I feel obligated to throw in my two greckles, but on the whole I'm pretty ambivalent about it, so I probably changed my mind a few times in the middle of writing the below. Umm. yeah.
--
I agree that UU shouldn't be necessary for ordinary solving of rooms - if it is required then it means the architect didn't include enough checkpoints in appropriate places. As far as gaining high scores go, if it's a standard thing then I don't know whether anyone would be necessarily worse off. I certainly don't believe that it will turn everyone into superoptimisers - solving a room efficiently is too complex a task to do by trying every combination of moves. Improvements are often found by solving the room using a different approach, small changes near the start that only have a noticable effect much later (michthro already mentioned Dusty Dungeon:L1:1N2E), or simple manoeuvres that UU isn't going to help you see (e.g. KDD2:L19:1S1E - spot the difference between my and michthro's demos). I don't think any of these would be made easier to do with the addition of UU. That's not to say UU doesn't have its uses in optimisation - it is very useful when you are facing a horde of monsters - ideally you want to kill one per turn while at the same time you generally want to retreat or advance as far as possible. As monster movement order is largely opaque, finding a good sequence of moves is largely a matter of trial and error and UU can help with that (although I'd probably prefer some kind of indication of relative move order)
So should we have it? I've been doing fine without it so far, although admittedly I have made use of the editor once or twice (mainly to add checkpoints). I did try out michthro's mod on a couple of rooms (namely Fun Park: 1N2E - where it was very useful - and 1N2W - where I probably didn't need it.) It does have the advantage over the editor of being able to combine restore and undo, as well as saving demos. But I'm not using because a) tisn't fair and I don't really need it, b) no idea if it'll work after the next patch, and I don't want to become crutched by it, c) um.. I forget what c was.
eytanz wrote:
You can also just watch the #1 demo and replay it if all you are interested is in short-cutting the stage where you try to figure out how to optimize. Plus, it's harder than it sounds to play a room without mistakes, at least for the rooms that need more than a couple of hundred moves.
Speaking
from experience, for most rooms it's not that hard. You generally only need to remember a series of things to do - 'enter facing N, hit this orb, wiggle as you run N to line up the roaches, run them through then kill that queen, etc' Also, I'm fairly sure that someone wrote a program that prints out the moves of a demo.
Tahnan wrote:
Click here to view the secret text
×When playing King Dugan's Dungeon : Twenty-First Level : 1 West the other night--with its inconveniently-located checkpoint--and had finished the room but for a few queens located at point 1 in the above link. I moved above them, pointed the sword south, and charged...killing the bottommost queen four turns into the spawn cycle, which I hadn't noticed, and thereby finding myself with four rather angry roaches to my east. A single undo wasn't enough; consequently, I had to restart the whole thing. (Which didn't help my efficiency; I still ended up 28th, about typical for me on that level.)
OK, long boring story, suitable for telling while sitting around a tavern in the Eighth while trying to top the stories of other delvers.
That's one of my favourite rooms in KDD.
I'm pretty sure that the coolness factor of a fast solution is proportional to the difference between the moves of the optimal solution and the moves it took when you first did it.
skell wrote:
Michthro wrote:
And what about the chess analogy? DROD, like chess, and many other games, lends itself to analysis. The way it is at the moment is just impractical. Not having a convenient, user-friendly interface for analysing DROD rooms is a serious defect.
Imagine undo in chess. You are playing with your friend and suddenly:
"Buddy, i must undo 5 moves, because I will lose!"
Would he answer:
"No problem. "
or maybe:
"What the? This isn't some kind of computer game wney you save and can load! Stop fooling around, and play with the consequences of your moves!"?
Um, you're misunderstanding the analogy. It's not talking about playing a chess game, it's about analysing a chess position. It should be like this:
"
In this position, what is the best move? Well, if I do this, then he does that, then move my pawn, he moves his pawn, then I take with the knight, he takes with the bishop, I take with the rook, he takes with his knight, then I can check with my queen.
But wait, what if he takes with the knight first? Better take a few moves back to see... no wait, I can't take more than one move back, I'll have to start again from the beginning."
(unless the knight landed on a checkpoint of course
)
). They tend to be difficult too. It can't break anything, cause monsters usually are the hard part.
Always glad to know I've been able to teach someone something. You're perfectly entitled to be against UU, as long as you respect other people's opinions. What do you say we agree to delete our respective posts and put this nasty incident behind us?
) I think, as long as UU was only allowed after you master a hold, and that they don't count as highscores at all, that UU could add to the replayability immensly. 
...
Ah, no more challenge.