Re: [Crawl-ref-discuss] Ziggurats

[David P. <pl...@mi...>]

On Fri, 23 Jan 2009, Enne Walker wrote:

> On Fri, Jan 23, 2009 at 12:04 PM, David Ploog <pl...@mi...> wrote:
>
>> (a) chances for zig portals
>
> What about decreasing chances for appearance (or increasing
> difficulty/cost) based on the number of zig portals generated? More
> ziggurat portals are good, but I wonder if we shouldn't make them
> somewhat self-limiting.

Well, they are limited by the entry fees. Of course, with players 
collecting 100k of gold, that's not much. At the moment, there is no 
counter for the number of ziggurats created so far. I think that adding 
exponential growth for the entry fee would be good, yes.

>> (f) flavour
>> Darshan pointed out that the idea of moving downwards in a huge building
>> is not transparent until we have windows through which you can see clouds.
>> This shouldn't be terribly difficult (and would be really cool) but it
>> needs some overhead: we want the outside ("air" and "cloud" features) to
>> behave like permarock, ie. absolutely immune from any changes.
>
> I like this quite a bit, although I'd rather have air behave just as
> deep water would for non-swimmers.  You can pass via
> levitation/flying, but will die if it runs out while you're on it.

I thought about this but it will introduce many problems, in my opinion. 
First, the idea of zig levels is to provide interesting tactical 
situations, hence the cramped spaces. Next, the ability to fly around 
would make many levels trivial: just think of the Kenku.
If we think that untouchable air is out of the question, I'd rather stay 
with the status quo.

> Also, we already have clouds in the game, so I'd suggest we use those.

Yes, I would reuse the existing cloud generators.

> I don't think it would be that hard to spawn per-cell clouds so that
> they appear to the player to be part of some larger moving cloud
> shapes.  (Not sure if that makes any sense.)

It makes sense. Of course, you'd see the same cloud again on lower 
storeys. I really think it would add -- it should just have absolutely no 
impact on gameplay.

David