Persistent levels

[AnonymousHero]

You truly are Evil

EDIT: Hang on, we can't do Zalgo text?!!????? The evil... deepens?

[fph]

Originally Posted by Zikke

Maybe the maps would persist, but the monsters would repopulate as usual when you enter the level?

It would make sense --- the dungeon is fixed, but the monsters can roam about it and take the stairs while you aren't there.

[Gwarl]

Originally Posted by Nick

Levels are frozen when you leave, so the monsters all stay where they were. I think this means that uniques stay where they appear first unless you kill or *destruct* them.

As is probably apparent, there are a lot of gotchas in this mode (and interesting interactions with things like forced descent) which I have decided to leave to other people's playtesting to iron out all the kinks

First gotcha (I did mutiple persistent levels in my baby's first roguelike the same way), do monsters regenerate hitpoints when you're not on the floor?

Potential for abuse is left as an exercise to the reader.

[EpicMan]

Originally Posted by Gwarl

First gotcha (I did mutiple persistent levels in my baby's first roguelike the same way), do monsters regenerate hitpoints when you're not on the floor?

Potential for abuse is left as an exercise to the reader.

Just regenerate X% (100? 50?) HP for all wounded monsters when a player enters a level.

If monsters only generated their drops on death (inventory could still be used for stolen items) a lot of lost-artifact issues would be lost.

[Derakon]

Originally Posted by Sphara

Wait. I need a confirmation on this one. Monster inventory is pre-determined? This is not true, right?

It's been true for a long while. I believe the original motivation was to discourage savescumming of drops. However, I'm also pretty sure that a specific hack was put in place, to ensure that an artifact in a monster's inventory does not count as generated for purposes of no-preserve mode.

[Zikke]

Originally Posted by Sphara

And for the second statement: Summoning monsters should give you enough monsters not to call opponent and experience generation finite.

Well, if you're running around dlvl 98/99, you'll clear it eventually and then have to simply spend turns wait for things to respawn. Technically it's not finite, but it sure would be boring a waste of turns.

[Sky]

so ...

if you go down a stair, and then up a different stair, do you come out of the first or second stair?

do mobs stay exactly where you left them? so, can you, like, pull Ungoliant out of a vault, go down a level, then back up from another stairs, etc? and pull her to the other side of the dungeon, then raid her lair?

if not, what if you go down a stair, and some orcs want to kill, you, and you go back up .. and basically wait to die? because you can never go down that stair ever again because there's an angry mob of orcs waiting for you ?

[Nick]

Originally Posted by Sky

if you go down a stair, and then up a different stair, do you come out of the first or second stair?

The second one - that is, the stair immediately above the one you went up. Levels are generated so that the stairs connect.

Originally Posted by Sky

do mobs stay exactly where you left them? so, can you, like, pull Ungoliant out of a vault, go down a level, then back up from another stairs, etc? and pull her to the other side of the dungeon, then raid her lair?

Yes

Originally Posted by Sky

if not, what if you go down a stair, and some orcs want to kill, you, and you go back up .. and basically wait to die? because you can never go down that stair ever again because there's an angry mob of orcs waiting for you ?

Well, you could find a different stair to go down. How you handle it is up to you

[fizzix]

If you also include the option to pre-generate levels, then competitions can be even more level.

With regard to uniques. I think one option we might want to consider is to alter monster summons so that the pool of monsters also includes monsters on other levels. So you could pull a unique from another floor. This sort of makes sense intuitively. Also, it prevents "summon ringwraiths" from being equivalent to "summon greater undead"

You could even consider altering all summons like this, so that monsters that get summoned get summoned from nearby floors. Monsters that get destructed get placed on floors 1-5 levels below, etc. That would take more work.

Another option is to allow uniques (specifically) to be able to "use" staircases. Let's be honest, certain uniques are designed to show up constantly and annoy you until you devote the resources to kill them. Adunaphel and Saruman are prime examples. The game would lose a little bit if Adunaphel was stuck on the floor forever once you descended past her. If she followed you down after 100 turns or so, and spawned somewhere on the level, or on the staircase, that would be interesting.

[Sky]

i got 2 crashes out of two tries. one just crashed the app with the crash message, the other told me it failed to allocate stairs, and then crashed.