Kwakstur
Level: Smiter

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Over time, an architect learns a few things about convenience.

Delvers want accessibility. People do not want Force Arrows on room entrances. It's good to have 2-way staircases. You never put a required room behind a blue door. You do not make a puzzle in a room with a master wall.

They also learn to have Save Points in certain rooms, even without puzzles. In that case, I think it is so that the player can restore to that room after completing others.


But I'm not quite sure. I want to make sure that the location of my checkpoints is convenient.


Here's what I'm thinking: There is a room in my hold with an NPC. If you kill this NPC and leave the building, police will take you to jail, and then you have to escape the jail.
But what if players are caught off guard by this and regret this happening?
Restoring to that room is a problem. You see, the NPC doesn't appear in that room until you do something elsewhere, and so you probably went into the room before the NPC was there. There are more rooms past it, so restoring to it would not only have no NPC, but would unconquer the rooms past it.

I'm thinking a checkpoint will solve the problem, but I don't know how it works, and when the player should touch the save point.
Help me understand the technicalities of this.

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Also known as ExpHP everywhere else.

Doom
Level: Smitemaster

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Checkpoints always take you back to the exact same point and time you were at when you activated the checkpoint. [edit: To be complete, hold mastery and completed secret rooms are stored separately]

In your example, the most convenient option would be a checkpoint in the room with the NPC that the player can/will activate (enforced?) after the NPC has already appeared there.

Even if the player didn't use a checkpoint in the NPC room, he usually wouldn't be too far behind (unless your hold for some reason is a pain to backtrack), since they could just restore to the (end of the?) last room that needs to be conquered before the NPC appears.

[false memories] Finally, concerning checkpoint placement, I recommend putting some in every room that can be explored through an alternate entrance that doesn't allow reaching/solving the puzzle. Let's say there's a path that lets you see what each room in the hold looks like before you can start solving them. Without checkpoints through the hold, *all* of your room entrance restore points are useless because they don't get overwritten through further adventuring between the rooms. [/false memories]

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[Last edited by Doom at 07-10-2007 07:57 PM]

Kwakstur
Level: Smiter

Rank Points: 385
Registered: 05-05-2006
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Doom wrote:
Checkpoints always take you back to the exact same point and time you were at when you activated the checkpoint. [edit: To be complete, hold mastery and completed secret rooms are stored separately]

How do I make sure secret rooms stay complete? Oh, man, this will make problems . . . There are some secret rooms where, upon entering, a variable is incremented by an NPC. So a certain number of these secret rooms must be visited before being allowed access to the holds biggest (and most cryptic) secret.
Shoot, not only am I way outdoing myself with this hold, but I'm outdoing the game, as well!

Doom wrote:
In your example, the most convenient option would be a checkpoint in the room with the NPC that the player can/will activate (enforced?) after the NPC has already appeared there.

That's what I'll try to do, but I have to make sure the player doesn't hit the save point after killing the NPC, as that would defeat the purpose.

Doom wrote:
Even if the player didn't use a checkpoint in the NPC room, he usually wouldn't be too far behind (unless your hold for some reason is a pain to backtrack), since they could just restore to the (end of the?) last room that needs to be conquered before the NPC appears.

That's where the problem with my secret rooms comes in. Actually, I don't need that variable, come to think of it . . . the player won't know what to do in my special room without visiting these secret rooms, anyways.

Doom wrote:
Finally, concerning checkpoint placement, I recommend putting some in every room that can be explored through an alternate entrance that doesn't allow reaching/solving the puzzle. Let's say there's a path that lets you see what each room in the hold looks like before you can start solving them. Without checkpoints through the hold, *all* of your room entrance restore points are useless because they don't get overwritten through further adventuring between the rooms!

Good idea. I often have a puzzle in a room, but the green door in another, separate hall.

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Also known as ExpHP everywhere else.

AlefBet
Level: Smitemaster
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Kwakstur wrote:

Doom wrote:
[edit: To be complete, hold mastery and completed secret rooms are stored separately]

How do I make sure secret rooms stay complete?

This is actually a bit misleading. In a saved game, secret room completion is tracked just like non-secret room completion, required completion, etc. However, the DROD engine also keeps track separately on which secret rooms have ever, in any play-sequence been completed. This is because hold mastery is defined as having completed the hold (gone down the end-of-hold stairs) and having beaten all the secret rooms at some point. This separate information is only used for master-wall status (and stats on the level screen), so restoring won't in some bizarre way cause secret rooms to be uncompleted or completed -- if you restore to before when a secret room was completed, it will not be completed. If not, it will still be completed, just like any other room.

____________________________
I was charged with conspiracy to commit jay-walking, and accessory to changing lanes without signaling after the fact .

++Adam H. Peterson

Doom
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Er..yeah, I think I was a bit misleading there.

That scripted secret counter should work fine, but it might be a good idea to inform the player so they won't use the restore method to find secrets, as this'll obviously mess your counter.

TFMurphy
Level: Smitemaster
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Doom wrote:
Let's say there's a path that lets you see what each room in the hold looks like before you can start solving them. Without checkpoints through the hold, *all* of your room entrance restore points are useless because they don't get overwritten through further adventuring between the rooms!

That's not quite true. Entering an unconquered room always creates a new save for that room *UNTIL* the room is conquered. By default, the latest room save will be the last time you entered the room before it was completed.

Once the room is complete, however, the only way to update the save is through checkpoints.

Kwakstur
Level: Smiter

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Registered: 05-05-2006
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Doom wrote:
Er..yeah, I think I was a bit misleading there.

That scripted secret counter should work fine, but it might be a good idea to inform the player so they won't use the restore method to find secrets, as this'll obviously mess your counter.

And on top of that, I'm starting to think that, if Restore is used, the counter is an invalid representation of how many such rooms were found.

In the current context, it works fine without the counter. Each one of these rooms has a word or two in it. These are cryptic steps to a puzzle where you must do what the scrolls told you to do. NPCs will make sure you are always on the tile you are asked to, facing the direction you are asked to.

It's up to the player to remember the steps and decipher what they mean. They can't even dream of doing the steps correctly unless they know what all the rooms say, so . . .
I'm going to remove the variable and the secret room status. I don't need the variable if it will leave players wondering which of the 15 rooms wasn't counted, and I'm also sick of those rooms counting towards the hold Master percentage, anyways.



And TFMurphy's post just appeared as I previewed my reply. Thanks for the clear up.

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Also known as ExpHP everywhere else.

Doom
Level: Smitemaster

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TFMurphy wrote:
By default, the latest room save will be the last time you entered the room before it was completed.

...my bad. I was sure I had messed up in a similar situation in some hold, but it was probably slightly different somehow.

TFMurphy
Level: Smitemaster
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Doom wrote:
...my bad. I was sure I had messed up in a similar situation in some hold, but it was probably slightly different somehow.

Well, there *are* some situations where it might hold. Kwakstur's example of having the green door in another corridor entirely would mean that the save for the room would be from the other entrance, before you conquered the room.

Also, taking your example and laying down some specifics... let's make half of them trapdoor/orb puzzle rooms with no monsters, and the other half rooms where there are monsters to be killed. (Obviously, no conquer tokens in the monsterless rooms)

All of the rooms with no monsters in get conquered as soon as you enter them, so when you get to "preview" them, that's the entrance that gets saved. The monster rooms, on the other hand, are going to be continually saved until beaten, so the entrance saved is the one you can complete the room from. So you end up with half the saves on the "preview path", and the other half on the "completion path".

In either case though, understanding the difference can help with checkpoint placement, so it's an important distinction to make.

Kwakstur
Level: Smiter

Rank Points: 385
Registered: 05-05-2006
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Of course, those rooms where the restore would be on the preview hopefully wouldn't exist.

Anyone who has reached level 7 or 8 (whichever one has Chen) in Wonderquest would know firsthand how bad it is to have a room with no monsters; every time you want to get through, you have to go through that painful puzzle again. Thankfully, most of those things are at the end of levels (which would never have any reason for you to repeat them), but it's still unnerving to know that there is not a single White Door in any of those rooms to give you a shortcut.

____________________________
Also known as ExpHP everywhere else.

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[Last edited by Kwakstur at 07-10-2007 08:50 PM]