Stealth, aggravation and monster detection range

[Timo Pietilä]

Hello.

I just remembered one thing I thought off couple of weeks ago. How about instead of making stealth less likely to wake up things it reduces monsters detection range? With high stealth monsters should not notice you if you are not in their LoS even if awake, and this does just that. Keep a some basic stealth as wakeup-treshold that doesn't change with gear. Increased huge stealth would not then help to wipe out entire packs of monsters without waking them up, but it would help to sneak past pits and vaults without disturbing the denizens.

AFAIK if monster has direct LoS to you it doesn't matter if it has shorter detection range than LoS range, but it also doesn't hunt you even if it is inside your LoS range if it doesn't have direct LoS. Trick-shot to monster that doesn't see you but you see it should make it more alert, increasing the detection range to full just like if you wouldn't have stealth at all.

Aggravation could be just opposite of stealth with PVAL.

We could add "hunt by smell" flag to monsters which would not be affected by stealth (you can't avoid dog by being silent) but OTOH their pathfinding should also follow that which might be too hard to do just now.

[fizzix]

I think this is a good idea. But to do that we need to add a second category to monsters, which is essentially knowledgeable about the player. This way you can have.

unawake and unaware of the player.

Awake and unaware of the player (monsters in a pit, or wandering monsters) Stealth would help here.

Unawake and aware of the player (monsters that have been put to sleep)

awake and aware. Stealth does not help here.

I think this would be an improvement, but I'm not sure anyone has taken on the task. You could also set some amount of time that if the monster has not seen the player it goes back to unaware (or maybe even asleep).

[d_m]

I think Timo's suggestion is really good. It will require improving the AI/movement/perception code for monsters, as well as creating other monster statuses (like Fizzix mentions) but those seem good.

Now we just need to start on it then

FWIW, I think monsters could have many different ways to track players, e.g. sight, sound, smell, ESP/innate sense. These would be affected by different things (light/stealth, stealth, ???, ???) and have different parameters.

[d_m]

I should add that even though it's a good suggestion, I have a feeling that the feel of Angband will change a lot (hopefully for the better) if we update stealth/aggravation/monster AI in this way.

[Antoine]

Originally Posted by d_m

I should add that even though it's a good suggestion, I have a feeling that the feel of Angband will change a lot (hopefully for the better) if we update stealth/aggravation/monster AI in this way.

In the process you may wish to downgrade aggravating egos/artifacts, as it looks like aggravate will no longer be such a serious drawback?
A.

[d_m]

Originally Posted by Antoine

In the process you may wish to downgrade aggravating egos/artifacts, as it looks like aggravate will no longer be such a serious drawback?
A.

Very possibly. It'll depend on how things shake out.