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106
Discussion / Re: Ideas to make DoomRL even faster and furious'er
« on: April 06, 2012, 16:32 »
Really? Pretty sure I've lost a few to barrels in the past. But that would mean that there was no unique in that level, which would indicate a bug in the program. Or that it was an armor and the possibility that a former would drop it into lava on death was overlooked.
107
Discussion / Re: Ideas to make DoomRL even faster and furious'er
« on: April 06, 2012, 16:26 »
Glad to see some constructive discussion going on!
Barrel levels are only annoying to me when there's also "something really valuable here." If not I feel no qualms about blowing up every barrel from afar.
One minor thing I'd like to see happen is to have unique armors guaranteed to drop on dry land when the enemy holding them is killed. It sucks when I clear such a level and find no unique. But I suppose I could just make sure to always kill formers with weapons rather than push them into fluids whenever there's a unique on the level.
But whatevs. Uniques can make things interesting, but they're rarely useful when they spawn, especially the weapons. Onyx armor is probably the most-hoped for spawn in the games I play, but even then it's only useful after I get a power mod on it, and even then I usually favor bulk-modded red armor for the fire resist. But P-modded cerberus onyx armor is the only real kit I go gaga for for on my MMB Ao100 runs. But I don't really need it, bulk-modded red is plenty. Well, aside from cerberus boots, but those are easy.
Heh, I once found a nano mod and an onyx mod one level after the other. I had MMB and was itching to get that second level of WhizKid so I could assemble Cybernano Red armor. Last enemy on that level with the onyx mod was a former sergeant, which tagged me next to a lava barrel while I was overconfident and running around with only 25% health or so. Bye bye Cybernano. :-|
Barrel levels are only annoying to me when there's also "something really valuable here." If not I feel no qualms about blowing up every barrel from afar.
One minor thing I'd like to see happen is to have unique armors guaranteed to drop on dry land when the enemy holding them is killed. It sucks when I clear such a level and find no unique. But I suppose I could just make sure to always kill formers with weapons rather than push them into fluids whenever there's a unique on the level.
But whatevs. Uniques can make things interesting, but they're rarely useful when they spawn, especially the weapons. Onyx armor is probably the most-hoped for spawn in the games I play, but even then it's only useful after I get a power mod on it, and even then I usually favor bulk-modded red armor for the fire resist. But P-modded cerberus onyx armor is the only real kit I go gaga for for on my MMB Ao100 runs. But I don't really need it, bulk-modded red is plenty. Well, aside from cerberus boots, but those are easy.
Heh, I once found a nano mod and an onyx mod one level after the other. I had MMB and was itching to get that second level of WhizKid so I could assemble Cybernano Red armor. Last enemy on that level with the onyx mod was a former sergeant, which tagged me next to a lava barrel while I was overconfident and running around with only 25% health or so. Bye bye Cybernano. :-|
108
Century Lounge / Re: [M|Ao100|97%|74|YASD]
« on: April 01, 2012, 15:37 »
I have learned to be very very wary around barrels. I often push barrels away from entrances before going into the room, on the off case there might be a shotgunner in the room I haven't heard yet, just to minimize the damage in case there is. If there's a barrel next to a mod, I do not approach it until I'm sure the room is clear, and I try to be aware of where enemies might see me and shoot those barrels. I don't lose too much stuff anymore.
109
Discussion / Re: Ideas to make DoomRL even faster and furious'er
« on: April 01, 2012, 13:36 »
I usually play HMP. I can get places in UV, I just find HMP to be more fun. It's the perfect difficulty level for my playstyle. I'd be satisfied with having a few of the changes I requested be part of HMP and earlier. UV is a pretty big step up. I have to play much slower and carefully, and the tweaks wouldn't have much meaning for that reason. Not really my style.
I actually think playing HMP the way I play it is more difficult than playing UV carefully. Maybe I'll upload a video one day of a good run to give people a good idea. But I doubt watching me pound through 100 levels at speed would be all that interesting.
And I don't think the difficulty level of games like Angband or Nethack is being properly appreciated. It takes years to win those games. Angband has been getting easier of late. At least the guys who've been playing for 15 years say that.
I actually think playing HMP the way I play it is more difficult than playing UV carefully. Maybe I'll upload a video one day of a good run to give people a good idea. But I doubt watching me pound through 100 levels at speed would be all that interesting.
And I don't think the difficulty level of games like Angband or Nethack is being properly appreciated. It takes years to win those games. Angband has been getting easier of late. At least the guys who've been playing for 15 years say that.
110
Discussion / Re: Ideas to make DoomRL even faster and furious'er
« on: April 01, 2012, 03:14 »
Do you know the difference between strategy and tactics? There is no strategy involved in DoomRL, save that of choosing an advancement path.
111
Discussion / Re: Ideas to make DoomRL even faster and furious'er
« on: April 01, 2012, 03:01 »The game wasn't built for speed, it was built for strategy.Can we dispense with this nonsense? People keep saying this without anything to back it up. It says right there on the DoomRL homepage:
"DoomRL (Doom, the Roguelike) is a fast and furious coffee-break Roguelike game, that is heavily inspired by the popular FPS game Doom by ID Software."
If you don't have the skills to play fast, then don't. But don't attack us for wanting to play fast and finding that the interface isn't as well-suited to it as it could be.
112
Discussion / Re: Ideas to make DoomRL even faster and furious'er
« on: April 01, 2012, 02:52 »
It's utterly ridiculous to say that DoomRL has the best interface of any roguelike. Full-stop. The three other roguelikes mentioned in this thread have been in continuous development for 17+ years, by teams much larger than DoomRL's.
And could we please save the flames for the cacodemons?
2dev, you like DoomRL's game mechanics. That's great, so do I. I don't currently play any other roguelike. Angband takes too long to get started and I don't last long enough on the interesting parts. It takes 2-3 hours of fast gameplay to get deep enough where you start finding the cooler items/monsters. Then I maybe last half an hour or so before I die. Too much buildup. Don't take this as a complaint against Angband. If I had oodles of time to while away, I would play Angband. On the whole, it's the better game, believe it or not. Most of Angband's *variants* are better than DoomRL, the top-shelf ones, anyway.
I put up with DoomRL and the sillier of its design decisions because it's the roguelike I can take a break with. It's a game I don't have to do any real mental heavy-lifting to play. It's fun even when I die. Dying is not fun in Angband. I can stare at the tombstone for 5 minutes before I clear the screen.
I don't think you're quite understanding my complaint, nor of the others who've voiced support for my proposed changes.
I get difficulty. I don't like games that aren't difficult. I play DoomRL because every single Wii game I've ever played was shit. The console world hasn't seen a difficult game since the Super Nintendo. Easy games are not fun. I expect a learning curve from every game I play. I expect a slow buildup of skill. I just don't think that certain things are skills. Taking any more time than it takes to form a tactical plan to move is not a skill. It's a waste of time that detracts from the real game.
I get game balance. I don't complain about the five or so early levels which are more perilous than the last fifteen. Because I can see how difficult it is to balance all that out. Making the first levels more interesting while being easier than the rest is, well, I'm not even sure it's possible. You either get tedium like in Angband, or painful difficulty/randomness like in DoomRL. Not a lot of middle ground.
Before you make more blanket statements about how you assume I play the game, check back to the three requests I made and actually look at what I'm suggesting. I started this thread looking for ideas, not just to complain. I don't see how fixing interface problems makes the game easier. In fact, it can open the way for making the actual game even harder, through monster AI improvements or whatnot, which I would welcome. I've been following roguelike development cycles for a few years now, mostly Angband's. They devote a lot of time to streamlining the interface. And it shows.
And could we please save the flames for the cacodemons?
2dev, you like DoomRL's game mechanics. That's great, so do I. I don't currently play any other roguelike. Angband takes too long to get started and I don't last long enough on the interesting parts. It takes 2-3 hours of fast gameplay to get deep enough where you start finding the cooler items/monsters. Then I maybe last half an hour or so before I die. Too much buildup. Don't take this as a complaint against Angband. If I had oodles of time to while away, I would play Angband. On the whole, it's the better game, believe it or not. Most of Angband's *variants* are better than DoomRL, the top-shelf ones, anyway.
I put up with DoomRL and the sillier of its design decisions because it's the roguelike I can take a break with. It's a game I don't have to do any real mental heavy-lifting to play. It's fun even when I die. Dying is not fun in Angband. I can stare at the tombstone for 5 minutes before I clear the screen.
I don't think you're quite understanding my complaint, nor of the others who've voiced support for my proposed changes.
I get difficulty. I don't like games that aren't difficult. I play DoomRL because every single Wii game I've ever played was shit. The console world hasn't seen a difficult game since the Super Nintendo. Easy games are not fun. I expect a learning curve from every game I play. I expect a slow buildup of skill. I just don't think that certain things are skills. Taking any more time than it takes to form a tactical plan to move is not a skill. It's a waste of time that detracts from the real game.
I get game balance. I don't complain about the five or so early levels which are more perilous than the last fifteen. Because I can see how difficult it is to balance all that out. Making the first levels more interesting while being easier than the rest is, well, I'm not even sure it's possible. You either get tedium like in Angband, or painful difficulty/randomness like in DoomRL. Not a lot of middle ground.
Before you make more blanket statements about how you assume I play the game, check back to the three requests I made and actually look at what I'm suggesting. I started this thread looking for ideas, not just to complain. I don't see how fixing interface problems makes the game easier. In fact, it can open the way for making the actual game even harder, through monster AI improvements or whatnot, which I would welcome. I've been following roguelike development cycles for a few years now, mostly Angband's. They devote a lot of time to streamlining the interface. And it shows.
113
Discussion / Re: Ideas to make DoomRL even faster and furious'er
« on: March 31, 2012, 16:49 »Depends.It's like they're but there are revenants who have homing attack, but there're arachnotron caves, but viles bother you with respawns, but commandos are even more painful, but barons chew your medpacks and deal acid damage, but...So i'd say they are all balanced to torment you.Arach caves don't bother me as much as they used to. By the time I get to them, I've got plenty of red/blue armor to deal with the short time I need to get to cover. Then I pull my shotty out, pop a few to rile them up, then switch to non-knockback weapons to finish them off when they get in melee range. If I get in trouble, switch on run and find cover. If I absolutely have to, I'll line them up so the rear Arach shoots through the near one.
114
Discussion / Re: Ideas to make DoomRL even faster and furious'er
« on: March 31, 2012, 15:10 »
Yes, I posted this to get discussion going, and it seems the best way to fix this would be to add three things:
1) Have Shift-R on combat shottys interrupt when an enemy comes into view.
2) A smoother Run function. I suggest making shift-move work.
3) Make the character confirm moving into a fluid that will damage him. Optionally, only make him confirm when it would do a certain amount of damage or percentage of current health.
1) Have Shift-R on combat shottys interrupt when an enemy comes into view.
2) A smoother Run function. I suggest making shift-move work.
3) Make the character confirm moving into a fluid that will damage him. Optionally, only make him confirm when it would do a certain amount of damage or percentage of current health.
115
Discussion / Re: Ideas to make DoomRL even faster and furious'er
« on: March 31, 2012, 14:44 »
Not sure if I can better articulate my playstyle so you could understand why I'm complaining about these things. Oh well.
116
Discussion / Re: Ideas to make DoomRL even faster and furious'er
« on: March 31, 2012, 13:59 »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.Forget strategy. This is about fun. Sure, it's technically the 'right' choice to waste a tenth of a second before every move and ascertain whether it's the right one or not. But is that fun? I don't think so. I'm arguing that a more forgiving interface makes for a funner game.
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arguing about it is not going to manifest it in the gameErr, yes, it is. Discussing these things on the forums is exactly how Kornel gets the idea for new features. If there's enough of a demand, and the feature is well-defined enough, it can also be taken to the bounty board to incentivize Kornel to implement it.
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I understand where you guys are coming from.I don't think you do. "Taking a few stings from early on" is not what we're talking about. My focus when playing DoomRL is not to win. This might seem counter-intuitive but I don't play to win. I play to have fun. Taking a few stings due to overzealousness is just part of the game.
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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.DoomRL does not reward caution. At least, I don't feel rewarded when I have to exercise it. I feel punished. I feel like, rather than walk the tight tight line between life and death, I have to fight an interface. It's no longer me and Mancubi and Arch-Viles, it's me and the effing reload button. Rather than making decisions like, "can I make it to this pillar before the Vile rounds that corner, revives the Mancubus and it blows up the pillar?" I have to scan for enemies for a fifth of a second after every time I hit 'r'. Every time I have to find the comma key so I can run rather than just do what every other roguelike does and let me shift-move to run, it breaks the feeling of fun. Now I'm fighting a keyboard.
If you want to sit around and take half a second between moves that's up to you. You might think that's fun, I don't.
117
Discussion / Re: Ideas to make DoomRL even faster and furious'er
« on: March 31, 2012, 10:34 »It's not really an interface issue here; the whole "compensate for information which a player would never ignore were he really there" concept is already there, in that it gives you all the time in the world to examine the situation before acting.DoomRL's gameplay is geared towards fast play. There's certain situations where you know to slow down. You first start hearing Revenant screams and you slow way the hell down, because getting out in the open with them when they first start appearing is very very dangerous. So you stick to corners and scan the screen after every move.
But that's not the default mode. The default mode is, you know (generally) what kind of danger you're in. Excepting commandos, every truly dangerous enemy can be heard. And you know the general pattern enemies move in. So you move in ways that diminish the number of opportunities they have to waste you. Sticking to cover, or not depending on what you're up against.
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.
But when you play fast, you make mistakes. DoomRL is a game that you could play fast the whole way through, if you just had enough help from the game to mitigate some of the more dangerous of those mistakes.
118
Discussion / Re: Ideas to make DoomRL even faster and furious'er
« on: March 31, 2012, 10:19 »Yup that's what makes this Doom 'the Roguelike' - The hallmark feature of (fun) roguelikes is instant, unexplainable/unavoidable death.I disagree. Sure, that's one of the classic features of roguelikes. But that's not a defining or even necessary feature. And DoomRL doesn't even really have it.
I've played Angband almost as much as I've played DoomRL. Angband is much, much more dangerous than DoomRL in this way. There are so many enemies which, if you're not aware of their abilities, can bring you from 100% health to 0% health in one turn. That's instant, but not unexplainable/unavoidable. You can almost always avoid death in Angband by being prepared and using detection spells. It's the rare, one in a dozen games or so, that ends any way other than an avoidable mistake on the player's part. The control interface is cohesive in giving you all the tools you need to do so. It's streamlined. It works with your playstyle, not against it.
Sure, if you step out in front of a bunch of Mancubi/Revenants without fire protection and a lot of health, you're dead. But you (almost) always know what's around because of the sounds. Instant death in this fashion is practically non-existent. Angband does have it, but it's rare, and the monsters that can do it are (almost always) easy to detect and avoid. Sometimes you get into real pickles, but then that's what escape spells are for. They don't always kill in one blow.
And that's not what I'm complaining about. I submit that DoomRL is hampered by being tied down to this old roguelike chestnut. "Thou shalt not hold down arrow keys!" Why is that? There's only one reason, the key buffer, and that can be changed. Angband has a trap system. Angband's traps can kill you. You can also detect traps. There's a neat green line that delineates the area you've detected. Angband does the decent thing and makes it so you can't run willy-nilly over that line. You have to confirm.
All I'm asking for is that DoomRL give the player the same courtesy. It won't make the game any easier. But I do think it will make it more fun.
119
Discussion / Re: Ideas to make DoomRL even faster and furious'er
« on: March 31, 2012, 03:01 »In graphical mode, if you click a tile down the hall and an imp wanders into view while you're marching, you stop marching. It won't let you make long movements while an enemy is in view, so mouse-users don't get splattered if they click the wrong tile and send Doomguy marching across the level while in a crossfire. This is already a thing. And the pathfinding system it uses will route you around lava, at least when you're trying to navigate through a patch with 'islands' on it, making it easy to navigate around static obstacles like those safely. Since my laptop doesn't have a keypad and the Home/PgUp/PgDown/End keys are arrayed vertically, using the mouse is essentially the only way to navigate both safely and quickly for me. I find this helpful.Graphics. Ick. Mouse control. Ick. What I do with the laptop thing is I use standard roguelike keys. Sucks doomrl doesn't have a separate keymap for this, and that the binding language gets changed with every release, but at least you can do it. If you've never used roguelike keys before, you should definitely give them a shot. Once you get used to them, you'll never go back to a mouse. Then maybe you'll actually understand what I'm complaining about. I play fast. I try to be hyper-aware of everything, but my laptop screen sucks and sometimes I miss an enemy that shows up out of nowhere. Usually it doesn't kill me. But sometimes it does.
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Not because you aren't patient, but because you zoned out.I don't zone out when I play. I just like to play on the edge. That means that every mistake has more potential of killing me. Most of the time this isn't a problem. No matter how sticky the situation, I can deal. Technicians can use medkits with no time, so unless I string together so many of them that I run out, I can usually stay alive a little while longer. It's the stupid mistakes that kill, for no good reason. I'm arguing that a lot of these things that we call stupid right now could be easily fixed with a bit of programming. Sure, it's stupid to hold your finger on the left key. But it doesn't have to be. That's what I'm arguing. It's only stupid because of the interface. Well, interfaces are easy to change. I'd do it myself but I don't have the source.
Think about it this way. What if holding your finger on the left key did the same thing the run button did? Moved you until an enemy came into view, then stopped you. Wouldn't be so dumb then, would it?
120
Discussion / Re: Ideas to make DoomRL even faster and furious'er
« on: March 31, 2012, 00:53 »Quote
if you don't want to play just a slight more patiently,Is this, or is this not Doom?
It's not that I can't play more patiently. Sure I can. It's that doing so sucks. Anti-Doom. Every time I have to do it, I whine a little. "Do I have to?"
I love DoomRL's game design. Really I do. It's a hell of a lot of fun as-is. But this feature could, I believe, turn a great game into quite possibly the perfect game. All it really needs to do is compensate for information which a player would never ignore were he really there, but the interface makes it really really easy to.