DRL > Discussion
Ideas to make DoomRL even faster and furious'er
Cotonou:
DoomRL is just where it needs to be in terms of death issues, with one exception. I would really appreciate a warning (like the Arena continue) for when you're about to step into harmful fluids when at very low health. This is a stupid, avoidable mistake which has claimed more characters than I can count and is never even slightly fun. Lava is just really hard to see sometimes, especially when its a single tile amidst a sea of blood. It makes me sad.
As for other games, Nethack is completely idiotic for how many ways its come up with to kill characters without any warning or feedback. The game is unreasonably frustrating and I have no idea how anyone plays it. Malice is not a design feature.
On the other end of the spectrum Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup is just about perfect. It allows you to die -- but those deaths are all of your own making. Are you too weak to fight that ogre? You die. Did you try to play cheap on the health potions? You die. Did you just try to walk into deep water without knowing how to swim? You... don't die. It won't let you. Did you wander close to said deep water while confused so you can't fully control your movement? You.. don't die. It asks you if you really want to do that. Answer: you don't.
This is how the games should be: they let you die through *expected* game mechanics, but don't blindside you with idiotic instakills and prompts you when you're about to do something spectacularly stupid, even if you don't know you're about to do it. You're playing the game, not the game engine.
As for the specific debate going on overhead: if you hold down the run key you deserve everything you get. Do not do it.
Matt_S:
--- Quote from: Ander Hammer on March 31, 2012, 10:58 ---It is also honestly not that hard to stop leaning on arrow keys to move; I did it, and I'm an idiot.
--- End quote ---
--- Quote from: Cotonou on March 31, 2012, 11:07 ---As for the specific debate going on overhead: if you hold down the run key you deserve everything you get. Do not do it.
--- End quote ---
If I wanted to walk from point A to point B, stopping when I saw any enemies, what are my options?
* Use "," but force it to stop and change directions all the time because my destination probably isn't going to be in a straight line.
* Use mouse motion, which automatically means I have to take a hand off the keyboard and move my mouse to where I want to walk, hope that the pathfinding doesn't just run me into a wall, then put my hand back on the keyboard. Also, I'd better be playing the graphical version.
* Moving one space at a time using the regular movement keys, making sure after every single move that there aren't any enemies in sight, taking far longer than it has any business to.
What you don't seem to understand is that just about every single one of the safety features being requested already exist in the game, and I've never heard any complaints about it. The only thing is, they put the steering in the hands of the game and they can be awkward to use.
Demetrious:
--- Quote from: Napsterbater on March 31, 2012, 00:05 ---I'm even learning to like the game of getting there. It's just the pain of the stupid death that makes me think every time, "there's gotta be another way." Just today I was 70% to MMB bliss, just about to make the decision between a WhizKid detour or straight for the Blades. I was sitting in a cleared room reloading my Combat Shotty when a former commando comes in and wastes me while I'm busy pressing 'r', 'r', 'r', 'r', 'r'.
--- End quote ---
This happened to me a few nights ago - this exact situation - while I was doing a HMP Tac Launcher run, for the sake of trying it out. I'd been tired, I saved the game, and it tells you to hit "enter" to leave after saving - but I tapped it twice, and so the god-damned thing reloaded the game! Sigh. Had to finish one more level before I could re-save and exit.... and thus I died with an inventory full of large med-packs.
I deleted my 9.9.6. folder after that. All medals, badges, etc, I just clicked on it, dragged it to the trash, then emptied the recycle bin.
I've suffered ragequits before - you've got to me Mother Theresa to play Nethack and not rage-quit occasionally - but this is the first time in my life I've actually deleted a game folder. And it's percisely because of what Napsterbater said - Doom RL is so fun because it really is suited to a quick-and-dirty playstyle. Sometimes you have to slow down and think, but when you come down to it Doom RL is a lot more straightforward then most other Roguelikes out there. There's no herb-growing system, there's no complex potion miscibility tables, there's no alignment system and altars to convert and spell/skill advancement system: you've got a few trait trees and a ton of demons to kill, that's it. So when you get killed for playing fast - when playing fast got you to level 6 of Deimos without a problem - that tends to piss you off.
Doom RL is not your average roguelike; which is a good thing. So to say "that's typical Roguelike interface quibbles suck it up" isn't an argument I've any sympathy for. At the very least a full reload by pressing shift-R should be interrupted by a monster appearing in vision - it takes the exact same time as pressing 'r' five times, it just saves some wear on your keyboard, is all. But since it is not interruptable, you recognize shift-R as AN EVIL COMMAND THAT WILL GET YOU KILLED. So you get into the habit of tapping 'r' incessantly... and it gets you killed.
And the Run command, which never saves anybody. It's not neglecting the Run command that gets you killed; it's the one time you hold the arrow key down for two seconds because you're tired, or your cat jumped into your lap, etc. I can't tell you how much I love losing hours of patient, grueling gameplay advancement because I held a key down for 2 seconds instead of 1.5 seconds, then coming to the forums to be called stupid. I play games to have fun, not to be kicked in the balls. I play IL-2, and that takes intense focus and concentration and effort, to keep a fighter in the air, on the razor-edge of the performance envelope - but when I die, I just re-plane and hop back in. And I'm focusing on the game, not on the interface. IL-2 doesn't kick me in the sack and steal my pocket change if I bump the joystick wrong.
Setting up the key-buffer to automatically stop you, and force a new key-tap for every action once an enemy comes into view - that'd be amazing.The key-buffer idea would actually save you frustration in those situations.
Oh, and the Run command.
--- Quote from: Matt_S ---The only thing is, they put the steering in the hands of the game and they can be awkward to use.
--- End quote ---
Indeed. A feature so awkward that nobody ever uses it is... useless.
If we wanted Doom RL to be a game designed to extract our tears and rage, designed to exclude everybody but the most demented, cave-dwelling neckbeard from our secret club, we'd be playing Nethack with Chain-Guns, which is demonstrably not the case. The fact that Kornel put in tooltips - freaking tooltips - and the entire graphical version speaks to this, I think. With the difficulty levels and numerous challenge modes Doom RL is a remarkable game in that it scales to many different levels of player competence and difficulty, and that's really neat - but interface pitfalls can and will ruin your day on ITYTD just as easy as on HMP. I've experienced it myself, many times. I wager we all have. We're not asking for the game to compensate for our stupid decisions or Cat-Who-Dances-On-Keyboard pow-wows; nothing can do that, but a few simple, obvious interface improvements that would really cut down on the incidence of rage-quit inducing deaths. The loss of hours of gameplay, with NO SAVES ALLOWED, make this a priority.
And while we're on the topic of improvements: the game's first four levels badly need re-balancing. Most of my runs require five or six deaths/restarts until I get a character who doesn't get RNG raped on the first few levels. After that it's actually easy, unless the stairs dump me next to eleventy-billion formers on the next level. How many Sergeants you see on the first two levels determines if you've enough ammo to do Hell's Arena, which is a pain in the ass when you're gunning for medals or badges, which you'll be doing soon enough if you're a decent Roguelike player. Once you get past the start, Doom RL is lovely fun, but the start is just a bitch.
--- Quote from: Cotonou ---Malice is not a design feature.
--- End quote ---
Quoted for truth, justice, and the American Way.
Murkglow:
--- Quote from: Napsterbater on March 31, 2012, 10:34 ---Most of the time, these decisions can be made fast. So you play fast. Or, I do. And it works great. Slowly I work on those tactical decisions, (which kill me half the time) but I'm having loads of fun doing so because speedy play is ten times funner than slow play.
--- End quote ---
And that's the thing, this is just your play style, that doesn't make it the correct one or the one everyone should or does play, nor does it signify what type of game DoomRL is. You call it "fast and furious" but that doesn't make it so. Me personally? I think if you spam "r" without looking at what you're doing you should die. Period, the game should not save you from your own foolishness. If you step in lava because you didn't look first or hit the wrong key, you should die. You made a mistake in doing so and that's your fault. You refuse to accept this and repeat "That wasn't my mistake" or "I wasn't zoning out" but the truth is it was and you were. If you hadn't made the mistake of not paying attention you wouldn't have died. Blaming the game for your personal mistakes (pushing a button too much or being too tired to play correctly) and asking it to hold your hand isn't how I personally think the game should be handled.
Ander Hammer:
--- Quote from: Demetrious ---stuff
--- End quote ---
Wow. Okay. There are several coherent points in there which I hope I can touch upon satisfactorily.
--- Quote from: Matt_S on March 31, 2012, 11:23 ---Moving one space at a time using the regular movement keys, making sure after every single move that there aren't any enemies in sight, taking far longer than it has any business to.
--- End quote ---
This is not as hard as you're making it out to be, and is in fact a valid strategy for not wasting dozens of games because of lazy moves; you're going to save time in the long run if your games take twice as long, but you die less than half as often/early. Making sure after every single move that there isn't an enemy in sight involves simply watching the LOS squares you're going to reveal as you walk, and listening to monster cries and slowing down if one is loud, and remembering, if monsters are nearby, where they're likely to be lurking. Or getting Int2.
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Okay. So. DoomRL is a Roguelike. It controls like a Roguelike. Okay, sure, it's probably possible to get a keypress buffer interrupt doohickey in to prevent mistakes like this, but arguing about it is not going to manifest it in the game, and if and until it's a feature, it's not going to make holding down or hammering a command in a turn-based game any less of a bad idea.
I understand where you guys are coming from. I have a few stings from early on when I accidentally moved too fast or held down a key. Alt-reloading for some guns is pointless in a lot of situations, and I agree that saving should probably require a key besides 'enter'. I think save-anywhere will probably be implemented at some point, too.
I don't think you understand where I am coming from. I'm going to re-iterate here: DoomRL is a turn based game, one that tends to reward caution regardless of build, and this is from someone who likes shooting rockets indiscriminately when he's not in melee. In almost any game besides, like, Sonic, what happens if you do things with potential punishments without thinking them through? Instead of asking that the game be changed and continuing to play as you are, give changing to suit the game a try in the interim and see how it works out. (Not to imply that every move you make is a stupid hold-key dash - just try catching yourself before you do it.)
Now, I'm going to go shave my neckbeard.
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