Tim wrote:
The cheapness is the fact that you are not asking for a NPC with roach-type movement, but you are asking for a monster with roach-type movement. We've got it already. It's called a roach.
Wrong, that *isn't* solely what's being asked for. The movement alone does not define the monster... or the NPC. What if you don't want it Deadly? Or want it to ignore brains? Or want it to fly over pits? Again, we bring up the fact that Flexible Beelining is *not* Roach movement: it's unbrained Guard movement.
Tim wrote:
I don't think clevernes and non-cheapness is the problem here. I've actually already experimented with this kind of new movement before. Moving an NPC for only a few turns turned out to be very confusing, even if the movement I used was totally predictable to the player.
Again, it depends on what you want to do with it. Who says it needs to be a few turns? Who says it can't be all the time?
"
But then why not just turn it into the monster in the first place?"
Because the exact mechanics of the monster may not even exist. There's already several properties a character can have that monsters might not have in certain combinations. There's also the fact that this ends up being a monster directly under scripting control, which means more can be done with it. As a move involved example, how about a room containing a single brain and a bunch of NPCs (Guards or Citizens or whatever). We'd say the story for the room is that the brain has control of the Guards and is turning them against you. If you kill the brain, the NPCs regain their senses and stop attacking. The puzzle of the room would be to get to the brain and kill it without killing or being killed by the NPCs.
But you're now constrained to only two different types of movement: Flexible Beelining (can sidestep obstacles) and Direct (stupid-like golems). Neither can take advantage of a brain pathmap on top of that.
That's just one example off the top of my head, given fifteen minutes. Not all that involved an example, but it's certainly a possibility.
Tim wrote:
If you really have any interesting monster in mind, why don't you just make a feature request for those instead? From my experience, most of those monster requests were simply not interesting enough to justify the inclusion. And if this request can only make those kind of monsters, then they are probably not interesting.
Interesting enough is always balanced against difficulty of inclusion. A whole new monster eventually ends up needing several things for DROD: consistency and linkage into the Eighth, graphics and possibly sound work, new constants and IDs scattered around the code, and so forth.
The difficulty between adding things to Character scripting versus adding an entirely new monster to the editor is an entirely different level of integration. Which is why new monsters are that much more difficult to request than script.
And regarding how they're "
probably not interesting"
: simple changes can be *very* interesting. Many holds have things based around *tiny* changes to a room that makes things ever so different. Some of the best ideas in DROD are also just simple changes to existing formulas: Orthosquares and Direct Movement made us think more about restrictions and how to work around them. We've even had several varieties of mosnters added that are basically just variants on a theme.
And even "
less interesting monsters"
can be interesting enough for a hold. It's not like we don't have holds based around that sort of thing either, and some are quite well received.
So really, I don't see what the problem is against what would be a reasonably easy set of additions to make for use by all architects in whatever imaginative way they can come up with, especially when compared to the work required for an entirely new monster. And we eventually come back to the fact that even if we ignore *everything* else: the absolute most basic movement-type - Roach Movement - is not possible for characters, while the other two are.
