This game wants to kill me

Nicholas · Mar 6, 2012

r_b_bergstrom said: ↑

The biggest one:
1.) Monster zoos are stocked by giving each open floor space a high (but not 100%) chance of spawning a monster. Goo, Water, and Ice probably don't trigger monster spawns in zoos. The room in question has around 230 floor spaces, plus another 200 Goo spaces, yet spawned only 220 monsters.
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Yes.

2.) The larger the room, the less likely it spawns. I've had plenty of anecdotal evidence towards this end, and this is just one more data point. (Or one more bit of confirmation bias.) If the size didn't matter, one would expect this room to be 1/3rd of the zoos on this floor, and it's clearly not.
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Yes. Rooms are tested at random, but obviously smaller rooms have a better chance of being placed in the map because they're less likely to trigger a collision with another room when we test it. It's possible that there is a better heuristic to control how we place things; I may revisit this later.

If you want a floor to spawn with a certain room on it, as a set piece, you can set it using the appropriate flag. The game will always choose a seed room from the list of potential seed rooms from the level, and will write that room first to ensure it spawns without collisions.

3.) The more doors, and the more directions they are oriented in, the more likely the room will spawn. This room is so rare because of the combo of being huge and having just one door, placed in the middle of a large side. It won't spawn if there's any other rooms intruding on the 13 spaces north or south of an east-facing door that it could potentially be attached to. This was an obvious supposition again based on lots of other anecdotal evidence from the rooms.xml. But I couldn't previously rule out the possibility that there was something else about this room that was preventing it, such as the possibility it was just an artifact from some previous iteration of the zoo spawning algorithm and that gaslamp had just forgotten to comment or delete it out. Now I know that it's perfectly capable of spawning on the moonbase floor, and would be 1/3rd of all zoos there if not for the combo of size and door placement.
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Yes.

4.) Whatever the floor generation sequence is it definitively doesn't start with the zoo and work outward. There was plenty of reason to doubt that anyway (as it's possible to get a floor with zero or two zoos) but this again is further corroboration of such a fact. Again, if it did work that way, this zoo should come up 1 time in 3 on this floor.
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Yes. It starts with the seed room.

5.) Map generation starts at some random point (possibly the first room you enter) and spreads outward simultaneously, one room at a time in each direction. You'll notice that this room spawned on a room with 3 exits, two of which lead to long room chains. I would guess that the dungeon placement started either with that 3-way room he's standing in, or maybe with the room to the west with the stairs up (if that's the stairs he came down initially). It generated the room he's standing in (just west of the zoo) in one step. Then it generated the room to the northeast of that one, the zoo, and another room south (possibly further south if the start point was indeed the west staircase) all on the same step. Once the big zoo was in place, the other chains had no choice but to wrap around it.
This also explains double-zoo floors, being streaky RNG hiccups where the same room spawns on two different branches at the same time. Further evidence supporting this can be found in another thread around here where someone (Raust maybe?) got double identical zoos with one room in-between. I've also seen a rare bug where rooms set with special="1" can actually spawn twice on the same floor, which I suspect is the same thing going on.
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Yes. That said, rooms with special=1 spawning twice should never happen. I thought I dealt with it already.

6.) On NTTG, the game may actually generate an entire normal floor, then trims off or deactivates any room that's partially or completely outside the smaller map size. I've seen some freakishly tiny NTTG floors, that I can say for certain aren't the result of hidden rooms. As if the chain of rooms crossed the border and wound back, but you couldn't access the ones that were back inside the frame because one or more rooms in the chain were cut off. I've also seen some weirdness where rooms right at the border of the NTTG map have 1-thick walls with clearly an empty space behind them, always in places where a door could have been according to the room diagram. Unfortunately, every time I've encountered these NTTG peculiarities I've been playing builds with no random teleports or digging powers, so I couldn't slip past the wall. Hmm... guess I should put testing that on my to-do list.
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Nope. It just spawns less rooms in a smaller area.

Marak · Mar 7, 2012

r_b_bergstrom said: ↑

*tons of theories on floor generation*
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I'm quite impressed that you basically nailed every point in your analysis, per Nicholas' post.

r_b_bergstrom · Mar 7, 2012

Nicholas said: ↑

Yes (x5)
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Thanks for the confirmation!

Nicholas said: ↑

If you want a floor to spawn with a certain room on it, as a set piece, you can set it using the appropriate flag. The game will always choose a seed room from the list of potential seed rooms from the level, and will write that room first to ensure it spawns without collisions.
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Really!? That would be really darned useful!

**Spends 20 minutes hunting through rooms.xml and comes up with nothing.**

And what flag would that be, exactly?

The word "seed" doesn't appear in rooms.xml at all. A search for "start" only turns up the starting room, a couple commented-out starting rooms, and one room that uses the word in a custom blocker description.

Here's the flags that the starting room of the dungeon has:
Code:
  <flags special="1" nomonsters="1" notraps="1" noblockers="1" notreasure="1" minLevel="2000" maxLevel="2000"/>
I can't see anything that strikes me as doing what you're proposing. Unless it's an undocumented part of 'special="1"'. I'd assumed that special merely restricted how often the room spawned.... I guess I could believe that every floor starts with a "special" room, but I'm surprised I'd never noticed it before, if that is the case.

Does special do anything else? There's not like a hard-coded max number of total rooms with "special" that can appear on any one floor, or anything like that, is there? That would explain just how rare some rooms seem to be. If special does do various other special things I wasn't expecting it to, I may need to revise most of Interior Dredmorating. Don't suppose you could shed a light on what special is supposed to do?

Nicholas said: ↑

Nope. It just spawns less rooms in a smaller area.
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Well, then something's (infrequently) broken, because I've had one or two freakishly small levels, where the rooms are only in the middle of the map, occupying about half the space that even NTTG floors do. Not talking about mysterious portal levels, either. I do a lot of modding that involves combing through rooms.xml, so I'm pretty confident I know all the hidden rooms and such. It was nothing like that.

First time it happened, I back-tracked all over the place to make sure I hadn't missed a door, then made sure I stepped on every satanic displacement glyph, even went back up a floor and down every staircase, no dice. Second time I wasn't quite as comprehensive, but I did check every room bordering the part of the map that had all the blank space to make sure there wasn't an unopened door hidden behind a symbol on the minimap. Sadly, permadeath has claimed both those characters so I can't share the files with you now to prove it.

Next time it happens, I'll send you a screen shot, save game and bug report.

Essence · Mar 7, 2012

You can also just used the debug key ("L") that reveals the entire minimap.

Daynab · Mar 7, 2012

I thought special=1 basically ensured the room would spawn on that floor? Or are you asking something else?

Null · Mar 7, 2012

@rb_bergstrom.

Seed isn't in the roomdb because it isn't relevant there. It's in the branchDB's floor definitions.

r_b_bergstrom · Mar 7, 2012

Essence said: ↑

You can also just used the debug key ("L") that reveals the entire minimap.
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Assuming that I'm playing in debug mode, yes.

However, I turn it off when actually playing the game as opposed to playtesting something specific, because I don't like the notion that if I bump the keyboard I'll suddenly gain 15 levels. And when I'm playtesting in debug mode, I'm usually looking to maximize the chance of a set of rooms spawning, so I'm rarely in NTTG.

Daynab said: ↑

I thought special=1 basically ensured the room would spawn on that floor? Or are you asking something else?
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Special="1" definitely does _not_ ensure a room spawns. There are plenty of rooms in the main game that have special="1" yet are rarely seen. Same for the very many rooms with that tag that I've added to Interior Dredmorating. In general, any room without special="1" will show up a lot more often than any room with it.

The main function of special="1" that I've seen is that it keeps a room from spawning more than once on a floor. I can be 100% certain that it does this, but it's not infallible in 1.0.9 rev B. Every once in a while the game glitches and goofs it up, but not very often. I've seen a room with special="1" spawn twice on the same floor maybe 2 or 3 times in the past 150 to 200 hours of play. In every case they were modded rooms.

What I was asking, I guess, is whether or not the observed behavior is the totality of the behavior. Since I hadn't looked in branchDB, I didn't realize there was a "seed" command there. I thought Nicholas was saying there was a flag in rooms.xml that determined which rooms were valid seeds. Since the only flag whose name isn't crystal-clear on what it does is special="1", it seemed to be the only candidate. But that didn't jive with my anecdotal observations about how special="1" affected room spawning.

Null said: ↑

Seed isn't in the roomdb because it isn't relevant there. It's in the branchDB's floor definitions.
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Wow. Thank you Null, I had ever noticed that. So there's only three seeds in the main game, and those across just two floors? Weird. Well, I guess that opens up some design space for the next iteration of ID.

Anyone happen to know whether or not the BranchDB is accessible via normal modding? As in: does it load up in the mod loader, without having to back up and replace main game files?

Nicholas · Mar 7, 2012

Yeah, it really should be in the room definitions and not the branch definitions, shouldn't it? As it stands - I think you could mod branchDB, but that might be icky.

Hmm.

Incidentally, if you want to test your room designs, there are some flags that are useful that you can pass to Dredmor on the command line:

Code:

        if (!_strnicmp(argv[i], "-docs", strlen("-docs")))
        {
            void WriteDocs(FILE* fp); // roomrw.cpp
            WriteDocs(stdout);
            exit(0);
        }
        if (!_strnicmp(argv[i], "-debug-flag", strlen("-debug-flag")))
        {
            debugFlag |= DEBUG_FLAG_ANY;
            CreateDebugConsole();
        }
        if (!_strnicmp(argv[i], "-testroom", strlen("-testroom")))
        {
            i++;
            playerRoomTestName = argv[i];
            playerRoomTest = TRUE;
        }
        if (!_strnicmp(argv[i], "-x", strlen("-x")))
        {
            i++;
            playerRoomTestStartX = atoi(argv[i]);
        }
        if (!_strnicmp(argv[i], "-y", strlen("-y")))
        {
            i++;
            playerRoomTestStartY = atoi(argv[i]);
        }
        if (!_strnicmp(argv[i], "-debug-flag-loads", strlen("-debug-flag-loads")))
        {
            debugFlag |= DEBUG_FLAG_LOADS;
        }
        if (!_strnicmp(argv[i], "-debug-flag-key-bindings", strlen("-debug-flag-key-bindings")))
        {
            debugFlag |= DEBUG_FLAG_KEY_BINDINGS;
        }
        if (!_strnicmp(argv[i], "-debug-flag-room-scripts", strlen("-debug-flag-room-scripts")))
        {
            debugFlag |= DEBUG_FLAG_ROOM_SCRIPTS;
        }
        if (!_strnicmp(argv[i], "-debug-flag-audio", strlen("-debug-flag-audio")))
        {
            debugFlag |= DEBUG_FLAG_AUDIO;
        }
        if (!_strnicmp(argv[i], "-w", 2))
        {
            extern BOOL useFullscreen;
            useFullscreen = FALSE;
        }
        else if (!_strnicmp(argv[i], "-res-1024", strlen("-res-1024")))
        {
            resX = 1024;
            resY = 768;
        }
        else if (!_strnicmp(argv[i], "-no-initial-config", strlen("-no-initial-config")))
        {
            enableInitialConfig = FALSE; // don't show initial config dialog
            extern bool firstTimeRun;
            firstTimeRun = TRUE; // don't wait to show menu
        }
        else if (!_strnicmp(argv[i], "-startuptime", strlen("-startuptime")))
        {
            logLoadProgress = true; // show startuptime information
        }
        else if (!_strnicmp(argv[i], "-nomusic", strlen("-nomusic")))
        {
            enableMusic = FALSE;
        }
        else if (!_strnicmp(argv[i], "-nosound", strlen("-nosound")))
        {
            enableSound = FALSE;
        }

Rarefied Horse Meat · Mar 8, 2012

Nicholas said: ↑

Incidentally, if you want to test your room designs, there are some flags that are useful that you can pass to Dredmor on the command line:
Click to expand...

You make me feel unbelievably snuggly sometimes.

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