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Gauging Interest: Mysterious Portal Only Rooms

Discussion in 'Modding' started by FaxCelestis, May 8, 2012.

  1. FaxCelestis

    FaxCelestis Will Mod for Digglebucks

    Not rooms that only contain a mysterious portal, but rooms that only appear if you go through a mysterious portal. Interesting?
     
    mining and tejón like this.
  2. NaiDriftlin

    NaiDriftlin Member

    Yep. Secrets are fun.
     
  3. Aegho

    Aegho Member

    On a side-note to that, can you make rooms that will contain at least one evil pentagram portal to the outside, but no doors? So the only way into it is by portal.

    Mysterious portals have a tendency to take you to a whole new "special" floor.
     
  4. FaxCelestis

    FaxCelestis Will Mod for Digglebucks

    Not that I'm aware of. I don't think doorless rooms spawn?
     
  5. Null

    Null Will Mod for Digglebucks

    Make it be a sealed chamber next to/inside a room that has doors. It would only have the glyph rather than breakable walls.
     
  6. Lorrelian

    Lorrelian Member

    I'm all for this idea, but I'd want any mod that implements it to come with at least one room that is hard coded with a mysterious portal in it, and can spawn on any floor. I've gone entire runs (DL 1 - wherever I die, usually DL 7-10) without seeing one, and if there's going to be content there, I want better odds of seeing it.
     
  7. FaxCelestis

    FaxCelestis Will Mod for Digglebucks

    Absolutely, have one of those set up already.
     
  8. tejón

    tejón Member

    Thumbs up all around. Yes, I have that many thumbs.
     
  9. Dray`Gon

    Dray`Gon Member

    I shall chime in stating that I too have interest in such a mod.
     
  10. r_b_bergstrom

    r_b_bergstrom Will Mod for Digglebucks

    Sounds like fun. Now I know why you were asking me a certain question, Fax.

    I can confirm that doorless rooms do not spawn at all. (By the way, 1.0.9 and 1.0.10 accidentally had a doorless room in the main game files. I told dbaumgart about it and it should be fixed in the DLC's version of the main build.)

    Sub-rooms that are attached to normal rooms (with normal doors) but not generally accessible do work. Stairs will still spawn in them sometimes, unless you border the walls with water, or put customblockers on the walls. They'll also sometimes get teleporters into them unless you use noblockers="1".

    One hurdle I think you're going to find is making enough mysterious portal rooms to become noticeable. The main game has hundreds of rooms, IIRC, and various mods (and DLCs) add plenty more. The game chooses between all of these when generating the Mysterious Portal realms, and only populates them with half a dozen or so rooms each. Even if you had 50 new rooms, they'd rarely be seen. Unless, of course, you drastically increase the number of Mysterious Portals in the main game, which I'm guessing you're going to do.

    Of course, that runs risks of disrupting item balance (as if Brax didn't already do so) because some rooms (even in the main game) have specific item spawns. Personally, I think Mysterious Portals are at their best when appearing on floors 3 to 10. In the early game it's pretty much suicide to go through them, and if you do get lucky you might find an item that totally breaks the next few floors. In the late game it's a cakewalk and there's rarely any treasure that's worth it. In between, it's a gamble, and that's where they are the most fun. That's why ID has a floor 3 room with 6 mysterious portals in it (laid-out like a Trek transporter room)... early enough to be a threat, but juicy enough to tempt the player with the likelihood of a lucky loot spawn inside. I mention all this because you say you've got a room that has a mysterious portal and can appear on any floor. It might be better with it's minLevel and maxLevel constrained a bit.

    Also, I've never seen the tutorial rooms from the main game show up in Mysterious Portal floors. Which may simply mean that tutorial flag disables them, but it may also mean there's a hard-cap to the way Myst Portal floors are generated. In other words, does it generate the Myst Portal floors from all rooms, or just from those of floors 1 to 15 (0 to 14, technically)? So before you put too much work into this, you'll want to test it. Probably by making one very distinctive room with minLevel="16" and maxLevel="16" and then copy-pasting that room into the database 100 times. If you can get it to spawn inside a Mysterious Portal realm, then you're golden. If it doesn't ever seem to generate, then you've saved yourself a lot of wasted effort.