[DM-dev] Hand-placed columns and scripted Crawlers, anyone?

[Henningsen <pe...@al...>]

The illustrious Selena wrote, in a different thread:

>In your remarks about the X-files you say you can let a Crawler run along a
>wall at a distance of its corridorWidth, and exactly know its entire course.
>You can do that much more generally: If you set changeDirProb to zero, you
>just need two hand-placed wall tiles, one to block its further progress, and
>one to block its turning to one side, and you can let it run through the
>dungeon space in any way you choose. Just a suggestion here: I think it
>would be nicer to have two (and probably more) columns hand-placed to force
>direction changes than to have single wall tiles. So? Do you think you could
>make provisions for hand-placement of columns?

I put this into a new thread because I want some input from the world at
large. If you read this, and have an opinion, let's hear it. My thinking is
that these dungeons are random. If you want to have a dungeon with a
pre-determined layout, there's no need to use the DungeonMaker. If you want
to have part of the dungeon pre-determined, you can already set walls down
by hand, and don't really need to manipulate Crawlers like this...

... on the other hand, there are some interesting design possibilities here
... like setting a Crawler on a predetermined course, but with very low
changeDirProb, like 3 or 5 ... then just when the user has figured out that
rooms-file Y produces the same basic layout in the center, BANG! the Crawler
changes course and all is changed. Or you could have several Crawlers on
predetermined courses, with altogether a 50% chance that one of them will
change course, possibly screwing up the others' pre-arranged paths as well. 

Hmmm... this adds all new depths and possibilities to dungeon design. But do
we really want this?

Peter