Un/Ey/Fay room descriptions

[Mikko Lehtinen]

Fay, through Ey, has inherited room descriptions from Un.

What we have in Fay was borrowed from Un at least eight years ago. I was wondering if there's something new worth stealing? As always in Fay, I'm more interested in the tactical possibilities of room descriptions than just flavour. (I've started playing Un, but I haven't seen much yet.)

I have some really quick ideas of my own:

- Disease room. Get wounded here and you're diseased.
- Poison room. Get wounded here and you're poisoned. Wound a monster, and it is poisoned.
- A statue of the goddess of healing: more powerful healing spells.
- Node of Fire: fire spells are more powerful.
- Fast winds: powders are useless.
- Weird crosswinds: powders get +1 radius.
- Magnetic walls: bows and thrown weapons are useless.
- Dark room. Impossible to light up.
- Powerful leylines. Double spell and magic device range.
- Weak leylines. Halve spell and magic device range.

Does someone else want to brainstorm?

[Antoine]

Rooms with 'powerful darkness' which reduce the range of your light source and cannot be illuminated?

No teleport zones?

A.

[andrewdoull]

The relevant flags from Unangband:

#define ROOM_DAYLITE 0x00000100L /* room is lit during daytime */
#define ROOM_ICKY 0x00000200L /* room cannot be teleport target */
#define ROOM_BLOODY 0x00000400L /* room causes wounds/poison to become worse */
#define ROOM_CURSED 0x00000800L /* room causes items to not provide bonuses (except artifacts) */
#define ROOM_GLOOMY 0x00001000L /* room is never wholely lit by light */
#define ROOM_PORTAL 0x00002000L /* room teleports you randomly */
#define ROOM_SILENT 0x00004000L /* room is magically silent, stopping spells/songs */
#define ROOM_STATIC 0x00008000L /* room causes rods/staffs/wands to fail */
#define ROOM_STATIS 0x00010000L /* room causes monsters to be in statis */
#define ROOM_SEALED 0x00020000L /* room causes features to be unalterable */
#define ROOM_HIDDEN 0x00040000L /* room cannot be detected */
#define ROOM_ANCHOR 0x00080000L /* room is anti-teleportation */
#define ROOM_ECHOES 0x00100000L /* room is anti-stealth */
#define ROOM_STENCH 0x00200000L /* room prevents monsters flow by smell */
#define ROOM_NOISY 0x00400000L /* room prevents monsters flow by sound */
#define ROOM_WINDY 0x00800000L /* room prevents missiles/thrown items */
#define ROOM_GRAVE 0x01000000L /* room brings monsters back to life */
#define ROOM_STORE 0x02000000L /* room prevents objects being taken */
#define ROOM_TOWN 0x04000000L /* room is part of a town */
#define ROOM_RANDOM 0x08000000L /* room activates randomly for effect */
#define ROOM_PUZZLE 0x10000000L /* room requires features contained destroyed */
#define ROOM_GUARD 0x20000000L /* room requires monsters contained destroyed */
#define ROOM_OBJECT 0x40000000L /* room requires objects contained destroyed */

[Mikko Lehtinen]

Originally Posted by andrewdoull

The relevant flags from Unangband:

Wow! Thanks! I'll try porting many of these to Fay. These remind me of old-style dungeon crawling RPG adventures in my youth.

I'll look into other terrain features in Un, too. I want to keep my dungeons more spartan, but there's probably something that I can use.

[bio_hazard]

How about:

(like Antoine's suggestion) Pitch_Black- Light radius of non-artifact lights reduced to 0

Instability- PC and Monsters randomly blink

Sacrifice- Destroy something from inventory to open doors.

Meekness- Mallus given to high dice attacks, bonus given to low-dice attacks

Soul Draining (or Forgetfullness)- Loose XP per turn.

[Mikko Lehtinen]

Thanks, Antoine and biohazard! This is a nice list of effects to choose from already.

Meanwhile, I'm getting seriously hooked on Unangband level generation. The whole package is a bit too much for my tastes, but I'm going to try to porting the "most basic core" to Fay.

I downloaded some older versions of Un source, where the code is not too different from Ey/Fay. I think I'm beginning to understand what's going on.

[will_asher]

Originally Posted by Mikko Lehtinen

Fay, through Ey, has inherited room descriptions from Un.

What we have in Fay was borrowed from Un at least eight years ago. I was wondering if there's something new worth stealing? As always in Fay, I'm more interested in the tactical possibilities of room descriptions than just flavour. (I've started playing Un, but I haven't seen much yet.)

I have some really quick ideas of my own:

- Disease room. Get wounded here and you're diseased.
- Poison room. Get wounded here and you're poisoned. Wound a monster, and it is poisoned.
- A statue of the goddess of healing: more powerful healing spells.
- Node of Fire: fire spells are more powerful.
- Fast winds: powders are useless.
- Weird crosswinds: powders get +1 radius.
- Magnetic walls: bows and thrown weapons are useless.
- Dark room. Impossible to light up.
- Powerful leylines. Double spell and magic device range.
- Weak leylines. Halve spell and magic device range.

I'll be wanting to steal some of these ideas also (and some from UnAndrew's and bio_hazard's posts).
I've been wanting to do something like this, but I don't know if I can figure out how to tie a flag to a room. Maybe I'll look at the UnAngband code to see if that helps.

EDIT: The relevant UnAngband code didn't help because my C-foo just isn't good enough to figure it out. But I did think of another (hacky) way of doing this.

[will_asher]

I've been implementing several of these for DaJAngband.

While I was looking at some of the UnAngband code, I noticed stuff about chasms. The idea sounds cool, but when I think about it, it seems like it would be easy for the PC to stand at one side of the chasm shooting monsters on the other side while the monsters are helpless because they can't cross the chasm.
So how would you balance chasms so this kind of thing doesn't happen (or at least would be hard to do)?

[Therem Harth]

- Give some monsters the ability to fly across them
- Improve AI so that monsters use ranged attacks when there's impassible terrain between them and the player
- Give more monsters ranged attacks (e.g. orcs and dark elves throw daggers, maybe trolls throw rocks and stuff, etc.)

[Scraper]

How about rooms where you need to enter the opposite key stoke to go in a direction or fight a monster. e.g. If you want to go left, you have to press the 6 button i.e. the button that normally makes you go right.