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[57E]

How about adding cages to the game, like some of the Final Doom maps had?

Possible ideas would be:
- Enemies could still attack you if you are in their range. Demons for example would be able to maul you if moved near of their cages.
- Risk that when caged monster is attacked the attack would break the cage and free the monster.
- Similary change that the monster would manage to break itself free by hiting it's cage hard enough.
- Have cages contain items instead of monsters (in the mock up the cage on the left contains green armor).
- Risk that using a lever would open all cages in a map.
- Risk that using a lever would drop a cage on the marine and you would have to break it to escape.
- Have them pushable (if they're empty) and have them block movement, but not the projectiles so they could be used to block corridors.

[LuckyDee]

Wow, looks nice. Fun idea, too.

I think this, combined with some of the stuff from other threads makes for some nice additions for the next versions. I think the game could really benefit from this.

[Kornel Kisielewicz]

Any idea how to present that in ASCII?

[LuckyDee]

Not the slightest, but I'll be happy to offer constructive criticism once you find the solution :)

[Klear]

Any idea how to present that in ASCII?

Like this:

####
#]O #
· · · #
· ·    #

Edit: Or maybe without the underline:

####
#]O #
· · · #
· ·    #

Yeah, that looks better.

[ih8regin]

it's too easy to criticize yet too hard to actually solve something.
W - a cage
U - a broken cage

[Klear]

it's too easy to criticize yet too hard to actually solve something.
W - a cage
U - a broken cage

You need to see the enemies inside the cage.

Would the method I posted above (underlined and/or crossed out letter) be possible, and if so, would the lines have the same or different colour than the monster, and if different, it may be better to make them brown or something and use # for closed empty cages.

[Kornel Kisielewicz]

Klear, that's impossible with a standard windows console. ih9regin - this way doesn't show what is inside :/.

The only reasonable way I see is using background colors, but I'm afraid that once I add *any* background color, the people will go wild with BG-related requests (and for the GFX integrity of DRL I don't want that).

[Klear]

Klear, that's impossible with a standard windows console.

Damn, I was so pleased with myself after suggesting that =)

[Klear]

If we said the enemies are chained in place instead of held in a cage, these could work:
ç or ¢
Ø
į
ħ
ş
Ą
Ŗ
And maybe ß

No idea which characters to use for Viles and Mancubi, though it would be possible to chain Ęs and Çs this way.

[Kornel Kisielewicz]

Edit: If we said the enemies are chained in place instead of held in a cage, these could work:
ç or ¢
Ø
į
ħ
ş
Ą
Ŗ
And maybe ß

It needs to be a general solution, not one tailored to the existing letters. Also, your solution would work only on a specific codepage -- I for example do not have these characters on non-unicode (and I remind that windows console is not unicode).
No idea which characters to use for Viles and Mancubi, though it would be possible to chain Ęs and Çs this way.

[Klear]

In that case I'm out of ideas.

However, if you figure it out somehow:

Net Lanucher

Damage: 0d0
Magazine: 1
Ammo: no idea, maybe make it consume broken cages the way acid-spitter can consume acid.
Special: Enemies hit by the Net Launcher are immediately caged.
Source: Predator 2

[57E]

I don't have any better ideas (that havent been said) than:
Have one character for empty cage, second char for broken/open cage & and third one for closed cage just color it diffrently depending on whats/whos inside.
You could still use the look mode to find the contents out for sure? Like the way Nethack handles those endless possiblities of things you can see while hallucinating?

[Creepy]

This would require more space, but having a "cage" wall type that stops movement but not attacks would be a simpler solution. So if you want a caged Caco spewing lightning everywhere, you have this:
===
=C=
===

And in order to stop this from preventing melee attacks, the cages could be damaged by melee attacks. A guy with a chainsaw could go through it if he had a hard-on for killing anyone using cages as a nest.

But I think I remember hearing something about walls prohibiting movement but not FOV or projectiles being some kind of problem in this version, so maybe not.

[Klear]

I don't have any better ideas (that havent been said) than:
Have one character for empty cage, second char for broken/open cage & and third one for closed cage just color it diffrently depending on whats/whos inside.
You could still use the look mode to find the contents out for sure? Like the way Nethack handles those endless possiblities of things you can see while hallucinating?

That would make some caged enemies undistinguishable from each other (notably demons/barons, former humans/revenants) without (l)ooking at each cage, which would in turn make the console version more annoying than the graphical one.

I had another idea, but I didn't even want to post it since I'm sure it's either impossible or at least undesirable - have the tile switch between the closed cage and the enemy/item inside.

[Creepy]

An animated tile probably depends on if the screen flips while waiting for input, from what little I know about such things

[Ander Hammer]

-1

Too easy to designate a hauler to drag a caged Baron to a magma river for dumping.

[57E]

Final try:

Restrict the possiblity of caged monster types.
Logical excuse would be that things like Cyber demon, Mancubus and Revenant would break the cage easily anyway.

(I have no idea what characters would be fitting or are avaible so they are just for example)

=  Empty cage OR caged Spectre
_  Broken OR open cage
i   Item in closed cage
1  Caged Imp OR caged player
2  Caged Demon
3  Caged Cacodemon

And perhaps few other monsters as well, but not the entire enemy list.

[skarczew]

1. Keep everything as it is now, but use different background (color) for cages. For example, B in a cage should have white, gray (or other background).
 Empty cages (or with invisible monsters - spectres?) could be represented as an empty tile with changed background color. Damaged cages could change into some other ASCII ( '_', '=', ' ' ), or change the color (if cage alone is white, then damaged one could be grayish, etc).

2. Filled cages would get the color of an enemy / item (background will change), while the content itself will default to black. In other words: O in a cage would be black 'O' on a red background.

3. Redefine chars / ship DoomRL with its own font :P .

4. I was thinking about blinking, but I am not sure if it works in Win console. And it looks just bad.

[tehtmi]

This would require more space, but having a "cage" wall type that stops movement but not attacks would be a simpler solution. So if you want a caged Caco spewing lightning everywhere, you have this:
===
=C=
===

And in order to stop this from preventing melee attacks, the cages could be damaged by melee attacks. A guy with a chainsaw could go through it if he had a hard-on for killing anyone using cages as a nest.

But I think I remember hearing something about walls prohibiting movement but not FOV or projectiles being some kind of problem in this version, so maybe not.

I think something like this could lend itself to the most interesting level designs, and seems to match what we commonly see in the classic Doom episodes... windows or walls that we can shoot through but not move through.  (The wouldn't necessarily have to go all the way around. Walls could block one side, or multiple "cages" could be connected.)

The only change that would be needed in the engine is separating line-of-fire from whether a cell blocks movement.  I'm pretty sure the AI would handle all this just fine.

[57E]

Did these as spriting practise:

Mockup

Tileset

Sprites are free to use, edit or ignore. No credits rerquired.

(The green pilar things were originaly supposed to be lamp-posts but I messed them up. Then they were supposed to be some sort of gate for the fence, but that didn't look right so now they are just waste of space.)

[Zecks]

yes good

[eharper256]

Mmhmm, I think this would be a very nice feature now there's some cool tiles. Good work 57E.

[57E]

I have been thinking that that, unlike the cage idea I originaly posted about, these fences shoud be just as hard to break as the normal walls.

As in if you realy need to get trough you would need BIG enough guns to tear the fence down. Or hope that nobody would come to bother you while move those explosive barrels from previous room to fence and shoot them to blow it up.

There should be some sort change depending on the shooter's accuracy that missile aimed at target behind a fence would hit the fence instead. And to shoot the fence on purpose you could just move the aiming reticle over that piece of fence and the hit/miss rate would be calculated like you were trying shoot a monster with dodge rate zero.


Also I fixed few bits to the fence tileset and added the monitor(s). See my previous post.


I originaly made the monitor sprites for shortcut icons. Don't know what you realy could use them for, but they were all over the place in Doom.
Perhaps have them display randomly choosen map data like:
- Amount of items on the level
- "[enemy count -former humans ] unauthorised personel on level [levelname]"
- Close and lock all doors on the level for random(10) turns.
- Show the stairs location.
- Explode on your face.
- Summon monsters?  D3 RoE's Bruisers http://doom.wikia.com/wiki/Bruiser were supposed to be disquised as interactive computer screens early on the development.