Re: [Crawl-ref-discuss] 0.6 sound system

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

On Tue, 30 Jun 2009, Matthew Cline wrote:
> On Tuesday 30 June 2009 10:05:33 am David Ploog wrote:

>> a) spell differentiation
>
> I don't remember anything about that.  Could you give some examples?

"school differentiation" would be more to the point. Earth and Air are 
loud schools (at least their conjuration spells), Poison is a silent one, 
Fire and Ice in the middle. This would mean, for example, that spell 
selection for a pure caster also depends on emphasis on stealth.

>> b) fix the ally abuse (them fighting does not wake monsters)
>
> I assume that allies waking up hostiles should give the hostiles a
> chance of shouting.  Should *any* sound waking up a monster give it a
> chance to shout?

That might be a good idea. But all fighting producing noises would already 
help a lot.

> Also, an ally walking up to a hostile won't wake up the hostile, since
> stealth checks are only done for the player.  Would it be too
> computationally expensive to do a stealth check for each ally as
> well?

No idea. Perhaps we can have a crude approcimation? Sending allies to 
monsters in order to not wake them is bad.

>> e) fix the abuse where you snipe sleeping monsters with spells one
>>    by one
>
> Unless I'm missing something, this has already been fixed by giving
> monsters a chance to shout if woken up by anything but stabbing.

Yes, that is true.

>> h) get rid of the binary waking mechanism
>
> This could be handled by having noise level decay linearly with
> distance irrespective of walls, which would be simpler and less
> computationally expensive than having walls decay noise level more
> than empty space.

But it has several disadvantages. I think it's natural to expect that 
noises are restricted to rooms. (Would also make for additional 
distinction between open and room&corridor levels.)

> We could first implement it the wall-ignoring way first and play test it
> to see if that's enough, and then upgrade to to taking walls into
> consideration if it isn't enough.

Yes.

David