[Custom dungeon] Chaos Hack [DSB] [Joramun]

[ian_scho]

The only way to thank you Sophia is for me to try to update the wiki with those DSB updates

[lord soth 75]

The Death Knights are seemingly as powerful as the Stone Golems.
Iv just spent nearly an hour in battle with 2 of them,and in the end i had to retreat back up 3 levels of the dungeon to find a fountain because during the fight i exhausted nearly 8 waterskins full of water.

The game seriously needs more flasks.....or just 1 flask would be nice.
My character is wounded on every part of his body,and is moving about at snails pace.

[Jan]

My character is wounded on every part of his body,and is moving about at snails pace.

Oh, that's bad. I always check my character's health before saving the game and if I'm wounded I reload my game - so fortunately I have no injuries so far.

As for DM and CSB, they are, at the moment, regrettably, far from bug-free. There are actually quite a few known issues that someone (probably Joramun, maybe me if I ever finish what I want to do with the core engine and have some time left over) will have to fix.

Is there a list somewhere? I checked the threads about DM and CSB for DSB and there's basically nothing, last posts are five years old and there's something like 10 posts in total. Am I missing something?

[beowuuf]

Yeah, Lunever posted a load of bug bits in one of the threads if not both, so check near the top of the DSB forum (rather than the custom dungeon forum if there are two sets of threads)

[lord soth 75]

Iv hit a brick wall.
Reached a small level with a Stone golem wandering around,and 3 or 4 water elementals are here as well.
No doors.Seemingly no secret doors.No stairs downwards.No switches on walls.

I recall seeing a RA door a few levels ago.
Do the RA doors lead to each random dungeons finale?

[Joramun]

No, but there's a good chance than the exit is not in the branch you're taking. You have to explore everything to be sure, the exit is always far down, but not necessarily on the last level (actually, it should be in the "longest branch" of the dungeon).
I'll decrease the probability of fake walls, they are really too numerous (almost one per level).

[Zed5Duke]

So there was fake walls? I miss them all.

[Joramun]

I don't know, sometimes there are, sometimes there aren't.

[the master]

Has anyone actually finished this yet. I have killed everything in the dungeon and still can't find this exit. Is it on the lowest level or should I go back up? What exactly am I looking for anyway - is it a door or haze or what?

[ian_scho]

The goal is to reach the fluxcage.

[the master]

Thanks Ian. Have you actually found it yet. What sort of level is it on because I have search the bottom 2 levels and haven't seen anything that remotely looks like a fluxcage.

[ian_scho]

Nope, sorry

[the master]

So no one on here has finished it. Says a lot really doesn't it. I mean is this fluxcage behind a door or at the end of a corridor, out in the open, on the top floor, the third floor the bottom floor.

[Jan]

So no one on here has finished it.

Apparently not. Certainly not me.

I mean is this fluxcage behind a door or at the end of a corridor, out in the open, on the top floor, the third floor the bottom floor.

Sorry - but is this a question? Don't forget that it's randomly generated so nobody is able to answer it. But logically it should be close to the bottom of the dungeon.

All I can suggest is:
- try tapping walls for fake ones
- haven't you overlooked a "fork" in the dungeon layout on one of the previous levels? I had several such "forks" in mine (two sets of stairs down on one level) dividing the whole dungeon below into smaller and unconnected parts. Some of these "forks" were even behind fake walls. Perhaps the end is in a part of the dungeon you have not discovered yet?

[lord soth 75]

Has anyone actually finished this yet. I have killed everything in the dungeon and still can't find this exit. Is it on the lowest level or should I go back up? What exactly am I looking for anyway - is it a door or haze or what?

I hit a dead end (literally)
I was about a million levels deep into the dungeon and found a tiny little level with a 4 Trillion Hit Point Stone Golem wandering about.There was no stairs down to another level nor was there any doors or false walls.
The only option i had left was to backtrack all the way through the levels i had cleared,and to try to find a false wall.
I just couldn't be bothered.So i gave up.

It needs tweaking imo.There was no flasks or weaponry to aid you against the non materials.
Some of the monsters were way too powerful as well.
Was good fun whilst it lasted.

[beowuuf]

It does seem like you need to do the trick Jan suggested of loading up the game in the edittor first, then saving that game and using it to play, so you can always use the initial editor opened map to look for the path if you get very stuck.

[Jan]

the trick Jan suggested

I don't seem to remember having this idea. But, broadly speaking, I don't seem to remember having any ideas at all, so meh.

"There's no danger Jan will deny it because it isn't true?"

"None at all."

[the master]

If there is a haze or fluxcage how is it triggered? Or is it just there waiting to be discovered.

[Joramun]

The fluxcage stands at the end of the longest path, likely within the last three levels of any generated dungeon.

But remember, Dungeon Hack is really what the name implies: a hack (for the sake of it).

The fake walls need to be toned down: a fork or two per level + a fake wall every two levels = 90% chance the end lies (somewhere) beyond a fake wall.

The dungeon has 16 levels.

The trick of saving with ESB somewhere is how it should be played, indeed. Good idea, Jan

[Zed5Duke]

This is very good dungeon but for me to play only 3 levels, just to survive beginning which sometime is odd difficulty impossible? after that similar to Dungeon Hack am lost motivation if there is no adventure, plot etc.

Anyway do you played Demise? I hear that is something similar to DH

[kaypy]

Finally stumbled across this 2 years later...

So, I made a few tweaks (having read things a bit first) and just finished a playthrough. Thankyou to Joramun for making this available, and to Sophia for DSB itself 8-)

Tweak notes:

Item generation was tweaked to guarantee a flask and compass on the first level (the first two 'food/junk' items generated on the first level would be preset types)
Any chests would be generated containing an item, including some stuff not generated otherwise- by the end of the game I had a second flask and two arrows!
The party was four characters chosen by the random number generator.
No ESB pregeneration- I mapped by hand.
No abusing savefiles to avoid 'wasting' keys. Breaking down doors to avoid wasting keys, OTOH, seemed perfectly fair.
Throw-stuff-at-doors ninja training was shamelessly abused.

[Joramun]

Well I reckon you're the first one to win !

As this dungeon a dirty hack, "tweaking" is considered a valid technique to win !

[kaypy]

Having even a single flask makes everything orders of magnitude easier of course.

By the way, while testing further modifications, I found a teleporter for the first time, and trying it out resulted in a stack overflow crash. I think it was teleporting the party back and forth over and over till it ran out of recursion room.

Since I hadn't modified that code at all, I think it may be a problem in baseline Chaos Hack. It was in an ESB-preserved dungeon, if that makes any difference. If I figure anything out I'll let you know.

Edit:
Got it. Flipping the teleporters alternately means there are times they are both active. You need to toggle each twice in a row.
So 1off 2on 2off 1on loop
The two lines with exvar[msg] should thus both be
exvar[msg] = { target={haze,tele,haze2,tele2,haze2,tele2,haze,tele}, delay={4,4,4,5,10,10,10,11}, repeat_rate=12,msg=M_TOGGLE}

I added a bit of a gap between the two active phases for safety, but turned the next haze on during the gap, so that if you stand on the inactive teleporter tile you see the haze for a moment before you teleport. It seemed a nice touch 8-)

[kaypy]

OK, I've finally gotten some substantial modifications into a seems-to-be-working state. The code still needs a heap of cleanup work, but more than that it needs me to stop tinkering and do some serious playtesting. Since I'm not going to be progressing for a while, I thought I'd put what I have here in case anyone else wants to check it out.

http://en.file-upload.net/download-8586 ... 3.zip.html (Out of date now)

Main changes so far:
Level based item allocation
Monster respawns
Dungeon feature tweaks

edit: and here's the first bug patch
edit: no nasty surprises added here... just some completely unremarkable... um... stuff...
edit: ...just watch your step down there, ok?

[zoinkers]

This (kaypy's Jan 14 release) doesn't work for me, with the latest version of DSB (0.6). It gets lots of errors in the log along the lines of :

LUA ERROR: ...ngeon Strikes Back\dsb60\chaoshack_redux/startup.lua:1252: dsb_fetch requires int in param 3

The call to dsb_fetch uses variables that do not exist in the given context, changing them to the following fixes it:

Code: Select all

			stuffs = dsb_fetch(lz,tx,ty,TABLE)

[Sophia]

The latest version of DSB is 0.61, now, just so you know.
(I don't think that would have anything to do with this issue, though, especially since 0.61 was not released as of Jan 14)

[kaypy]

Oops. I actually made a fix for that and then forgot to upload it. Thanks

http://en.file-upload.net/download-8612 ... 4.zip.html

This also prevents launchers from being used as machineguns and makes the item generation a touch more friendly- alcoves and chests are now significantly more likely to spawn interesting stuff.

[zoinkers]

Thanks for the update anyway. It's been decades since I played DM, interesting that 644 (fireball) was easy to remember.