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Messages - Sereg

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61
Off Topic / Re: Working on a roguelike...
« on: March 25, 2019, 07:52 »
Part of the reason I require reagent containers to take actual inventory space is because a player might at some point want to manage their inventory and remove excess reagents to make space for other things.

Probably it would be better to treat them separately, as suggested, and not display or track them in the inventory, but since they are currently items, this would require either a large rewrite or a hack - either way, probably still worth it to save a headache in inventory management that's not really intended. I'll see about a solution for this.

There are some contrast issues on some screens - I created a solution for this, but it isn't working as intended, so I'll revisit that and see if I can come up with something better - the player shouldn't have to select a different display theme to read their book.

As far as the save command, intuition is not necessarily universal - 'X' actually stands for "E(x)it", of which saving is a natural side effect, as opposed to 'Q', which stands for "(Q)uit without saving", and in my experience, I exit more games with Ctrl-X than Ctrl-S. However, it would probably not be a huge deal to add a line or two under a modifier switch for the s key code to handle this, since as you point out Ctrl-S may be a more intuitive understanding for some subset of players.

I'll look into the lamp message and see if I can find why that's happening. Fortunately it wasn't fatal, but it's a bad thing when Null Pointers start cropping up in unexpected places for unknown reasons.

The second error was probably unrelated to the refill, if it was so widely separated - I suspect that's a separate issue where the display thread dies. In the past this caused an unrecoverable hang, but in the current version, the game does recover from it after some amount of player input because I monitor the thread and attempt to restart it if I find it terminated. However, the conditions which cause it to be terminated are unclear to me, and apparently can persist for several player actions depending on the game state, so the hang is still present, and not particularly nice if it occurs while the player is in a situation where they need to take precise actions. I have had great difficulty finding the source of this issue, since it occurs in a portion of the code that comes from a standard Java library, and I don't understand why my input is producing the output that causes the crash, so my thread monitoring is a sort of temporary patch to make it recoverable when it occurs, but I'll have to investigate the problem in depth and find a proper solution before any kind of non-alpha release.

As far as the RNG behavior in your win, that's definitely within the scope of intended gameplay - and it's one of the reasons language knowledge persists between games.


Haste is probably too powerful as it is - I'll probably promote it to legendary rarity.

Embermace is definitely strong against undead - it doesn't inherently have a damage bonus against the undead enemy type, but the resistance profile of undead enemies is weak to fire, so the effect is similar.

Soul-rending is indeed a sanity based attack - be careful of those remnants, especially when your sanity is also low. Of course in your situation there's little you can do about it without spells, but in a more generous run, they make a great case for using magic instead of melee.

That bug appears to be caused by your save state persisting even after your victory, which is not supposed to happen. I'll trace it and see if I can find out why that important step was missed.

62
Off Topic / Re: Working on a roguelike...
« on: March 22, 2019, 06:16 »
I'll send a more complete response Sunday night,  but for now I'm on mobile only so I'll keep it concise... did the hang occur immediately after the refill which generated the error log,  or were there two separate instances?

63
Off Topic / Re: Working on a roguelike...
« on: March 20, 2019, 19:21 »
And here it is:


20 MAR 2019 - Alpha 0.1.2.0:
   Added new interruption messages for clarity. Revised rarity of center tiles down slightly. Added and implemented Spell Power modification. Grimoires and some amulets will increase this by certain amounts, while heavier armor will decrease it. Added a new weapon and amulet which boost spell power, and added a boost to the warlock's attire. Losing sanity now passes a message which will identify the cause if the player dies of madness. Fixed a bug where scrambled lore as a result of poor language proficiency could lead to bug reports. There is now a lower bound on how much the player learns from studying an unread grimoire - some progress will always be made. Slightly reduced chance to upgrade a loot roll to a higher tier. Reduced the reagent cost of many spells. Added new monster type Reptilian. Wrote lore and spells for new Grimoire 'Ophidian Apostasies'. Rebalanced some casting times and made Chant uninterruptible. Adjusted the rarities of several weapons. Added light override and burst effects to temporary effects to support new spells.

64
Off Topic / Re: Working on a roguelike...
« on: March 19, 2019, 17:48 »
I'll try to push a release tomorrow night - I haven't got quite as much done as I'd like, but I'll be away until next week sometime, so nothing new will get done until then if I delay it, anyway.

65
Off Topic / Re: Working on a roguelike...
« on: March 19, 2019, 08:19 »
It is possible not to learn anything new about a language from a grimoire - but annoying. I might remove that total failure chance.

Temporary effects are new, and inflicted by very few monsters and a couple spells, so it's a fairly rare message.

I am aware of a bug report that's generated by a non-fatal crash while trying to read lore for books whose language you haven't mastered - this has been corrected in the development version.

66
Off Topic / Re: Working on a roguelike...
« on: March 16, 2019, 06:40 »
Haha that's awesome... I thought to myself while writing that spell... should I make something bad happen if the player stands in the area of effect? As you have discovered,  the answer to that question was: "Yes. Yes I should."

It looks like you had quite the run going, too... that's a lot of loot so early in the game o.O

67
Off Topic / Re: Working on a roguelike...
« on: March 15, 2019, 12:02 »
Action speed does indeed affect equip and remove times - I believe those are based on attack speed, which implies the use of your hands, not move speed which affects use of legs or cast speed which affects speed of mind/speech.

Armors do not directly affect resistance stats - they behave differently than other gear slots, and their resistances are applied directly to the process of absorbing damage, while in general resistances are applied up front before the damage is dealt. It might seem a bit confusing, but think of the resistances you get from amulets and grimoires as sort of magical enhancements, while resistances on armor reflect the actual properties of that piece of armor.

Radius of a light source is actually directly related to its brightness, so there is currently no way in my lighting system to create a large light radius with a low brightness(although I could certainly override this, and it might be interesting to do for some lights...). However, burning things down from a distance, before you can directly see them, is definitely a valid strategy for managing sanity.

As far as going to the death screen immediately, I might be able to find a way to add an intermediate step that freezes the screen and displays a message, but the death screen does tell you what killed you, so I'm not entirely sure what the confusion is... still, it probably wouldn't be a bad idea to capture the screen at death and write it to the mortem. I'll look into that for the next release.

As far as the danger of entering a new floor, that's certainly an intended part of the sanity mechanic - imagining already being in a mentally unstable state from the horrors you've seen, then descending a new level and being immediately faced with several more horrific enemies - the shock very easily could kill you, or leave you completely mad.

If you're frequently finding that such situations are occurring, I may need to slightly rebalance the sanity restoration rates, but at first glance I'd chalk that up to an unfortunate RNG. Bear in mind that some mitigation comes through repeated play - knowledge of languages persist between games, so the next time around you may find you have access to more spells for dealing with Insanity in the books you find.


Edit: By the way, I've got a spell power modification system implemented for the next release, so you should be able to optimize your equipment to create a stronger caster playstyle from now on.

68
Off Topic / Re: Working on a roguelike...
« on: March 15, 2019, 09:44 »
1) Yes, technically doors can be broken via other methods - their transform tables allow modification from other sources than alteration. However, I've only implemented modification from alteration, so presently nothing else can actually do this. Broken doors are a flavor for now, then, but in theory, eventually monsters will exist who will be able to break down obstacles between themselves and the player, and the player should have new ways of affecting their environment.

2) Currently the only way to improve your damage is by evaluating enemy damage type strengths and weaknesses and selecting spells which are more effective against your particular target. Casting speed can be boosted, which is useful to some extent, but probably better would be raw damage increases or chances of saving reagents - It should certainly be possible to implement damage boosts with the current system, but reagent modification will be more difficult to do.

Hmm, 6 or 7 fonts in 13 floors might be a bit more common than I intended. I'll probably revise that rarity upward, but not as far as it was before. However, it could just be a very lucky RNG - certainly, a treasure room with only broken chests is extremely rare. Loot containers, when generated, have a small chance of reverting to a different type, and for everything in the room to manage that is rather incredible.

Light going out is an interruption, so it will stop an interruptible action like picking up an item. Currently, any interruption other than of studying a grimoire will only display the interrupt message, but nothing specific to the item or action. In the development version, I've just added new messages to make it more clear to the player that their interrupted action was not completed, so this should be fixed for the next release.

And yes, the masks are a bit poorly spaced on health - I'll look into rebalancing those as well, like I did for Sanity.

Congratulations on winning - I notice you have a couple of Grimoires which you could read well enough to cast some spells from, and quite alot of reagents... were you able to make use of any of them? I see you finished the game with the starting Grimoire, and I'm hoping that's only because of the overabundance of mercury you found on the run.

69
Off Topic / Re: Working on a roguelike...
« on: March 14, 2019, 15:13 »
Hmm... if you're having performance issues on that, I probably just wrote some really inefficient code somewhere. If it only started recently, I have an idea where to start looking, but I should probably make a complete optimization pass on all the algorithms at some point.

70
Off Topic / Re: Working on a roguelike...
« on: March 14, 2019, 12:47 »
Lighting is actually less expensive than before, so I suspect it must be something else... I wonder if the slowdown is due to the new temporary effect checks. Do you mind posting your hardware specs?

Glad to hear the loot rework is having some effect - I suspect that death was just the wrath of the RNG, but let me know if it continues to be an issue.

71
Off Topic / Re: Working on a roguelike...
« on: March 14, 2019, 10:19 »
14 MAR 2019 - Alpha 0.1.1.5:
   Reworked loot system - it should now be somewhat easier to find items of higher rarity. Monsters are also slightly more likely to drop items. Temporary effects now have diminishing returns the more times they are applied. Wrote lore and spells for new Grimoire 'Atlantis Ascendant'. Fixed a bug where the northwest borders of the map were improperly hidden. Active fountains now appear active regardless of lighting. Moving into a closed but not locked door automatically attempts to open it, which now has almost no chance of failing. Monster sight sanity threshhold halved. Center terrain features are now slightly more common, with a better chance of becoming a better feature. Non-armor equip and remove actions replaced with consume and dequip actions, respectively, taking much less time to complete. Fixed a bug with refueling. Fixed a bug with loot generation. Pause now passes appreciably more time, but is still faster than any other action besides Instant spellcasting. Added new weapon stone hammer. Added new grimoire 'Liber Ivonis' with lore and spells.

Edit: missed a couple - I adjusted the rarity on falchions from Uncommon to Scarce. I also added a new spell, Mercurial Missile, to the Lapis Philosophorum, as a less efficient but more potent per shot version of Silver Bullet for alchemists with extra mercury on their hands.

I've also reformatted how I do version numbers - I'll be working toward a 1.0.0.0 completion in larger steps than before... The fourth number will denote minor adjustments, with the third and second denoting larger milestones. I have a rough plan for how to progress these, but nothing set in stone yet, so version stamps will probably still be somewhat inconsistent, but it should be an improvement over the earlier system.

72
Off Topic / Re: Working on a roguelike...
« on: March 13, 2019, 08:18 »
Heh, I really ought to get an update rolled out with the update to sanity... it's been a busy week, and I'm trying to move to a release schedule where I emphasize more content per update rather than fast releases, but I should have enough done to push an update tonight or tomorrow, or Friday morning at the latest.

I'm glad you're still playing despite that, and I hope you don't burn out on the current somewhat rough mechanics - the next update should have a better balance overall, as well as some nice new books to play with.

73
Post Mortem / Re: [U|100%|YAFW] Scavenger Diamond
« on: March 11, 2019, 07:14 »
Huh. That's quite clever. My answer to this challenge was the standard spam AoOC runs for Azrael's Scythe, then hope for enough health kits to restore energy enough times to reap everything with the secondary fire - but you've innovated a technique which, as far as I can tell, has never been used or even described before.

On top of that, you've managed a YAAM YAFW that's for all intents and purposes a complete conqueror win on Ultraviolence, other than the miscalculation with the Cathedral, which is a pretty high difficulty achievement - I have two Angelics, and have only completed Conqueror once(I find it so challenging that I almost never even attempt it), so I'd say you're definitely capable of going for the easier ones with a reasonable possibility of success, and you're probably better qualified to consider the more difficult ones than I was even at my peak.

74
Off Topic / Re: Working on a roguelike...
« on: March 09, 2019, 10:15 »
 It actually does work like that, with diminishing losses as the number increases,  but perhaps the threshold is too high... I'll look into that for the next release.

75
Off Topic / Re: Working on a roguelike...
« on: March 09, 2019, 05:14 »
Currently the AI I use is very rudimentary - its default behavior is to shun light, but if the player illuminates it, it will instead attack. This makes sense for the animal type enemies, but other enemies will eventually have different AI.

I might see about adjusting dungeon feature rarity in addition to item rarity - there is a feature that will help restore sanity, but it also has a different use you've already discovered...

Sanity can also be conserved by keeping your Eldritch resistance high, and if you do find a non-empty lectern, or otherwise come across some of the magical grimoires available in the dungeon, you may find that some have ways of restoring your sanity. Others, of course, may make it even worse...

Changing equipment used to be an interruptable action.  Changing armor still is,  but every other slot can now be swapped without interruption.  However, I never changed the time cost... I believe it's still 5 seconds, which is a lot longer than it takes for a strong enemy to melee you to death.  I'll leave armor at that time, but I think it would be reasonable to speed other gear up a bit.  Of course,  it will still take some time... I don't intend players to change gear in combat, so it will not be a free action,  but it shouldn't be quite that lethal either.

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