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View Full Version : Just some random ideas concerning dungeon layouts and navigation



BFBeast666
07-19-2011, 03:16 AM
I like the fact that the dungeon floors in JADE are much, much larger, since the old 80x20 restriction is gone, but right now the room creation algorithm needs some serious cleaning up. The number of parallel corridors is way too high and there's not enough large rooms, the biggest one I've found was about 8x8 or so. I'm well aware that we're in early alpha, I just want to get this in rather sooner than later.

And one other thing: It would be very helpful if there's a way to find the stairs again (apart from just walking back to them). I've spent about half an hour crawling through a dungeon floor on the desperate search for the up stairs. Zooming out only helps so much, going any lower than 4 makes the screen barely readable and amidst all the dropped items one small < gets hopelessly lost. Maybe either a button combination that tells you "the up stairs are in the northwest" for a general direction, some kind of highlight so they can be seen when zoomed out far enough, or - I'm hopelessly spoiled by Stone Soup in this regard - a targeted 'w'alk option. Hitting w> for example would move the PC to the down staircase, but I can see all kinds of trouble with pathfinding code creeping up, not to mention when there are multiple stairs on the level.

Barring that, a pickaxe in 0.1.3. would be very welcome, to tunnel where no one has tunneled before. I'm really, really sick of having to walk 45 spaces through three rooms and four corridors when all I need is ONE wall segment out of the way :)

Since the scope of JADE is much larger, what are you guys thinking about recall magic (think Diablo's Town Portal scrolls/spell)? Would it make the game too easy/exploitable? What about long range overworld travel in general? Will there be a way to get from town to town in a speedy manner? In ADOM, the real estate one had to cover was fairly limited, being about 75x20 spaces on the overworld map, but with multiple screens in every direction, food consumption, time and whatnot, alternate modes of movement and ways to keep tabs on one's position would be definitely things TB should look into.

Aielyn
07-19-2011, 05:06 AM
Personally, I'd like to see some more interesting room shapes, too. Round rooms, rooms with pillars in the middle, things like that. Perhaps they could apply to larger rooms (say, 7x7 and larger) and simply add appropriate walls to enclose the room.

In the case of a round room, if a room would be generated like this:


##########
/ #
## #
# #
# #
# #
# #
# #
#########

Then the walls would be rounded out, with the corridor extended in like this:


########
/ ##
### ##
# #
# #
# #
## ##
## ##
#####

So, as you can see, the corridor just got extended in, with the door placed in the last space surrounded by two walls.

Similarly, the same room made into a pillar room might look like one of these:


########## ########## ########## ########## ##########
/ # / # / # / # / #
## # ## # # # ## # ## # # ## #
# # # # # # # # # # #
# # # # # # # # # # # # ### #
# # # # # # # # # # #
# # # # # # # # # # # # #
# # # # # # # # # #
######### ######### ######### ######### #########


With all the extra space on each level, this sort of thing would add to the flavour of the game, I think.

EDIT: What is noteworthy about this method of alteration is that it can retain the same original map generation algorithm - it just adds some after-generation modifications. If there are some potentially problematic cases, like the round room with corridors coming to both walls in the same corner (thereby creating a "cross" shape), it shouldn't be too hard to implement it so that one corridor (chosen at random) is extended in all the way, and then the other is only extended until it reaches the new piece of corridor.

Laukku
07-19-2011, 07:14 PM
right now the room creation algorithm needs some serious cleaning up. The number of parallel corridors is way too high

Actually it feels like there are too many rooms in a too small area. Have a third less of them maybe. I would like to see some more long corridors between rooms instead of the webs we got.

adamalive
07-21-2011, 07:11 AM
I really like the ideas in Aielyn's post.

As for town portal equivalents, I don't think it would necessarily be a bad thing to be able to teleport over long distances, but I think it's best implemented as a rarity.. something of extreme power rather than a common occurrence or easily accessible ability.

It's a big overland (world?) map though.. It should take a long time (IG time) to travel between cities on foot, and it should be dangerous to make such journeys on one's own (bandits, monsters, wild beast attacks, starvation, weather, getting lost, etc etc).

I do agree that as players it would be handy for us to know the geographical position of our character in relation to the whole map, but I think that's part of the fun. I love the fact that the map loops! I think it's badass :P