Over-engineering dungeon generation

[bpleshek]

RogerN,

What did you do to get your *band to compile in Visual Studio? I have full versions of 2003, 2005, and 2008 if it matters.

Thanks,

Brian

[RogerN]

Originally Posted by bpleshek

What did you do to get your *band to compile in Visual Studio? I have full versions of 2003, 2005, and 2008 if it matters

If I understand you correctly, you're trying to compile vanilla or some other variant using Visual Studio. That's different from what I'm doing here. This project is in C#, so lots of the code had to be ported.

[bpleshek]

I've written my own *band type game in VB6 and was porting it to VB.NET. I'm about 1/2 finished. But I had meant compiling vanilla with .NET.

Thanks anyway,

Brian

PS I can post my VB6 generation code if it would be useful to you. I think it works rather well and isn't too difficult to understand IMHO.

[RogerN]

Not dead yet!

After almost a year of inactivity, I'm working on my (hopefully not doomed) variant again. Recent changes:

- Switched from text rendering to 32x32 graphical tiles
- Monsters! They can move, too.
- Items! Daggers and clubs, oh my!
- Saving / loading
- Looking around, examining your inventory
- Attacking monsters

There's a small glimmer of hope that I might release a playable game at some point...

[buzzkill]

Yea!!! We need more variants with good old fashioned 32x32 graphics. Did you borrow the code, or write it yourself?

[RogerN]

The rendering code is all original. There's very little to it, actually. The GDI+ libraries included with C# already have support for blitting transparent bitmaps with good performance.

The rest of the code is a mix of original stuff and code ported from vanilla and Sangband.

[tynan]

If you are going to have secret doors, make sure there is a reason for them being there. I never liked the idea of a random secret door leading to nowhere? Basically if there is a feasible way to code an isolated room with secret door the only way in, and have minimum one piece of treasure there (with maybe a monster or two, the idea being there is something there worth keeping secret). And implement these isolated rooms into the random dungeon generation, so that when you use WoR scrolls/spells (or stairs up/down), you will never "accidentally" appear in one of these secret rooms.
Looks great so far, keep it up.

[buzzkill]

Maybe we could have secret doors and hidden doors. The difference being that secret were specifically constructed not to be found and must be searched for or detected. They would never be found without actively searching. These could lead to otherwise inaccessible portions of the dungeon. These otherwise inaccessible portions souls be shielded from other forms of detection and magic mapping.
Hidden doors would simply be hidden by debris, dust, years of non-use, and would function almost identically to the current implementation of secret doors, only they would be much easier to find.

[RogerN]

I have plans for secret doors If all goes according to plan, part of my dungeon creation routine will be connectivity analysis. The game will look for small dead-end rooms to use as treasure rooms, and the secret doors would occasionally be placed there. Of course, there might occasionally be an out-of-depth monster also.

Another idea I had was to have larger dungeons with varying levels of difficulty on single dungeon level, and special gates dividing the difficulty levels. Players would have to find the key (or pick the lock, or blast it with magic) in order to progress to the next area. That's not to say that the dungeon would be linear; there might be several paths from the level 1 area to the level 2 area, but all would be sectioned off by a gate which needs that key.

If I can't make it fun, though, I may have to throw that idea out. Large dungeon levels are tricky to balance IMO.

[RogerN]

Work continues! I took some time off from boring tasks (status effects, UI stuff) to tackle a first-pass at town generation. None of the shops are functional yet, but the town looks pretty nice (by Angband standards I guess):

Town Screenshot - First Draft

Shops are generated in random locations, along with a couple of farm plots. All the shops are connected by dirt paths. Perlin noise is used to generate some forests. No water yet, but that's easily doable later.