Dredmor Patch 1.0.10 RC9 Feedback Thread - I Believe in The Lever Fix

I know of no reason why you couldn't do the same thing (partition, dowload, transfer, delete partition) for RotDG. It's a hassle, but certainly a possibility. I've got the Steam version, but I frequently open the program outside of Steam for various reasons. DoD and RotDG both work just fine without Steam running.

I'm not really sure why the partition would be necessary, though. What am I not understanding about your situation?

 

Well, to be frank, I do not trust anything that requires Ring Zero access to your system. Not even antivirus and firewall programs need that. Windows itself only has Ring 1 access. Yet Steam silently usurps Ring Zero and can actually do things that Windows cannot even see, much less do anything about.

Here is an article about this subject, but it is out of date for modern Windows, as with Windows 7 the Kernel is using Ring 1 only if I am not mistaken.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_(computer_security)

To my way of seeing things, Steam is malware simply because of the way it works.

I know that the developers have said that there will be a non-steam way of buying RotDG once 1.0.10 is done. I can wait to buy it again.

I should clarify my previous post though. I *Did* buy RotDG via Steam. The Humble Bundle code worked fine for DoD.

If anyone knows whatever technical jargon I have messed up, please do correct me. I hate being the bearer of misinformation.

 

Sir, with regards to the stacks of food: Lutefisk. Also, some players to tend to hoard food of a kind in stacks to save inventory space.

 

Anyone who shreds all cheese and meat will have massive stacks of those two at least. So it may be a bigger issue than you think. I have been known to specifically avoid using my best food and drink items in the hope that I have saved enough for later levels. Those Diggles are now a priority target for me.

And just because it cannot be said enough, thank you for caring.
*Edit* lccorp2 beat me there.

 

I haven't installed any of the RCs yet, but the above makes me wonder if the consumer diggles should pick a stack, roll a number X, then eat as many items from the stack as required to equal/exceed X worth of healing/mana value (or just the whole stack, if its total falls short of X).

Diggles would then chomp more lutefisk pieces than, say, brie cheeses; numerical loss from stack in inverse proportion to the item's regen value. Just a thought...

 

Source for steam using ring-0? haven't been able to find any references to that yet, in fact with some searching all I can find is various threads talking about vac not being able to detect cheats using ring-0

 

Well that is mostly because Valve sued everyone who posted details of how it works years ago. They claim that this is incorrect and that any evidence that could be produced to show otherwise would require their source code. (Not to mention violating the user agreement as well.) The articles were removed to help shut them up in court.

Understand, my information may well be out of date. Steam may be benign. Or it may not. I cannot say with any certainty. But I can say with absolute confidante that I do not need it installed on my system.

Notice that the latest update to that page on Wikipedia is four years old.

My general complaint with Steam is that it is a Content Protection system. (AKA DRM.) Valve prefers the term Content Delivery System though, but a download is that. Steam is invasive and wants to investigate every game I may have on my system even if it has nothing to do with Steam. I do not use any automated antiviral programs because they are invasive. I use Clamwin. It is entirely manual. (And freeware.)

This rant is not really related to DoD, nor is my explanation fruitful for this thread. PM me or start a new thread in the off-topic branch if you want to continue this.

Sorry for polluting the thread everyone.

*Edit* The closest I can come to actually proving by my own evidence that Steam is using Ring0 is that you can mark all the files in a Steam game as read only and make them belong to the Admin only, and in previous versions of Steam it could access them and write to them without changing them to not be read only. (I do not recall if they still belonged to the Admin only.)

For all I know it can still do that. That means it has definitive Ring 0 access.

 

Where us the Mod Workshop, or is it just images?

 

As requested: You're wrong.

Outside of No Time To Grind mode, most builds can easily get by with a couple of large number foods, and actively avoiding that approach relegates you to inventory hell purgatory. Here's the five most likely food items to show up in quantity in a character's inventory:

1.) Cheesy Omelettes*. Diggle Eggs are, in 1.0.9 rev B at least (don't know about 1.0.10 since I'm on a Mac) a rare and valuable commodity that only spawn on the earliest floors of the dungeon and yet can be made into the best foods in the game. As a result, it's not uncommon for players to horde those eggs. You turn them into cheesy omelettes, and save them just for use during zoos. Getting hit for your entire stack of 20 to 40 cheesy omelettes would be devastating*. Same for loosing all your eggs if for some reason you haven't made them into omelettes yet.

2.) Lutefisk. According to the wiki, there's a mechanical incentive to their be donated in large lump sums of exactly 500.

3.) Ground Meat, especially for Big Game Hunters. That skill procs so much meat, your inventory can end up swamped if you don't periodically grind the various cuts down.

Also, some meat types produce higher healing amounts when ground, so in NTTG (where food is really scarce) it's not uncommon to grind up meat for the incremental boost you get. I've personally had stacks of over 100.

Not such a big deal if a Big Game Hunter loses his ground meat, he'll just make more. But on NTTG, losing a whole bunch of low-value "between fights" food would really hurt.

4.) Ground Cheese. Again, mostly just an inventory management issue, to free up spaces for more important things. Unless they're playing on NTTG, most people wouldn't really cry over lost ground cheese.

5.) Grilled Steaks, but probably just for Big Game Hunters, and then only if the RNG coughs up BBQ grills often enough. I've seen stacks of 60+ Steaks on a Big Game Hunter before.


Drink stacks are rarely anywhere near as large, however since just two booze types spawn again and again on floors 10 to 15, it's pretty common to have stacks of 20 or 30 of them, depending on build. If the change to 1.0.10 introduced new boozes to replace the Gargle Blasters and Absinthes at the lowest levels, that won't be an issue.


*: Since we're on the topic, I have to say that in my opinion the Cheesy Omelette recipe is probably too good. It's 56 hp for 1 egg and 3 grated cheese, taking zero skill to make. That completely goofs up the healing and resource curves, and devalues all other foods in the game. Given how many foods you took the time to code and illustrate, that's not a good thing. Compare Cheesy O's to the original Deep Omelette which takes 400% as many eggs but only heals 114% the hp. It's just over the top.

Cheesy Omelette wouldn't be nearly as overpowering if it was a hidden recipe That would force you to sometimes make a Deep Omelette instead, and it would give non-crafters a reason to click on bookshelves. However it would be terribly frustrating if you finally broke down and made Deep Omelettes out of all your eggs then immediately found the recipe.

Better solutions might be:
make Cheesy Omelettes simply heal fewer hp (probably around 36 or 38 hp, so it's not quite as good as a Grilled Cheese which requires the rare bread and specific cheese combo),
possibly change the recipe to take two eggs per Cheesy O instead of one.

 

While personally I think the idea of a Diggle that eats stacks of food (and drink respectively) is entirely appropriate, I'd like to propose that they be switched in level. Level 7 is currently the realm of the Hungry Diggle, and level 11 the Thirsty Diggle. At it stands, Fighters start feeling the pain around level 8, but have an easier time of levels 12-14 then they do of 8-11. That's a little silly, and by putting the Hungry Diggle as a level 12 monster, you give Fighters a bit of a disincentive to jump from floor 8 to floor 12, because they risk destroying their major healing source before they return to the upper levels once they've leveled up enough to handle Arch and Muscle Diggles.

Meanwhile, the mages tend to be just reaching the point where they can regen 1 mana every 1-2 rounds by DL7, and they can combine that with their alcohol to get their mana on in a serious fashion. Having a Thirsty Diggle around there (and maybe level 8 as well) to rob them of their drink reserves would help keep them from feeling like mana is a fungible resource going into the 'danger zone' of DLs 8-10.

In fact, it may even be best to have a Famine/Ravenous/Gluttonous Diggle on DL 14-15 that eats both a food stack and a drink stack. But that's just me.

This even though I almost always play a crafter of some sort and inevitably grind every meat and every cheese down just to save inventory space, so I'd be more vulnerable to these beasties than most.


That, and I second r_b_bergstrom's opinion on Cheesy Omlettes. Either they should only heal around 35 HP, or they should take 2 eggs and 2 cheese.

 

Nope.

I don't suppose 'fisk can be eaten by enemies when stored inside the Cube?

... which brings me to an idea: Safe Deposit Box, a rare and expensive item, that could be used to store one - and only one - (stack of) item(s) and thus protect them from being stolen/eaten/exploded/affected by Mass Corruption, etc.

 

Correction incoming. Assuming current Food/Drink "caps", you find nothing but Absinthe and Gargle Blasters from Floors 9 thru 15, and you can have a stack of 75-130 of each, easily. Same goes with things like Grated Cheese, Ground Meat, Diggle Eggs (on the lower floors, say 1 thru 6), Lutefisk, both Omelettes, and Dire Sandwiches.

Now, if you've added food and drink that are better than Absinthe and Omelettes for RotDG Floors, then it's less of an issue. If it's still All Absinthe, All The Time on RotDG Floors, then Thirsty Diggles can potentially nuke 50-100% of your Alcohol reserves in a single strike.

Specifically, that Cheesy Omelettes are far too good for the materials/skill involved in "crafting" them, and that they break "food progression" pretty badly when you get 10-health food items as drops but can craft a dozen 60-health food items by grinding those same 10-health foods items up and using a 0 skill recipe on them. Also liking the idea of reducing their healing to something more akin to Grilled Cheese levels, maybe a bit lower.

 

I worry that having the diggles eat entire stacks will encourage smart players to simply stash some of their food away in a dungeon room somewhere (such as in that one thread where a guy put all his junk in a monster zoo room). Because if I knew such monsters were floating around, that's what I'd do. Then, after I cleared them all out, i'd just run back a level and grab my foods. Another (less practical) thing that players could do is simply divide up their items into small stacks in their inventory.

Either way, the current way it works seems to encourage user tedium, which ultimately makes it less fun. Maybe it would be better just to have the diggles eat a flat number (like 5), or a small range of numbers (3-7).

 

I currently have over 500 ground meat in my item belt. To go with the 700 softballs and 200 concussion bombs. Not like I've been hording stuff or anything, nooo... I just have nothing else to spend my money on.

 

I propose a new measuring system, wherein 500 of anything is referred to as a 'fisk' of that item.

 

I enjoy that idea, even though it usurps my idea of using 'fisk' as a form of sacrilegious profanity in future fanfics. It is hereby added to the NewBs lingo guide.

 

ALL counter-based achievements on Steam have been broken and stopped working for quite some time now. Can we get this looked into?