RabidChild
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Mike asked for a poll, so here it is. See discussion here.

I'm posting this in General because I figure more people are likely to see it here than in Feature Requests.

gamer_extreme_101
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I feel the only ones I can unconditionally support are grid lines that remove the weather for them. My thoughts on the other:

-Spiders aren't nearly as bad as they were in 1.6. They're designed well enough now and used sparingly enough in my experience that I don't see a problem.
-Secret walls I'd almost rather have a permanent solution like making them more visible to begin with. Keep them hidden inside regular walls so the path is secret, but just make them easier to spot at all times. Some of the 4.0 styles are especially bad for it.
-LOS for evil eyes in a button click would remove almost all of their puzzle potential. I feel that single undo already solved most of the issue with evil eyes for me.


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west.logan
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I don't know. I guess I could see the gridlines or the weather but the others kind of defeats the original purpose. I'd rather the architect be publicly shamed and/or excommunicated for poor design than strip him of all his tricks.

I'd support the puzzle view toggle if the architect could choose which rooms and what the user could toggle. Set the default to "allow all toggles" for those architects who don't care. For those who do care about certain things ruining the puzzles, they could change it. That could be a lot of work but would negate my objection.

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[Last edited by west.logan at 05-02-2013 05:39 PM]

Schik
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Is the point of evil eyes having to mentally draw out where all the gazes are and memorizing them while solving the room? Or is it simply to avoid them until you don't want to avoid them? If you're not good at memorizing them (I'm not!) you end up mentally re-drawing them frequently which isn't terribly interesting to me.

As for secret walls, I think we (Caravel) made a bad decision in adding them. There are clever ways to hide secrets, and secret walls is not one of them. Secret wall *mazes* are one of the most boring things I can think of (and yes, we had one in the very first level of JtRH).

I'm not a proponent of allowing the architect to determine my settings for me, be they undo, visual styles, or what keys move my little guy around. So I'd vote no to them choosing what I can toggle as well.

For me, the best option would be to bind this toggle to a function key, with modifiers changing the behavior, like:
F23: turns on a grid
Shift-F23: turns on grid, eye lines, transparent tar, visible spiders (grid + vision token)
Ctrl-F23: turns on all of the above and turns off weather and lighting, and highlights secret walls.


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robin
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I like this, but I don't want visible spiders or visible secret/broken walls.
Tarstuff I can't decide, (I had the mod, but deleted it and I don't use the tarstuff slider often).

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Kwerulous
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I can't help but feel that, apart from gridlines or perhaps the weather/lighting toggle, this is just trying to be a counter to poor architecture. Any room where the lines of sight of many evil eyes is of particular importance, or you need to see things under tarstuff, ought to have an easily accessible vision token. Was that not why the vision token was implemented?

Spiders - I'd say their invisibility isn't really a problem any more. You can see them when they move which is generally when they're going to cause a problem. Again, if they're a critical part of a puzzle (noting their relatively new use with shallow water) and it is appropriate, a vision token should be accessible. In certain situations, to save the player having to click around all over the screen, a temporary visibility widget can be created by the architect - using the vision token.

Secret walls - if you're able to reveal them with the press of a button, then they may as well just be regular crumbly walls (in fact, scrap that - they may as well just be open passages). I like the idea of making the secret wall graphics slightly more obvious than they currently are, however.

The Architest
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I am all for revealing where evil eyes gaze, as I am trigger happy.

Jacob
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Voted for the top 4.
But could "puzzle view" be customised from the setting screen (e.g. I want the puzzle view key to only toggle eyes and spiders and nothing else, since I don't want secret walls to be spoiled, or, I only want to use it to find secret walls).

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hyperme
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Kwerulous wrote:
I can't help but feel that, apart from gridlines or perhaps the weather/lighting toggle, this is just trying to be a counter to poor architecture. Any room where the lines of sight of many evil eyes is of particular importance, or you need to see things under tarstuff, ought to have an easily accessible vision token. Was that not why the vision token was implemented?

Except there's plenty of pre-3.0 rooms that have eyes/tar abuse and being able to increase playability is always a good thing.

Incidentally, it seems that whenever an optional feature to remove certain forms of difficultly is suggested, a bunch of people come out and moan about (warning: hyperbole) how 'Feature x will ruin DROD forever'. Stop being the fun police. DROD is a single player* game. You play it on your own, by yourself. If some else playing on their own, by their-self differently somehow degrades your fun, you have issues. Seeing eye beams and under tar and secret walls isn't going help with most puzzles anyhow, so the core DROD puzzling isn't being killed.


*high scores don't count. Well they do but we aren't adding a 'win and get best moves' button.

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[Last edited by hyperme at 05-02-2013 07:49 PM]

west.logan
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I'm not worried about DROD being ruined, I'm more concerned about taking away architect tools retroactively that essentially render their past effort pointless. Bad designers abuse but that's no reason to strip the good designers of capabilities. That's really my only concern, thus my above suggestion.

I'd like to hear architects weigh in on this.

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Kwerulous
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I guess I'd be considered a 'novice' architect, but as far as I can see:

*no (good) room should depend on not being able to see spiders. I mean, you don't really want to be staring at a room thinking, "this is surely impossible", only to find out 5 minutes later that you need to use the spider hiding in an alcove in the corner. So I don't imagine the player being able to reveal spiders being an issue to architects.

*hiding trapdoors/pressure plates/whatever under tarstuff just for the sake of hiding it annoys players (generally). If you're going to have something under tarstuff, it should form part of the puzzle (e.g. to release a PP by cutting away the mud), so you ought to be able to see it.

*not sure about evil eyes. I mean, you could potentially have an evil eye placed in a critical position such that revealing it's line of sight makes the room's solution or lynchpin blatantly obvious.

Schik
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Clicking an eye shows its line of sight. So this isn't giving the player any new information, just making it easier to use that information.

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stigant
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*not sure about evil eyes. I mean, you could potentially have an evil eye placed in a critical position such that revealing it's line of sight makes the room's solution or lynchpin blatantly obvious.

In my experience, there are 3 main types of eye rooms (with some sub-types):

1. Rooms in which a handful of eyes are used to block off regions of the room until tasks X, Y and Z are accomplished. These rooms are not in need of GUI++ help, but they won't suffer from it either. By necessity, the lines of sight are usually horizontal or vertical (though sometimes you get two diagonal lines) so they're easy to trace in your head and since they don't intersect with very many other lines, and there aren't many lines to keep track of, you can usually do that book-keeping in your head. The puzzle, then is figuring out how to accomplish X, Y and Z without crossing those lines.

2. Rooms in which there are a large number of eyes with criss-crossing LOSs from eyes around the perimeter of a region that create a maze of safe squares.
2a. This can be used to restrict Beethro's movement without restricting other monster's movement. The interesting part of the puzzle, then, is to figure out how dispatch a group of monsters which would normally be easy in an open space but isn't because your movement is restricted.
2b. Find a route that gets you from point A to B where normally you'd just go straight from A to B but now you have to find your way through an invisible maze. There are better ways to implement a maze (ie use walls), but the interesting part of the puzzle is finding the path through the maze, not finding the maze.
In both cases, the UNinteresting and tedious part of the puzzle is finding the individual squares you can step on. It's uninteresting because it doesn't require any real thinking, and it's tedious because it's nearly impossible to keep the whole thing in your head at one time, so you have to keep stopping to re-cache parts of it. IMO, these rooms will be improved by GUI++. GUI++ will remove the tedium and leave the interesting part of the puzzle (if there ever was one).

3. Rooms with blocks of eyes in different directions. It's tough to make these rooms even remotely challenging (typically, you can always just kill a couple of eyes, move one square, kill anything that comes after you, move again etc). Occasionally, you'll find an interesting twist on this:
3a. A room with a timer so you have to dispatch the eyes efficiently (ie move wait wait wait kill, repeat won't work). In this case, the puzzle is to be efficient and strategically daring rather than cautious. Stepping on particular individual LOSs usually doesn't ruin your solution.
3b. Rooms where you need to strategically remove eyes to leave walls (say to trap a serpent or to allow escape from other monsters). Here the interesting part of the puzzle is reasoning out which eyes to kill/wake, not where to step to wake them.
In these rooms, GUI++ isn't really going to help much (since there will be so many LOS's the floor is just going to look like a mess of red lines). To the extent that it does help, I don't think it will ruin the puzzle since usually stepping on one LOS doesn't ruin your solution.

I may have left out some niche rooms here and there, but in general, I don't think people enjoy mapping out which squares are safe to be the interesting part of any room involving eyes.

EDIT:
So, if I may sum up my feelings in general:

stigant's Axiom of GUI Design:
If a piece of information is available to the player and:
a) it requires no thinking to obtain that information (for example, random clicking to find a hidden wall or carefully tracing LOS's for eyes)
and
b) that information could in any way critical to the solving of the puzzle
Then
1) No interesting puzzle has ever or will ever be devised that involves nothing other than finding this piece of information
and therefore
2) every reasonable effort should be made to make the acquisition of that information as painless as possible.

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[Last edited by stigant at 05-02-2013 09:45 PM]

Dischorran
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But we'd break the Cheap Trick Compilation every which way, and that hold is fantastic!

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Kwerulous
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stigant wrote: So, if I may sum up my feelings in general:

stigant's Axiom of GUI Design:
If a piece of information is available to the player and:
a) it requires no thinking to obtain that information (for example, random clicking to find a hidden wall or carefully tracing LOS's for eyes)
and
b) that information could in any way critical to the solving of the puzzle
Then
1) No interesting puzzle has ever or will ever be devised that involves nothing other than finding this piece of information
and therefore
2) every reasonable effort should be made to make the acquisition of that information as painless as possible.

Whilst I agree with that, I think that as long as the architect is considerate of the player (all architects should be, really), then there is a small extent to which those rules may be bent.

I've just been playing around in the editor and have knocked up a puzzle revolving around evil eyes. In this room, as an architect, I would choose not to include a vision token*, because I believe it makes the room easier - in the sense that it puts a big flashing sign around the solution. What not including it doesn't do, however, is make the player have to click on eye after eye or squint at the screen following lines of sight.

*note that if beta testers advised including it I of course would trust the players' advice.

Edit: I take this back actually. Further thought reveals that the room doesn't really illustrate my point very well.

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[Last edited by Kwerulous at 05-02-2013 11:00 PM]

west.logan
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Question: does anyone currently randomly click everything to find hidden walls etc.?

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Schik
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west.logan wrote:
Question: does anyone currently randomly click everything to find hidden walls etc.?

I don't always do that but I certainly have done it in times of desperation.

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skell
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Schik wrote:

west.logan wrote:
Question: does anyone currently randomly click everything to find hidden walls etc.?

I don't always do that but I certainly have done it in times of desperation.

I do the usual "touch every wall tile with mah sword" technique in deep desperation.

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Tim
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So lemme just brainstorm on these poll items here and see what comes out of it:

1) Grid Lines: My guts say that I don't want this one. When I played WonderQuest with it my head hurts.
2) Transparent Tarstuff: Everyone must be using this mod now?
3) Evil Eye Sight Lines: 99% of evil eye problems can be solved with one-turn undo so this seems to be superfluous.
4) Spiders: Just because it's been used badly lately doesn't mean it doesn't have its uses. There are really special rooms that use spiders to reduce the complexity of the room. The problem is that people never noticed that spiders are used for that trick. So this one is better turned on.
5) Secret Walls: I guess the public opinion is clear on this one and I agree with them.
6) No Weather/Lighting effects: Lightening effects can trigger epilepsy so it's a good idea to be able to turn it off (instead of a toggle). Also I had to test many holds with lighting off because of horrible design so I don't mind that to be a toggle. But I'd also like to have a permanent option for this one for people with slower computers.

But it seems that I agree with the sentiment that players could have some weapons against poor architects, especially nowadays.

Besides, when TSS comes out, we can all make holds with Patience Tiles anyway in them anyway.

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Someone Else
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I'm trying, but the script variable "_TotalTime" doesn't work!

robin
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Jacob wrote:
Voted for the top 4.
But could "puzzle view" be customised from the setting screen (e.g. I want the puzzle view key to only toggle eyes and spiders and nothing else, since I don't want secret walls to be spoiled, or, I only want to use it to find secret walls).

This is a good idea

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drodettes
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Grid lines: Sounds good, since some of the styles/floor patterns can be tough to see.

Transparent tarstuff: Feels a little redundant to me, but it could be very useful for the older holds, where tar over walls was used not to annoy, but rather to puzzle (a la Level 11 KDD)

Evil Eye sightlines: Same thing as tarstuff.

Spiders: Seems very niche. Wouldn't mind either way.

Secret/crumbly walls: Removes the whole point of "Secret" walls. Definite No from me.

No weather/lighting effects: Can't you already shut this off?

Banjooie
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The idea of giving us a little menu to decide what the Puzzle View button does is top shelf.

Absolute top shelf.

I still feel secret walls should still be used for cosmetic purposes only.

stigant
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But we'd break the Cheap Trick Compilation every which way, and that hold is fantastic!

Well, a couple of things:
1. Oh, my, god, I hadn't even heard of that hold... it's awful (in a goodish sort of way).
2. I haven't played all the way through, but the rooms that I have played wouldn't be spoiled by GUI++. Of course, none of them had tar, round-corners or eyes...
3. The puzzles in these rooms are (at least partly) about discovering what information you might need to solve the puzzle rather than hunting that information down.
example (spoiler):

Usually (at least the rooms that I've played) once you figure out what information you need, getting that info is pretty simple. If GUI++ points out that information, the player still has to realize what information he needs to get (the interesting part of the puzzle). GUI++ just makes it easier to get that info (the non-interesting part of the puzzle).

That said, if GUI++ is up all the time, there IS some potential for spoiling the puzzle. (I didn't KNOW that I needed to look for xxx, but I happened to notice that xxx was there because of GUI++, so I didn't need to think through the puzzle at all). Perhaps GUI++ should turn off when you leave a room (thus requiring you to explicitly bring it up in each room). Or require holding down a key to keep it on. And then, using another key to lock it on if for some reason you need it up for several moves.

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skell
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Are we discussing NOT implementing a superb feature because it MIGHT make trivial one hold out of 300?

Seriously?

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[Last edited by skell at 05-03-2013 10:16 PM]

Panther
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Especially since it's an optional feature?

stigant
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Are we discussing NOT implementing a superb feature because it MIGHT make trivial one hold out of 300?

No, we're checking to see if we can implement the feature without making one hold out of 300 trivial. If we fail in that particular sub-endeavor, the feature would probably still be implemented.

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TripleM
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My 2 cents:

If the choice is between adding Puzzle View vs not adding Puzzle View, sure, go ahead and add it.

If the choice is between adding Puzzle View and spending that time creating a new game element, or new level in TSS, or a cool new scripting command - then I'd prefer all of the latter.

So yes if trivial; no if it's going to take time that could be used on better things.

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[Last edited by TripleM at 05-04-2013 03:56 AM]

mrimer
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At present, I'm personally feeling okay at least about adding a key/option that toggles gridlines and the effects of the vision token. My guess is that it's going to take some time to implement.

Once we get to that point, I'm fine with at least considering adding the less popular, more esoteric options. No promises about those yet, as they're in the minority.

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[Last edited by mrimer at 05-04-2013 07:26 AM]

Nuntar
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Tim wrote: 2) Transparent Tarstuff: Everyone must be using this mod now?

I don't. Finding-stuff-under-tar puzzles are far from the most enjoyable type in the game, but where they exist, just for myself I'd rather solve them as intended. When I played Flash DROD, with its enforced transparency, I found Level 11 really tedious because the wading through tar was still there, but none of the challenge.

But I'm not at all against there being an option in the game to turn on transparency. I like the original suggestion that players should have seetings to choose which individual elements of Puzzle View they get when they turn it on.

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