I may reduce the brittle from 75 to 50 or so, but hey, you're stealing offerings off an altar. I just wanted to break the "kill everything, break everything, loot everything" mentality that goes with most of DoD. And it worked, as you've pointed out - after having suffered once, players quickly learn not to do it again.
And well played on your part, too. Also, in a completely unrelated note, stupid blobs of corruption...I don't know if you'll ever do it, but how about adding items that remove corruption from equipment, just really rarely? One should not need to be a demon to remove curses. Angband/ADOM/etc all have remove curse items, why not Dredmor?
With the way targeting currently works, only player spells are able to remove corruption, IIRC. I'm considering adding it as a capstone skill for my upcoming Arcanist skill.
That sounds great. I would take the Arcanist skill to avoid that awful demon skillset. (Even if that was effectively all it offered, so long as the debuff is not so bad.) Can you provide any details of your upcoming Arcanist skill? Will it have a long distance teleport and a long lasting area DoT/Cloud spell? How about a mine layer summon? Anything potent and offensive that acts like the Mathemagics Recursive Curse in that it can be targeted anywhere, even if there are obstructions that would stop a bolt or beam? How about a food and booze generation spell? I have too many ideas.
I really like the rooms in your mod, and the new items and such. Some of the rooms are really clever! However, I really don't like the Pokemon themed stuff. It seems completely out of place in DoD. I've never played any Pokemon games, so I don't get any of the references, anyway. I disliked it so much that I uninstalled the mod. Perhaps you could release a version without the Pokemon references. It's up to you. I'm probably in the minority on this.
So far, you're the only person to have complained about this. I personally feel that karmic justice after baby-eating is a little more laugh-worthy than a "take this to end it all" suicide pill item, but if enough people find it a problem, I'll create a pokemon/no-pokemon version the way Fax has DA/noDA versions of FAXPAX. Which is why I need feedback, folks. Can't consider the decisions you want unless I hear them.
I vote for no Pokemon. It does not mix so well with DoD in my opinion. I ate the egg and got my laugh. I would have pushed the red button that said "do not push" as well. I use RR regularly, but I still find myself confused about Pokemon regularly. *Edit* Check this out to laugh at myself being stupid. http://community.gaslampgames.com/threads/pokémon-skills-bulbasaur-charmander-squirtle-magikarp.2706/#post-27033
The egg idea is neat, but it doesn't need to be a Pokemon egg I was more concerned with all the drinks, food, and especially the buffs that use actual pictures of pokemon. I mostly got Pokemon drinks, and candy rather than regular items. And then things like Ginseng. I only played with RR for three floors and I was seeing Pokemon everywhere! It seemed that every item I looked at said "You're not a pokemon, but..." I think I'm especially biased against Pokemon, but I don't think any pop culture thing should appear so heavily in DoD. A couple of monster insults that are from pop culture are fine. Something like a Shield of Caketown is also clever. But playing with RR made me feel like I was playing in the Pokemon universe instead of the DoD one. But I really would love a chance to fight Fiersome, craft some Obsidian items, and see all the rest of the neat things you've created
I too was having even more inventory issues with the added items. I would love to remove half the items from the game, while keeping the craftables and the better potions and such. I am not a Pokemon, and I have a limited inventory. If you think you are especially hard on the Pokemon stuff, read the link I added above again. I feel like an ass for thinking some of the stuff I did about them. I really always thought Pokemon was some crazy Japanese animal idolatry. (And plainly ridiculous.) I recently looked into the "Trading games" that bear this name, and I find them to basically be identical to "Magic The Gathering" at least in concept and implementation. RR is a great mod. I would love if there was a Pokemon free version, and even more than that, I wish it was stable with Interior Dredmorating. (I crash every time I have RR and ID loaded at the same time. Every build I tried is the same. They have similar benefits, and RR barely wins over ID since I have to pick one of them and skip the other.) Whatever direction you go, you have a massive fanbase and we will support you as best we can. (I think I can say that for all of us.)
*Hmm. I see; thanks for the input, Glazed. RR originally started off as a pokemon item mod, which formed the base of the mod. Right now, the pokemon-related items are so deeply rooted into the mod (from being referenced repeatedly in the rooms, spellDB, etc XML) that I'd have to rip it all out and rebuild it from scratch - something that I need to wait till the summer to get the time for (damn term papers). One of the problems is that as I've mentioned before, I am not an artist. Most of the item sprites I use are either ripped from games I own or from sprite sheets on the internet; my background stuff comes from ID. I either enlarge, shrink, recolour (pixel by pixel) or otherwise manipulate the sprites, but I'm not very good at making my own. Some of the art clashes come from there, and it's little I can do much about. I'm fortunate enough to have found an artist who's interested enough in Blood Knight to offer to draw icons for the skill (which is getting an art revamp once the patch comes out), but that's about the extent of it. With regards to the icons, I could replace some of those from the base game (and new buffs have been tending to official game art). The problem arises with the "buff icon bug" that essentially eliminates buffs when two of them reference the same art file (you can see this in the base game with Radiant Aura and Righteous Radiance, which reference the same .png). With more and more mods using the base stuff, I'm naturally hesitant to replace the icons, especially for food buffs. What I can promise and agree with, though, is a revamp of some of the descriptions to be less obtrusive. Players will be seeing a lot less "You're not a pokemon, but..." in the next version I push out. *Omninegro, all my test runs are made with RR and ID together (win7), and I've never had a crash that I can trace back to any conflict between the two mods. I'm not exactly sure what your problem might be, but as far as I can tell it's nothing that I can reproduce or fix on my end. So sorry about that. Inventory-wise, my strategy is to sell buff foods that I don't need and just keep some around. Although with Hungry and Thirsty Diggles soon to be on the loose, having a wide variety of stuff might actually be helpful. We'll see. I'm actively trying to make all of the new weapons and armour I'm introducing unique and fill some niche that hasn't already been, which is why the inflow of items has slowed of late.
In reality, the reason I chose RR over ID is that RR comes with Radiant Wizard. And I am certain you recall the multiplayer save exchange I was doing with that skill. (Sadly I aborted it to test the newer beta RCs. And even at that I had not put enough levels into it to get the real benefits of the skill.) I will see if I can figure what is conflicting. I use a handful of mods every time I play these days, but the only combination of those I prefer to use that consistently fails is RR and ID with CK and a few others. I did not do enough trouble shooting to determine much, but it worked fine when I removed ID or RR. So I presumed there was a conflict therein. As for the Hungry and Thirsty Diggles, they may be the worst idea ever. If they could only take one item, like a single Deep Omelet then they would be alright. But as is I remove them entirely. I personally think that there is nothing wrong with leaving in the Pokemon rooms and such, but the items are too much clutter in my opinion. Zinc, Iron, Calcium, and all that other stuff is potent, but wasted space if you play a crafter as is basically required by modsets like this that have a bunch of recipes. If it were possible, I would love to see a portable hole or extended backpack item that would *Only* hold things like Acidum Salis and Iron Ingots and other crafting components. That would free up loads of item room for those like myself that keep a stack of loot that is too much to carry everywhere by the stair to the next level, every level. Hell, such an item would be worth paying real money for. (Especially since it would require work from the coders at GLG to implement such a change.) But back to the subject. For now, please ignore my remark about RR and ID conflicting. I will see what I can produce as evidence before I whine anymore.
Thanks for helping me bugfix. Any solid details you can report on the crash would be lovely. You can always download the standalone RW mod skill if you'd like to play RW with ID, though.
Odd. I tried it now and cannot get it to crash. /sigh This has happened before. I say something about a conflict and when I try to reproduce it I fail to. For now I will take that as a good sign.
I wouldn't worry about it. It's your mod, and you should keep it exactly the way it is. Perhaps, however, prominently mention in the first post that it's heavily Pokemon themed. That'll keep people like me from wasting your time.
I do want to move somewhat away from its roots, though, and if it's a big enough holdup that it's alienating a good proportion of people, I'm going to have to change it one way or the other. Once I get all my term papers in and examinations over with, I'll have the time to work on gutting the mod and replacing what's necessary. For now, though, a number of descriptions have been tweaked to be less obtrusive.
Threw this room together in a few minutes using one of the previous ones from a template. There's so much unused art in the /dungeons folder, seems a shame to let them go to waste, too. The stuff in this room will probably make me worry about causing confusion with actual interactable objects and monsters, but I'll try to place them where they won't be in the way and will obviously be non-interactable.
Yesterday, I finally got around to trying your mod for the first time. I must say, you've got some really nice rooms there. There's a lot of good work in what I've seen so far, and I haven't got very far into it. First game, my first room was your level 1 zoo with more than a dozen monsters. Started another game just after that, and the first room was the Dragon Whelp nest. Third character got to actually explore the first floor pretty well, though. Curious as to whether you're balancing to match the main game, or to match Essence's Rebalance? Actually, I'm pretty sure the issue was my half-patched version of the Beta, as certain rooms I'm sure you must have marked special="1" were showing up multiple times on the floor. As to the Pokemon thing... Well, I've got to admit that's part of why I didn't try your mod till yesterday (the other part being Mac mod bug). Your initial post made it sound like it was an all-pokemon mod, and I just didn't come back to see what had changed. 1.0.10 allows multiple mods on Macs, so I can run it and ID at the same time to thin out the pokemon stuff. DoD has a lot of pop-culture references in it, so some number of pokemon items is perfectly fine. Heck, I've got two Star Trek rooms, a Trek insult, and the Rainbow Batleth all in my ID, so I can't rail on you too hard for going to a particular well multiple times. I think the trick is to make sure you're using references from other sources as well, so it's not just pokemon, and to make sure that each reference has a joke in it to anchor it (or a gameplay element that's really cool and unique, but jokes are easier). Using my own stuff as an example, the Rainbow Batleth has a joke, and a mechanical element that ties into it. It's not likely that I'd add just a normal batleth or a phaser, or whatever. Then to keep the Trek stuff in check, I worked in nods to Lord of the Rings, Ranma, Venture Brothers, etc. But enough self-promotion, I swear I started posting here to offer advice and help... I haven't played enough RR yet to know if the solution to the "Pokemon Perception Problem" is to remove some of the Pokemon items, crank up the humor for those who don't get the references, or just dilute their spawn rate with more non-Pokemon items. Possibly a mix of all three? How many Pokemon items do you have in the mod? Applying the above concepts to your stuff, this crazy egg I hear whispers about is probably a keeper, even if you do decide to trim down the pokemon references overall. When people frequently say "I ate that certain egg, and it was worth it" that means you've got something cool going on. I'm looking forward to finding one. Once I've got a truly functional version of 1.0.10 on my computer, I'll play your mod some more and see if I can give you more specific feedback.
Thanks for downloading and playing, sir! *The floor 1 monster zoo has a total of nine non-ajdacent door spaces, and the most I've ever seen in that zoo is about fifteen or so, If my memory serves. I agree that it's pretty much a death sentence if it's your first door, but as I think I mentioned in your thread, I don't feel comfortable with zoos potentially going below 9 monsters. If it's causing a huge problem, though, I'm going to add some acid bolt traps in there to help the player out a little. The whelp nest, though, has two hordes, and dragon whelps have stats approximating that of a diggle, so I can see how you got swarmed there - again . I've tried to give them appropriate xp values balancing them against diggles, but they're still good xp for floor 1 if you can down them. *Regarding balance, I'm a little sad to say I'm a bit bad at balancing, both for and against the player (as is evident with my skill mods, where I often have to tone things down). Generally, I'm balancing towards Essence's rebalance, but the items and monsters both turn the game a little extreme both ways - as you pointed out, the floor 1 monster zoo and the dragon whelp nest are examples of that. What little feedback I received regarding Mana Hunters and their ilk was that they were a tad too vicious, too (even though I intended for caster builds to say "oh, f***, not THEM again" on spotting a horde of those), so I diluted the mana drain cast chance a little. A bunch of food and drink give small, 12-turn buffs, but I've tried to dilute them out with worthless food, or even those which give negatives to compensate. I think there's a picture in this thread with a double zoo consisting of 400+ monsters, neatly divided up into 100-monster sections. I recognise the fact that it's probably a bit daunting, but the monsters weren't going anywhere, I could walk away after each 100 and take a break, and after I'd killed them all I really felt like an awesome god of war. If the 200-monster zoo turns out to be a problem, though, I can probably reduce the number of doors to make it spawn less. *Regarding the rooms, almost all rooms are marked with the special="1" tag; I don't really have any building block rooms because the base game takes care of that well enough. If I may ask, which rooms were those? *Regarding pokemon stuff, I've already taken Glazed's advice and changed the descriptions of some items on my side to be less obtrusive. At the moment, most of the Pokemon items are food and a few pieces of equipment; there haven't been any for a while ever since I decided to take the mod in a new direction (since exclusively making it pokemon-themed was far too limiting) and there won't be any more. If and when the buff icon bug ever gets fixed, I'll change a bunch of the icons as well. Currently, the pokemon items probably aren't more than 1/4 of all items in the mod. Those that can be made ambiguous have been already, so that sorta reduces the number a little more. There're already a bunch of other references (I'm pretty sure that anyone familiar with WoW will have picked up the minus 50 DKP thing) ever since I spread things out, so don't worry about that. *And yes...THAT egg. Really, all you need to do to get folks to push a button is to label it "do not push". There's a special room from floors 1-6 that spawns it, but you can always get one from a vending machine if you so desire. Anyways, thanks for playing again, and I'm definitely waiting to hear from you again!
The character that nearly completed the first floor saw three dragon whelp rooms, three pie or cake rooms, and at least two of the room with all the blobbies in cages, all on the same floor. But I suspect this had to do with my botched version of RC9 (as mentioned in the RC9 thread) that seemed to interpret every mod as yet another copy of whichever mod came last alphabetically in my index. The third dragon whelp room killed me, despite having beat it twice and leveled up several times in between. I was all out of bolts and other expendable resources. Also, I couldn't figure out what the cake or pie rooms did. None of them had either pie or cake in them, and I never found any elsewhere to place on the rugs if that's what you're supposed to do. If it's likely they're working as expected, don't spoil it for me, I'm sure I'll run into them later once I've really got 1.0.10. Figured I'd mention it, though, in case they're supposed to spawn there and weren't.
