Re: -Crawl- (now with YAPS) chardump - Scalez the Draconian Monk - Frowning at the swamp
- From: Joshua Rodman <jrodman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: 06 Jun 2006 20:39:04 GMT
On 2006-06-06, Erik Piper <erik@xxxxxx> wrote:
Joshua Rodman wrote:
Yesterday I hit more buggy weirdness than I've seen in a long time --
all of the same type, but such an unsettling type that it counted
double. :-) I was casting Shadow Creatures a lot in the Elven Halls, as
that's one of the few places where it's a more useful way than Summon
Ice Beasts to spend 5 MP. One type of summoned elf -- I haven't
narrowed it down yet -- was throwing abouut beams named "****",
represented by inverse spaces colored yellow. No clue what, if
anything, said beams did. "****" means exactly what you'd think it
means:
struct SBeam mons_spells( int spell_cast, int power )
{
ASSERT(power > 0);
struct SBeam beam;
beam.name = "****"; // initialize to some bogus values so
we can catch problems
beam.colour = 1000;
No idea if a beam.colour of 1000 means yellow or not.
Unfortunately, I can't figure out where the trouble is actually
occurring. Perhaps it was just the influence of 06.06.06. and it'll be
gone tonight after midnight :-P
Guh, at times like this it really frustrates me that Crawl is written in
a binary-compiled language, where debugging usually requires
understanding everything instead of allowing for the possibility of
clean inspection.
I'm glad to be reassured that the bugginess may not be my fault. I sure
thought I'd tested my hackery decently enough. If it happens again I
may try more seriously to track it down. I really hate playing
legitimate games in wizard mode, however, and spoilin all the surprises.
"Enhanced vision" and similar phrases are just fancy names for see
invisible. All the checks for reading with MUT_BLURRY_VISION are
without regard for anything by the name of enhanced vision or any
similar name.
Oh.
I had assumed this was one axis.
Having never played nethack, I had to look this one up.
Or ADOM. :-)
Okay, to be truthful, my decision that nethack was not for me took about
5 games spread out over as many years. ADOM took one game, and looking
at the command "summary" to decide this was not my cup of tea.
Strangely, an Amulet of Life Saving was not produced by pressing the
help key.
Blue Death. Two blink scrolls (one which did not help),
What happened?
For some reason the blink did not let me select a location. It moved me
from one below the Blue Death to two above, and the death simply closed
the gap. No change.
Oh wait a second, you were in Elf:7. Of course. No-teleport-control
zone. Characters with translocational skill get a hint message when
entering such a zone.
Oh, I got the warning. I mentioned it to some friends. I had no idea
what it meant. I thought it might foreshadow the expected
unpleasantness of the Elf vault guardians.
Luckily I wasn't playing a very blinky game. Mostly positional tactics,
calling, and crazy amounts of meelee damage.
The deep water is a bit of a challenge for positioning, but with a
poison resistant PC, unless you're prone to pressing shift-Y at
random for no particular reason, you're NOT going to fall in. Don't
worry, really!
An aside: I have completely removed the roguelike keys from my
binary. Shift-Y does nothing at any other time than answering
prompts. I got really tired of moving when I thought I was
confirming.
This sort of thing should be much easier to do; Brent is a rabid
vi-chauvinist and so has never thought much about supporting people
who prefer to play numpad-only. Quite to the contrary, he's written
things that suggest he's verged on disabling numpad entirely. (In
which case I'd probably miss out on Crawl entirely -- I have no beef
with vi fans or vi support, but a vi-only interface? No, thanks.)
Okay, this is what prompted this reply.
I've used vim for probably 13 years now on Amigdos, MS-DOS, PCDOS, OS/2,
Windows, BeOS, and Linux. I'm typing in vim right now. vi keys are
hjkl, are strongly unituitive, but easily mastered. It's _very_ hard to
make an error, as they're home row keys.
roguelike keys are most certainly _not_ vi keys. Hitting diagonal
targets (yunm or whatever), encourages fumbles with the various
steppings on various keyboards, the asymmetrical placement of the
diagonals, and just simply far more movement for the fingers.
In short: vi orthagonal movement: good. roguelike diagonal movement:
markedly inferior.
Of course, for a _game_ where I'm not editing text, the value of keeping
my hands on the homerow dwindles to tiny, the extkeypad is a happy place
for my right hand to spend most of its time.
Yeah, I looked through the code to try to figure out how one is supposed
to tweak such things, and decided the setup was seriously inflexible,
thus the hand-hacking.
The y-for-northwest/y-for-confirm overlap is especially annoying in its
interaction with butchering.
Crawl has a number of situations where a key sequence does _different
things_ in different circumstances. For example when targetting, . can
mean the current target, or yourself if there is no current target, or
something along these lines. I think the should make such issues near
impossible.
Cast a spell and aim it, oh you failed and moved. Oh look you died.
Angband _mostly_ prevents this sort of thing. I think it is worth
trying to eliminate them because they cause highly uninteresting deaths,
and encourage very uninteresting kinds of carefulness. For example,
spell failure could generate a state which is not cleared on
movement/aiming keys.
Yet Another Patch Suggestion: a confirm_butcher ini flag.
If I could wave my wand, butcher would ask only on multiple corpses.
Of course, if I could wave my wand again, multiple candidates in a pile
would pop up a list like 'r'ead or 'e'at do, for all situations,
including 'g'et.
Darts have been my way of saying "Hello Sir Hydra/Slime/Dragon/whatever
you are, you're so awfully far away. Would you mind coming closer so we
can have a nice little tete-a-tete? You're too kind".
Magic Dart can do the same. :-) Or, if you're not into conjurations, so
will any number of other targeted spells.
Darts, however, do not take up my valuable blade hands points, err, I
mean spellpoints. Or make me hungry. I think it was worth carrying
them and being willing to drop them whenever weight or slots got tight.
Boris [...] The nastiest bit IMO is the wide spread on one of his
ranged attacks [...] (Mystic blasts from
greater nagas are similarly unpredictable.)
I have learned this lesson (thankfully without dying) about Greater
Naga. I treat them with some caution and kill them quickly.
Crawl in general has this tendency of cruelty by variance. I think it
is a good game mechanic.
j - Airstrike Air Good 4
# _just_ learned. I've grown tired of my experience points running
# away.
Evocations.
huh?
That would have been an ideal outlet for your runaway experience at
that point in the game.
Oh, I see.
What I meant by "runaway experience" is the kind who can still move
around the dungeon on their own. Experience points on the hoof, if you
will. Airstrike was my distance attack to use on things who didn't seem
to mind acid spit and who were "Nearly dead" but running away across
deep water.
-josh
--
Grim. Grom. Grümmer.
.
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- From: Joshua Rodman
- Re: -Crawl- chardump - Scalez the Draconian Monk - Frowning at the swamp
- From: Erik Piper
- Re: -Crawl- chardump - Scalez the Draconian Monk - Frowning at the swamp
- From: Joshua Rodman
- Re: -Crawl- (now with YAPS) chardump - Scalez the Draconian Monk - Frowning at the swamp
- From: Erik Piper
- -Crawl- chardump - Scalez the Draconian Monk - Frowning at the swamp
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