Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Mr Crabman]

As far as I can gather, the [ARENA_RESTRICTED] token exists to prevent spoilers and make those creatures a surprise when encountered. This guess is mostly based on which creatures have this token applied.

But it could be good if they would be unlocked for the arena permanently once you have encountered one in one of the other modes. "Encountering" one would add its ID to a list stored outside the normal save games, and creatures in this list will be added to the arena list even if they have [ARENA_RESTRICTED].

What "ecnountering" means... I'm not sure exactly, since just having one appear on the map doesn't really mean you've "ecnountered" it, as you might not even see it before it leaves the map again. Certainly loo(k)ing at it should count though, or viewing it in the creature/unit list.

However, it may be a good idea to have another thing used for procgenned creatures (especially unique ones like demons) to prevent them being spawned even after meeting them, or to at least prevent their ID's being added to the global list, so that 2 TITAN22 or whatever can't be spawned just because you met a different procedurally generated TITAN22 in another world. Maybe a "save specific encounter list" instead of the global one for such creatures (of course, nothing stopping playings from manually adding TITAN22 to the global list anyway).

For the unique ones that are meant to be super difficult or impressive/mysterious monsters or something, it may be good to also make their addition to even the local save list more strict than just encountering them.

[FantasticDorf]

Not trying to shoot you down, but the liberty of simply editing it off kind of makes your suggestion redundant, and would need to store-meta data and reference points somewhere about which creatures a player has already encountered and validated a actual interaction with.

Now if Steam release had player-profiles in totality for holding that sort of information in the steam-cloud id say its much more reasonable to hold onto additional info like that, but for DF classic that is literally deployed from hard-drive via a exe with en-situ folders of assets to modify that isn't hardwritten into the memory of the game its not really perhaps appropriate.

[Mr Crabman]

Not trying to shoot you down, but the liberty of simply editing it off kind of makes your suggestion redundant, and would need to store-meta data and reference points somewhere about which creatures a player has already encountered and validated a actual interaction with.

Now if Steam release had player-profiles in totality for holding that sort of information in the steam-cloud id say its much more reasonable to hold onto additional info like that, but for DF classic that is literally deployed from hard-drive via a exe with en-situ folders of assets to modify that isn't hardwritten into the memory of the game its not really perhaps appropriate.

Sure, it's easy to remove, for people who are comfortable editing the raws, but that's not most players.

Plus, from what we've heard, there's no indication that multiple mods making changes to the same objects is going to be possible (on the inital Steam release anyway), so mini-modifications like that aren't going to be practically usable for anyone who can't go in and make this change themselves (without locking themselves out of other mods that is), though admittedly, the better solution there would be to add that capability for mods: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=179270.msg8332006#msg8332006

But even if that were done, this sort of "detect if it was encountered" logic would makes it more feasible for procgen creatures to be spawnable in the arena (since editing the raws for THEM is more involved/difficult).

[BlueManedHawk]

I don't like this idea.  Having certain things be unlockable for the entire game is something I am averse to because it means that a player will invariably have to permanently and irreversibly alter their copy of the game.

[IndigoFenix]

Sure, it's easy to remove, for people who are comfortable editing the raws, but that's not most players.

I think that this logic should actually be a pro for the "leave it as is" side.

Players who don't mod are missing out on a huge amount of what DF has to offer, but there is the natural tendency for people who don't think of themselves as modders to consider the raws untouchable.  Encouraging players to make small, easy edits (outside of "cheating") is a good way to introduce them to the fact that modding is not "cheating" - it's an intended part of the gameplay experience.

Vanilla DF should not feel like an incomplete game, but there should be small "bonus rewards" for people making easy edits to encourage them into the water.  [ARENA_RESTRICTED], being found at the top of each creature's raw entry, and which if removed doesn't change the game but allows the creatures to be played with in Arena mode, feels almost like it was designed to be a players' first modding experience.