). Ephemeral infusion is gone as an effect, replace with direct ally heal in the Elixer card. The Storm card now no longer makes a Twister, and the Placid Magic card is removed. No changes yet to Pentagram.
Deck usage It's been suggested to move card usage to the ability menu to avoid deck management, probably removing decks so that cards are for Nemelex worshipers only. Unlikely for 0.17. Possible for 0.18+, but needs a specific proposal.
Beogh – Reconsider early & late-game balance. (Probably should be made stronger in one of them - currently neither fish nor fowl.).
dpeg: allow prayer over orc corpses to either give 20% chance for piety vs 80% for resurrection (allied orcs) or 80% chance for piety vs 20% chance for resurrection as an ally (hostile orcs). Resurrected orcs keep their name and “had a gift” tag (if any). The name is appended, such as “Beowulf the Revenant” etc.
dpeg: A Beogh interface toggle that llows to switch between four modes for orc company: 0 (none), 3, 12, all. Regardless of option, hostile orcs keep converting. (Perhaps 3 should take best fighter, best wizard, best priest.) If an orc dies, implicit call for replacement to keep the number up. No systematic Beogh balance changes are likely for 0.17 at this point, but this is a good item for 0.18+.
Lugonu
Remove corpse piety (reaverb). Done!
Altar desectration Consider adding altar desecration piety (now that wraths are more gradual). Start small, i.e. low wrath and small piety gain. Unlikely for 0.17, proposal would need more thinking about how to make it both fun and reasonable, but good item for 0.18+.
Trog — Also replace corpse piety by rescaling other forms of piety. (reaverb) Done!
Yredelmnul — If abandoning the god, destroy all zombies (rather than making them hostile). Note: is this necessary now that player undead expire? Yred's allies are permanent and don't degrade after becoming hostile. This is a simple fix and would be good to get in 0.17, so I'll look into it –gammafunk
Uniques — more xp for many of them, higher incentive to kill by better loot. For numbers and more ideas see
https://crawl.develz.org/tavern/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=11276. (Partially implemented as of
f578f52 and preceding commits).
No systematic changes are likely for 0.17. This unique xp/reward reforms needs a concrete proposal before it can go further.
Acid — There's room for slightly more acid in Vaults and Depths, and significantly more in Extended. Entropy weavers apply heavy corrosion and can be found in Spider, Vaults, and Depths. There's the Moon Troll and brown uglies/very uglies in Lehudib's wizlab for acid attacks. No specific plans for extended monsters with acid as of yet, certainly possible for 0.18+.
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Transmutations — revamp? New forms, effects (using permanent resources to power spells?); revamp/remove sticks to snakes, ignite poison, &c. Blade hands has been described as too strong, but there is no agreement nor any specific proposal for changing this spell. Not going in 0.17. There haven't been any specific proposals for changing blade hands or other spells in the book of changes. Remains an item for 0.18+
Charms — Redesign Badcharms (stoneskin &c, rmsl &c). Standing 'least bad' option is probably 'mp/time' costs, but that would require redesign of elementalist backgrounds… 'effects removed on armour swap' seems clunky but might be viable for some charms. It's possible haste the spell will be removed, since it's seen as not necessary given the wand and potion, and complicates the move to using aut for score, but this is by no means agreed upon. Not going in 0.17. Nothing specific proposed on any of these items.
Spellpower — spellpower should matter much more for many spells. One candidate for this is Shadow Creatures, which could reroll if the selected monster has hd too high for the given spell power. Other spells like blink and the animated remains spells are trickier. Increasing duration based on spell power is possible, but would be tricky to balance with the duration caps we want on the animated creatures. It's hard to imagine how Blink could meaningfully depend on spell power. No plan to change this in 0.17, good topic to revisit in 0.18.
Deep Elf monster tiles — Most elf casters are not differentiated by anything but color, and their colors are not consistent with other monster sets (green priests, purple wizards, and so on). There are visual motifs for classed monsters now, like a circular aura on the ground; applying these motifs and refining them will be an ongoing process. Note: there are tentative plans to rework elf, which might change/remove some deep elf monsters.
Adding ancient tiles for player doll cosmetics — There are a lot of tiles on Mantis (for example
https://crawl.develz.org/mantis/view.php?id=3936) that look good and deserve to be in the game, even if they don't have a specific purpose. We can also consider adding these to the rotation for tiles that appear for worn equipment, but I consider that a separate issue.
Replacing tiles made by non-tile-devs — As much as I love the current Anubis guard tile, it and its brethren (Bennu, Ushabti) could use improvement. Please add any other tile requests here.
SDL2 mouse problem — Ctrl becomes active for mouse clicks when using stairs (
9252) until either ctrl or x is hit again. The issue may not be the same on all
OS.
At long-last, this bug has been fixed!
webtiles-changes — Branch that moves the client to react/jsx, adds player titles and a server score page, along with moving configuration to a toml file and many other WebTiles server changes.
Not happening in 0.17. Reworking the client js (possibly using angular.js instead of react/jsx) and improving the game js are both things we want but this will take time unless we get some new JS developers on the project.
OS X —
OS X nightly builds? We currently rely on geekosaur compiling on a 10.8 VS with his own apple account.
Nightly builds of OS X don't seem achievable at this point, since we don't have an Mac server and cross-compiling from linux isn't even legal.
Windows – Do we need 32-bit and 64-bit builds? If the i686-w64-mingw32 target is sufficient on 32-bit and 64-bit system, don't make 64-bit binaries, but release the two zips + installer for one architecture. The plan is to release only the i686-w64-mingw32 binaries for 0.17, and release zips+installer.
LTO — We're not able to compile with LTO on Win32 or even ubuntu utopic (although it works when not using -g with GCC, for some reason). We'll have to keep revisiting this. For now we probably have to build relative to Ubuntu utopic in order to support a wider range of distributions, so LTO will remain disabled.
Android — miserium has volunteered to do semi-regular trunk builds; will we host these, and where? We link to said android builds on the trunk nightlies page.
Domain — Are we planning to change the official home page's location?
chequers and
|amethyst both have appropriate domains.
Remove the clan points for highest AC+EV upon win — Meaningless now that e.g. Cigotuvi's Degen exists.
Require killing the Serpent of Hell for Angel of Justice III — SoH always generates in a game and is a much more significant challenge since 0.16.
Remove Temple from the list of forbidden branches for Lord of Darkness III No temple gods encourages start scumming to find an overflow or just using a zealot. Challenge is about lack of xp/loot and simultaneously getting the harder runes, not god choice (or startscumming).
Rename Lugonu's “Heretic” banner to “Spiteful” — This allows a rework of Beogh's Saint into Heretic as described below. No changes to the banner rules. New description: Lugonu hates all the other gods. At the moment, Lugonu is especially SPITEFUL towards Ru and admires those who make sacrifices to Ru and then abandon Ru's worship.
Rework and Rename Beogh's “Saint” banner to “Heretic” — Saint I was either a trivial banner or among the most difficult in the tournament for a player in a top clan. This removes the clan-based banner, but we do otherwise track clan standings and points.
Description Text — Beogh hates all the other gods and admires HERETICS who go out of their way to incur their wrath. The good gods (Elyvilon, the Shining One, and Zin) and Ru are insufficiently wrathful, so abandoning them does not impress Beogh. Any god except the good gods, Ru, and Beogh are hence applicable for this banner.
Rule for I — Abandon and mollify an applicable god.
Rule for II — Over the course of the tournament, abandon and mollify three applicable gods.
Rule for III — Over the course of the tournament, abandon and mollify nine applicable gods.
