Kennels and Other Rooms

[wobbly]

Thanks. That makes sense. It is something I can maybe pull out with a bit of work. It's a basic square room with blocks of cells & the blocks of cells potentially only really need a length, a starting co-ordinate & an orientation from 1 to 4. I'll think about it, for the moment changing the datafiles is something I don't actually know how to do. For now it does what I want it to do & I can look at it again when I understand the code a bit better.

[fph]

I think that the point that they are trying to make is: what is the actual advantage of this method wrt 3-4 different kennel sizes hardcoded in the config files? That method looks simpler to understand, change, and keep bug-free.

[wobbly]

I guess the pt from my perspective is I'm always seeing the same rooms. A prefab gives you 1 room which over the space of 100+ dlvls you see again & again & they're going to be the exact same rooms next play through, & the next. Always the same. 2 or 3 versions of a prefab is only giving you a couple more & each has to be drawn & added to a datafile. 3 variables from 1-5 is already giving 125 different rooms, you can get far more variance stacking variations & probabilities.

[Nick]

So a simpler example of the sort of thing you're trying to do is Nomad's template rooms. These have optional features which are generated or not at random. I think Nomad's approach to what you're doing would just be to introduce about 50 rooms to a file covering every possible configuration

Note too that vaults can specify monsters of a given type.

[wobbly]

Yeah I've looked at the template rooms. It's a pretty nice idea but actually fairly awkward to work with in some ways. At the end of the day I don't think I agree. It's hard to "break code/configuration separation" if it doesn't exist in the first place.

/* name						rows	cols	builder */
ROOM("staircase room",		0,		0,		staircase)
ROOM("simple room",			0,		0,		simple)
ROOM("moria room",			0,		0,		moria)
ROOM("large room",			0,		0,		large)
ROOM("crossed room",		0,		0,		crossed)
ROOM("circular room",		0,		0,		circular)
ROOM("overlap room",		0,		0,		overlap)
ROOM("room template",		11,		33,		template)
ROOM("Interesting room",	40,		50,		interesting)
ROOM("monster pit",			0,		0,		pit)
ROOM("monster nest",		0,		0,		nest)
ROOM("huge room",			0,		0,		huge)
ROOM("room of chambers",	0,		0,		room_of_chambers)
ROOM("Lesser vault",		22,		22,		lesser_vault)
ROOM("Medium vault",		22,		33,		medium_vault)
ROOM("Greater vault",		44,		66,		greater_vault)
ROOM("Lesser vault (new)",	22,		22,		lesser_vault)
ROOM("Medium vault (new)",	22,		33,		medium_vault)
ROOM("Greater vault (new)",	44,		66,		greater_vault)

Which of these actually are editable outside the code? Very few, & generally the least common. Fact is, the vast majority of level gen is actually under the hood & needs code change & recompiling to work. There's a fair bit that you can do in the edit files, but a hell of a lot more that you can't. If you look at the pit code not only is it impossible to change outside of the code (with the exception of the monsters), it's actually pretty awkward to change inside the code, the monster placement routine is setup for a fixed 5x11 size.

Level gen is currently a mix of these room generators & edit file rooms with the generators doing the bulk of the level. I think it would be a mistake to ignore the part that is actually building most of the level.

[Pete Mack]

Fair enough.