Interior Dredmorating version 1.2.6.4

Well at least your customer base will know for sure. Consider yourself beta tested, in that regard.

 

Finally, got my first GRPD (and NTTG) !
Here is my 2 cents feedback for interior dredmorating:

*Really great mod overhaul, the new rooms ambush are great. Love the new items and most of them are really nicely balanced.
I'm really glad you added a bunch of stuff for floors 10-15. Even with those I felt like variety could be increased ( I still had about 5 or 6 poodle pants in 3 floors ).

*Some rooms have machines or items right behind the door if its opened.

Not a huge deal but i missed stuff a few times when entering from the west door in the screenshot example. Moving the elements away from the spot right above side doors would avoid this.

* The poodle pants are really a lot more powerful than any other pants I've seen. I think I got mine around floor 9 and never had to change pants ever. If you compare to the serpentine pants, I feel like the poodle ones offer too much benefits compared to the very small burliness reduction. Maybe reduce it even more ( - 8 ? ) or give a bit less dodge / mag resist.

* Brax with only two items is frustrating and changes balance a big deal when you keep getting that one.
Its also very frustrating that since there s a bunch of doors, you keep going through the shop with the music constantly changing.
Lastly on one floor, I had this brax room with no Brax inside ( everything worked, selling with shift click, just no brax ).

* Not a big deal, but there's stairs in the zombie zoo. Seems like a really mean welcome if you get there from level 1

That's all ! Awesome mod.

 

Thanks for the input. Glad you liked it. Congrats on the win!

I still had quite a few items on my to do list when I decided to go live, and many of them are level 10-ish. At the time I was working on items and rooms for levels 10 to 15 when the devs announced that the 1.0.10 patch would be in beta at the end of the week. So I stopped construction and rushed what I had out the door as soon as I had it playtested and stable. There wouldn't be much point to the release if the patch followed less than 24 hours after it, or, worse, if I delayed so long that the patch (or beta) actually preceded it. Had I realized how long it would actually be before the beta came out, I would have taken my time and put in more items and deep rooms. Now that the patch is in non-Mac Beta, I pretty much have to wait until I can see what the patch really does to item spawning.

That's an easy fix and a good solution. I'll move it as you suggest.

Valid criticism.

Originally the stats were much lower. On my very last playtest before sending it out the door, I was able to verify that the 50% proc on the pants wasn't triggering. So I bumped all the power-ups to compensate. Having played with it since then, I'd agree that it's overpowered. I'll trim it back in the next release... or maybe increase it's level since in theory items of level 12 or 13 will spawn post-patch. Depends on how fast the beta progresses.

Personally, I think the main game's pants selection is flawed, and that makes it hard to balance pants. The higher-end pants are warrior-only, so there's no guide for what wizard or rogue pants should do. Parachute Pants have 10 dodge at 5-stars... how far do you go above that? I'd up the burliness penalty, but it's already as high as any nimbleness penalty in the main game. Not that any of that changes the fact that I goofed up and made them too good. I'll fix it soon.

Note however, that I don't put much weight in the specific statement "I got mine around floor 9 and never had to change pants ever." Given the way the game is currently (pre-patch) spawning items, and the relative lack of high-end pants, the same statement is bound to be made about whatever pants you pick up on floor 9 or 10.

Edit: And of course, if you were a wizard and _not_ using ID, the best pants you could get would be spawning on floor 5 or 6 and you'd never be tempted to switch to anything you found after that.

I only recently started playing with No Time To Grind, and I'll agree, NTTG makes the 2-item Brax feel unkind. I need to tone it down a bit, by either upping the number of items, reducing the number of doors so it spawns less often, upping the percentages of the 4 vending machine spawns, or making several larger shops to compensate. It still strikes me as balanced fine without NTTG, but with NTTG resources are so precious.

Hadn't even considered about the music being an issue. I play with the game music off and iTunes playing in the background. So thanks for mentioning that, I'll give it some serious thinking and try to figure out what to do about it.

As to the Brax bug - it's really rare, but keeps happening to that room. Thought I'd fixed it, because after a change I made specifically to prevent it, it went away for the next 20 times that room spawned. Last night, it actually spawned missing not only Brax, but also missing the two items. They were just empty pedestals! I think I know what I have to do to fix it, but doing so will basically require scrapping that room entirely.

Sadly, there's nothing I can do about that. Technically, any room can spawn stairs, except those with the "zoo" tag. The game randomly places stairs on any wall - either # or ! walls - that has an empty space south of it. I've even seen it happen on the "ambush" wall that dissolves on floor 3, and then you're left with stairs just floating in the middle of the room that monsters can pass through.

Hmm... I guess I could put a "moat" of 1 space of water just inside the wall. That might fix it. I've never seen stairs spawn in the lutefisk shrines, for example. I'll look into it.

 

I too play with no music. But then I also mute the sounds as well. Roguelikes are great fun but need no fancy graphics or sounds to shine. (I doubt there is a common Roguelike I have not played, or a very common one I have not beaten.)

I too loved the ambush. At first I did not understand what had happened. I thought I somehow fired a BoMD at the section of walls and blinked at the right time to miss the majority of the explosion.

Would it be possible to make traps spawn monsters all over the place? Even puny monsters generated by traps could be a nice addition. It seems as though most traps have little more than damage and/or a debuff. How about a trap that duplicated the result of eating a Root of T'Char?

Ah, there may be too many ideas to ever hope to get them all addressed. Take what you like and forget the rest. I love ID. It is a permanent mod for myself.

 

Dwarven T'Char Mine: Little more than a Dwarven Landmine with a T'Char Root glued on top. This mine is largely responsible for the majority of Elven retreats from their battle with the Dwarves.

Dwarven Laser-Guided T'Char Bolt: When the Dwarves are desperate enough to use these, it means doom for both sides.

Both could be craftable and are pretty obvious. More to come... As always, ignore the ideas you do not like or cannot think how best to implement without ruining balance.

*Edit* I figured it would be better to edit than to keep replying to my own posts.

Dwarven Elf-Buster Mine: Created by those bastard Dwarves to end the Elvish existence once and for all time. It is made of a Dwarvish Landmine and a refined block of the most dangerous metal found in deep mines. The metal is now known to be deadly by mere proximity. And when the Dwarves decided to burn it in the furnace, the resulting explosion destroyed the entire Dwarven capital city instantly. Thus this thing of great evil was crafted.

Elven Drarf-Buster Mine: The Dwarves that step on these die in agony very quickly. All it does is remove all alcohol from the body of the poor sod that steps on it. It is harmless otherwise.
(I do not know if this can be done at current.)

*Edited a fifth time*
Is it possible to make a staircase that sends you to a special level similar to the Mysterious Portals? We could make a "Stairway to Heaven and/or Hell" that would send you to a extremely large level with many nice items and a few game killingly strong monsters to guard them.

 

For the record, the new patch does fix the issue with music changes slowing the game down. I can now enter and leave any store without problems. So don't let that overly influence future patch changes.

 

Oh shoot. But it doesnt do that with the Brax room with the fridge in the back room ? I really like the idea for this one by the way ( though characters with no controllable teleport skills are screwed. It s too bad there's no item whatsoever that allows a one time teleport you can control.)

That sounds like a good idea ! Maybe you could also add some sconce and stuff on some walls ( would look weird if it was the whole wall, so the water sounds better but it could help diversify a bit ) ? Stairs dont spawn on them, right ?

 

That's good news, but there's still other reasons to get rid of the room in question. See below.

Nope, it's just the Brax room with the two items, vending machines, and four doors.

I initially had that room set to have a chance to trigger a small horde of monsters in it. It was an evil trap of mine, designed to catch area-effect casters who shot before realizing what the room was. Seemed to be working fine, so I released it. Then, about the fifth or sixth time I entered such a room after the release, it started acting up. Seemed like the squad leader of the horde was sometimes replacing Brax. Instead of a horde, you'd get just one off-color monster of a type seen commonly on that floor. If you hovered over said monster, the pop-up info on it identified it not as a squad leader, but as Brax. The real Brax was nowhere to be seen, and you could just take the items off the pedestal with no consequences. The monster had it's usual hit points, but could sometimes cast spells and summon Dred Collectors like Brax does.

I assumed that what was happening was that sometimes a horde monster would spawn on top of Brax, and the two would merge or glitch each other.

That was less than ideal, so I got rid of the horde spawn chance, and replaced it with a single monster that was guaranteed to always spawn. This seemed to solve the problem, as I entered such a room more than twenty times without incident. Again I released an updated version. A few days later the problem started again, despite no changes to the file. Except now when it happens, the items and/or pedestal are gone as well.

It's bizarre.

It's clear though, the room has got to go, or at least be restricted to a small subset of floors. I'll do something about it in the next update. As it is, it shows up too often, sometimes is missing a Brax or an item, gets annoying if you've got the music playing, and is too cruel on NTTG. Plus, the "trap" totally doesn't catch area-effect casters if they have the normal music playing, a thing I would have realized if I had switched to iTunes about 300 play hours ago.

There's at least one way into that back room that doesn't require a teleport. Just sayin'.

 

I have accidentally dug into shops from all sides before. That is a surefire way to get there. Luckily this is not Nethack/Slash'Em. The shopkeepers are not so forgiving of messing with their shop and walls there.

 

Okay, so there's at least two ways to get in that don't involve a teleport. Three, now that I think about it.

 

Hehe I thought you had meant digging, but I can imagine what the third way is.
For the trap maybe you can have the same idea if you have a lever summon the horde like the mass pitting mechanism.
However in terms of design I feel its too mean as you said. Combining horde trick AND only 2 items, players really wont want that room to show up.

 

In 1.0.10RC5 it has a small chance to crash upon startup when generating a new character.

On second thought, ignore that. I cannot get it to crash now that I am trying... I will post again if I find anything reproducible. Until then, I will edit my comments in the other thread to reflect this.

 

Don't know if you've already noticed this, but Listening Post room - visblock can't be used on vending machines, it seems. Also, for the Mushroom Prarie room - it's "name" for monsters, not "subtype" when you're spawning the mushy monster. You might want to fix those sometime - they're turning up errors on my console when the rooms are loaded.

 

Thank you for the heads up. Neither are causing observable problems on my mac so I might never have caught those. I did notice that rather than a mushy it spawned a gnome last time I was there, which really puzzled me because it had been working fine when first tested. Must have randomly generated a mushy the first time I was in that room, as that would have looked like it was working as expected.

Will get both fixed in the next update, probably monday-ish.

 

This is a very unique mod. I will go and play it, and check it out. I believe I will have a lot of fun.
Whoops, I forgot what directory to put it in. That was silly of me.

 

1.2.3 Release:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/8238260/Interior Dredmorating 1.2.3.zip

This version is mainly to address certain bugs and issues that were pointed out in previous comments in this thread. While I was at it I threw in some new zoo variations and other little surprises to shake things up a bit. More new content will be coming sometime after the 1.0.10 DoD patch/beta becomes available for Macs, but I wanted to get this stuff at least out there now rather than waiting.

CRASH WARNING: Upgrading from a previous version of Interior Dredmorating in the middle of a character is 99.9% guaranteed to crash your game. You know that obnoxious 2-item shop with all the doors that spawns all the damn time and sometimes bugs out and forgets to include a Brax? Yeah, that had to go. Since it's no longer in the files, it will play havoc on your old saved games. Don't upgrade if you're not ready to give up your current character.

Changelog:
* 11 new shops
* 18 new zoos (some are minor variations, others are pretty drastically different)
* 1 new room that has nothing to do with shops or zoos
* Poodle skirt has been toned way down. They're still very good, but no longer ridiculous.
* Minor edits to a number of rooms.
* Rooms that were spawning too often shouldn't any more.
* The level 11 to 15 items should spawn more often and consistently on the deeper levels.
* Rooms with bugs have been fixed.
* Less chance of vending machines getting lost behind open doors.
* Further refinement of graphics. Figured out how to trim down file size (and thus reduce load times and in-game delays on some systems) without significantly impacting image quality.
* A whole bunch of new insults for the monsters to hurl at you.

 

Yes, I did get it to work, silly me forgot what directory to put it in, and I have to agree, that two item shop that spawns all the time is really annoying.
Also, there are certain spots on certain levels, where I can't cross at all. Because there's a wall in the way, it says something about an airlock. I don't know what I need to do to cut through that area. Stupid bolts of mass destruction are way too rare. And I'm more of an archer/warrior than a mage.
Then there was a time where the only way to the other side of the level was through hopscotching around several islands of one tile surrounded by water.
I didn't have Knightly leap yet, so I had to give up on it.

I'll give this new version a try. I don't mind starting new characters. I do it all the time.
Really looking forward to different zoos, and new shops.
Hey, do you have any Krong Anvil rooms? Just wondering. I like finding them. With my Archaeology character with absurd luck with enchanting his Fedora. +3 Burliness and 2 acid resistance with 2 Piercing resistance? Yes, please!

Wait a minute, I just started the new version, and there's A zoo on the first level? Thanks...at least it's only like 7 monsters. Still, a bit surprising to find that. Free artifact!
And it's the second room I entered.
Note to self, always save the game every 5 seconds. I died. Stupid overpowered evil potatoes with their leet hax spells. On Elvish easy...

 

Usually those blocked areas aren't quite as inaccessible as they might seem. They occur in the main game as well, though the frequency of such things are much higher in ID.

Here's three things ways to get past them that you might not have considered.

1.) You may not be aware that the game features two types of walls: fragile and sturdy. The fragile walls can be blown up via any area attack. Thrown bombs, bottle bolts, attack spells like Firebreathing and Psychokinetic Shove, and even melee skill power-ups like Norwegian Axenado or Thibault's Trompement can be used to cut through these. The only trick is figuring out the correct space of floor or wall to target to take out the fragile wall pieces with whatever skills or items you've got access to, as both the fragile and sturdy walls look identical. The BMD is never required to access any area, though it does allow you to be a bit less picky about which part of the wall to shoot.

2.) Sometimes a teleport skill or spell can get you past the obstacle. There are rooms where certain teleportation methods may require you to be sneaky about where you stand in order to be able to see and target the space on the other side. In the specific case of the airlock, nearly any teleport skill (Knightly Leap, Move In Mysterious Ways, Invisible Geometries, Froda's Jump Discontinuity, or Xeuclid's Translation) should be able to access the other side of the wall. The only teleport I don't recommend relying on is the Instability Infusion potions, as they're prone to running out at the wrong moment and leaving you stranded somewhere unpleasant.

3.) Should you lack all of those methods you'll almost always be able to get past major blockages via stairs or satanic displacement glyphs. If it seems like you can't reach a part of the level, step on all the teleporters you've seen on that floor. If that doesn't work, go back to the previous floor and try going down all the staircases you haven't before. It's extremely rare that there's neither a glyph nor a staircase in any "hidden" section of the dungeon that's larger than a single room.


In general, even without mods like ID making the game more complicated, I'm convinced every character needs either a teleport or a repeatable area-effect attack, and most characters I build have at least one of each.

Yep, a tiny mini-zoo. It can spawn anywhere between 2 and 9 monsters, depending on how many doors the room has and how kind the RNG is being.

 

Dang, Bergstrom, you beat me to the punch on zoos. Although the 2-9 monster one on DL1 is a bit too easy, I feel - I'm currently playtesting a 20 monster one and it feels reasonably okay even for DL1. Do any of yours reach the 200-monster mark, though? Haven't tried to count the empty spaces on each one in the rooms.xml yet.

Great job polishing and compressing your artwork - since I benefit from it, too, you have my thanks.

 

Ah. THank you for explaining it. I will endeavor to rush to Knightly leap immediately now.
Beats wandering all over the levels above and below to get into the area.

I am enjoying the new version, especially the different shop layouts. Especially that long shop is long one.
Okay, it's not super long, but it is long.
I always like finding good items in shops, even if I can't buy them yet. Makes me look forward to getting the money, which is no small task.

Can you remind me of them in the main game? Because I can't remember any area that's blocked off like the airlock area in your mod, or the tiny one space islands to get across room. The teleporting levers room in the base game is the only one I can think of.

However, if it could be made more obvious what you need to do to get past them, that would be okay.
I couldn't target the airlock door/area with anything. Charlemagne skill which knocks back items did nothing. That means, no other knockback skills would work, right? Let alone any skill that can crumble a wall.

I'd just prefer it if it was made easier to understand what you had to do. I rarely play with Knightly leap being the first skill I get.
Am I playing Dungeons of Dredmor, or am I playing Portal: Knightly Leap/insert teleportation skill name here Edition?
I just got lost with those areas, that's all. I'm not complaining, at least, I don't mean to. I just didn't really understand what to do in those areas, because it wasn't entirely obvious besides that leaping room one.

I know people say that there are smash-able walls in the base game, but I've never ever run into them in my entire play-through of this game since the beginning. They are not noticeably different from normal unbreakable walls.

And sorry for the lengthy message.