thangorodrim.angband.org/

Has anyone else here ever played angband, or one of the many varients?

This gives me an idea. Why not use coldstone to create a game like angband/rogue/moria where you just go down into an endless dungeon, looking for monsters and loot?

For those of you who haven't played any games like that, let me explain it:

You create a character, and spend your first moments in the game buying weapons and armor. Then, you decend down into a randomly generated dungeon filled with treasure, monsters, and monsters carrying treasure. Fight a few monsters, gain a few levels, get stronger, get treasure, go back to town, buy better items, go deeper into the dungeon, repeat ad infinitum.

But to really be a replayable game instead of a linear, plotless game, it needs to be able to have some random elements in generating areas. Will this be possible? If not, it would at least be nice to use rotating lists of maps that could be used randomly.

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This is a classic mikee argument: 1) Make an outlandish, inflamatory statement 2) Backpeddle from it 3) Throw up some straw men 4) Nitpick to divert attention from the real argument at hand
—Andrew

Kind of reminds me of Dark Gauntlet. Kind of.

I think you can probably fake it with random number generators and "if" statements. Hopefully you can do a better job than most of those games. I took a look at Angband. As far as graphics, I wasn't impressed.

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'm just your average run-of-the-mill demon possessed, bloodsucking, headhunting, cold-blooded, hot-headed, pyromaniac.
My name is Legion, for we are many.

Hmmm...Diablo 1 anyone? Not a bad way to go for a game, but I think perhaps throwing in a few tid-bits of story, optional missions, just something to keep the person hooked. What happens to me when I play those types of games is that I love it for the first day, the second day, and the third. After leveling and leveling and getting deeper and deeper into the dungeon, and don't get anywhere, with no hint of closure ever, I get bored and think, what's the point? So if there where possible missions with rewards of new types of weapons and or armor that you can't buy or find anywhere, it'd help keep people hooked. Also from what I've heard, there's no randomness about maps or npc's in Coldstone, which is a bummer, but how much more could we ask for in such a great opportunity as a WYSIWYG game development tool. Heaven is close at hand for some of us who have been waiting and waiting for they day we don't need to know complex coding to make a little magic. Anyhow, sorry for getting off topic.

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-Bratt99
Liquid Squid
ProductionsŠ
www.rsad.edu/~bthompso/index.html

NETHACK!!!!

Madman: You might possibly be able to do random dungeon generation in Coldstone with a lot of scripting, but I doubt that it'd be worth it. Plus, you'd need some way for it to remember the layout of each level after it was created, which would very rapidly become impractical in terms of memory and disk space. The idea of just having a lot of prebuilt levels and randomly choose between them is marginally more feasible, but again, I think it unlikely. Sorry to be a pessimist.

Spitfire: if you go looking for eye candy in a Roguelike game, you're bound to be disappointed. The appeal in such games comes from their depth and complexity, not their graphics. (Take the message found in Nethack when a pit viper triggers a pit trap, for instance - whodathought that the programmers would think of something like that?)

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-War Life Lesson #1: Never, ever commit a terrorist act on a nation whose president is its most vocal advocate of capital punishment.
-What can possibly be "holy" about a war?
-I believe both Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson should retire from public life. Can I get an Amen?
(all from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution's "Vent" section)

If you don't like the graphics, just use the text. I always do, before I ever heard of angband I played Moria for AGES, which didn't even have graphics. And there was only one color for text.

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This is a classic mikee argument: 1) Make an outlandish, inflamatory statement 2) Backpeddle from it 3) Throw up some straw men 4) Nitpick to divert attention from the real argument at hand
—Andrew

Quote

Originally posted by Madman:
**
But to really be a replayable game instead of a linear, plotless game, it needs to be able to have some random elements in generating areas. Will this be possible? If not, it would at least be nice to use rotating lists of maps that could be used randomly.
**

It would be easy to have random elements in maps like different monsters, treasure chests, traps and other things. Having a whole map generated randomly (I mean piece by piece) would be quite a mess I think... but, it would be easy for you to create like a dozen of maps per level and randomly select one to play. At the beginning of the game, pick a number between 1-10, store it in a variable. Then, just refer to this variable to select an appropriate map pattern. Easy.

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Dee Brown
Beenox inc. - (url="http://"http://www.beenox.com")www.beenox.com(/url)
(url="http://"http://www.AmbrosiaSW.com/news/upcoming/coldstone_betashots.html")Coldstone Game Engine(/url) / (url="http://"http://www.AmbrosiaSW.com/games/pog/")Pillars of Garendall(/url) developers

(This message has been edited by Dee (edited 10-07-2001).)

I recommend Chocobo's Mysterious Dungeon. Hours of mindless fun!

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Speaking of rouge-like games, does anyone know where I can get any good ones(besides Omega, which I already have)?

Angband's the best game of all time!!! Nethack too... a little hard though...

But I doubt it'll be possible to make a real rogue-like with CS, because of all the random aspects. On what Dee said: Have any of you played Dragon Warrior Monsters? In that game, every level is made up of about 16 randomly-picked screens. Each screen has a different piece of map on it, and there's probably a library of a hundred or so different screens to use. I guess there's several games with the same concept, but I haven't played them

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You could make the generation of the next dungeon be based on the character's level. You could have like a hundred or so levels that are already made and choose one like everyone else said. Then you could make it so that each level will choose a random set of graphics to use like a lava pit/volcano looking dungeon could be there or it could be an ice dungeon of the same setup. Then monsters would be placed according to the land set that it chooses. Then lower levels will have much bigger maps to randomize between. Then around level 135, here comes the humongous arena with nothing but you and a bunch of titans, dragons, demons, god etc... Everyone vs. you. And you probably die at that point.
Nothing like a good rambling.

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-angband
-thangorodrim
-moria

-note the Tolkien plagiarism. It seems that every fantasy based game has got something taken from Tolkien in it.

Stop it!!!!!!!!

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That sounds like an interesting idea... when passing between maps, would it be possible to go to another random map? That way you could just wander around, and shops/inns etc. would appear on certain maps, allowing you to heal/'prepare for the next set of maps you would go through.

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...well Angband originally came about as a hack on Moria, intending to add more Tolkienisms to it other than names. These games all sort of came about as:
Rogue->Nethack
Rogue->LARN
Rogue->DND->Telengard(low resource version)
Rogue->Moria->(variants I don't rember)->Angband->(variants)
Rogue->Adom
Rogue->Omega
Rogue->etc. ad nauseum

Anyways some of the Angband variants, Adom, Omega and others do have quests, and a sort of story line. As near as I can recall Omega was the first with actual quests. Most of these also have more than one town and one dungeon plus outside areas. Adom is the best of these but only for DOS/Windoze/Amiga(in theory.)

Other variants of these games just either ripoff other sf/fantasy works for name, or make diffderent changes like skills, different/extra player races, different magic systems/spells, new/different traps, extra towns, extra dungeons, etc.

Larn and moria were very similar: one town, one dungeon, kill foozle. IIRC.

Nethack is similar to rogue with more stuff & pets. (Never liked it as mmuch as Moria and its variants...)

DND/Telengard: smaller area display(only immediate vicinity) plus some different hacks(fountains/altars/etc) that seemed to have shown up in Nethack & Adom.

All of these games used, originally, only text(ASCII) character "graphics." Graphic versions, if ever added, just use a graphics display with mapped tiles rather than ASCII characters. Also, some of the PC versions use ANSI(vt120?) for some color & extended IBMPC charset.

My only problem with Angband was how hard it was. I used the invincibility cheat and it took me around a year. However, it was fun editing it. The reason it seems like it has a lot of LOTR stuff is because it's loosely based off the series.

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