Portablility of characters

beowuuf · Post by **beowuuf** » Wed Feb 28, 2001 5:49 am

Exactly how portable will characters be from game to game? It's accepted that someone will want a CSB made, but was this planned to be achieved in that the same as CSB did? How about instead it's an initial option at start up along with enter and resume. That the game reads any saved game file, takes the party info, and creates a new saved game from the dungeon.dat file, starting the party at a pre-defined spot indicated on building of the dungeon with RTChange or whatever (a special pressure pad marker maybe?). If a builder wants to not allow this option of another party attempting a dungeon, then they simply don't include this marker in the dungeon so the game write fails.

Ii did seem to be a common question for other dungeons build using DMute, and would have the extra option of a 3 or less party starting in a hall of champions still being able to pick up new chamions too.

George Gilbert · Post by **George Gilbert** » Wed Feb 28, 2001 11:00 am

It's a bit more complex than that as things would have to be limited more severely otherwise dungeons become too easy (you could for example import CSB characters who'd finished CSB back into the start of CSB...that's an extreme example, but you get my drift here).

I'm more likely to implement a flag to the effect of "only import characters from this/these dungeon(s)" so CSB would have DM and Prison set but no others. That way people can build dungeon pairs (as in the Prison/CSB) or sequels to their own dungeons, but know roughly how experienced new characters are going to be in their starting dungeons...

Any better ideas are, of course, more than welcome!

theadder · Post by **theadder** » Wed Feb 28, 2001 12:52 pm

With original role playing games like Dungeons and Dragons, a person created his character and then used that character in ecery game he ever played, adapting it and building it. I think this is the point of RPG's, and have always been irritated by the fact that most computer RPG's expect you to start again each time - which to me defeats the purpose of creating a character.
I would like to be able to carry my characters from the end of one game into the beginning of any other game in RTC in order to be able to say that I've got "my" adventuring characters. Obviously, people would just have to build dungeons to cater for different levels of adventurers - or how about changing RTC so that the monster levels are based on the character levels instead of being set in stone. For example, if Master level champions are imported into the game, then screamers would suddenly all be Master level too. I wouldn't have thought that making monster levels be based on character levels would be that big a change - probably a few lines of code when the monsters are defined at the start of the game.
I have always thought there should be a standard agreed upon by all RPG games makers so that characters can be imported from any RPG to any other RPG and the game adapts as they would be in Dungeons and Dragons or the like

George Gilbert · Post by **George Gilbert** » Wed Feb 28, 2001 1:26 pm

That's certainly an interesting idea. What do other people think about scaling monster difficulty.

Obviously when importing characters they would be stripped of any items and go in bare (which would be a slight disadvantage when importing into DM as the mirror characters mostly have stuff to start with).

Monsters could then be scaled according to either levels/ experience and/or their stats. The only practical way of scaling would be in terms of the monsters health rather than numbers (there would be a problem with allocating new squares for extra monsters to go on), but something could probably be done quite easily. The question is getting the balance right...it's certainly a good idea in principle though.

Post by **Gambit37** » Wed Feb 28, 2001 2:57 pm

I think that adapting the power of monsters to the power of the players is an excellent idea, bearing in mind that a dungeon isn't just based around the strength of it's creatures.

I don;t like the idea of stripping characters of their items beofre entering a dungeon. It always struck me as pretty stupid in CSB. I mean, you have these powerful guys that you take from DM who have all this neat gear, then suddenly they decide to try a new challenge with no clothes or anything.... bloody stupid adventurers really!

Better to only selectively strip powerful items and weapons from the player and leave them with basic things like torches and food. Though where do you draw the line... what about armour, etc? Hmm... not sure on this one.

Post by **cowsmanaut** » Wed Feb 28, 2001 3:10 pm

In D&D most DM's would would never let you use a character again once they died unless you could got the reincarnated right there by a party member.

Also after a point many of the games of D&D I played I could only use a character for so long before I had to retire them. They just get too powerfull.

I think that if you've grown your character for a long time and want to use them that's fair.. however there should be a penalty or a limiting factor. Strip them of their Items certainly seems a good Idea but what about the fact that they can still do a mon powered fireball 20 times and not break a sweat?? How do they grow if you are a mon master everything? I don't know but it just doesn't seem too fun to me to do it that way...

Scaling monsters health and armour/attack doesn't make sense to me.. it sounds very final fantasy-ish.. where monsters get tougher as go along.. I can understand a monster gaining levels itself for staying alive long enough but not just because *YOU* gained a level. When do you get that surge of gratification when you kill something that beat the piss outta you, several levels back, in one blow? You can't if it's growing as you do..

I say do something like this..

1. for every level of mastery you have you have you go down to the equal amount of levels of a beginner.
ie. 1st level master would go down to a neophyte

this gives you a chance to grow again.

2. Have a dungeon minimum entry for each stat.
ie. 250 HP 100 mana 80 stamina 100 str etc etc etc
or take a percentage off effected stats for his drop in levels.

this leaves you with something to work with and build on.

3. if you don't want to remove everything just remove all magic items. potions, swords, armour, pendants.

the justification for this could be that Chaos has sucked the essence from you when he brought you there..
Revenge for defeating him before.. but he still wants you to suffer.. a little mouse to play with before devouring you..

)

Just my personal ideas.. However the only person to suffer when bringing in too powerfull a character is the player.. they loose the challenge of the game. If they really want to make it that easy on themselves .. hey, maybe that should be their choice.. But who would want to? /:)

Post by **cowsmanaut** » Wed Feb 28, 2001 3:14 pm

I guess we agree on a couple of ideas.. but I always thought of CSB's begining as a trick played by chaos himself.. I mean who would drop them selves into the middle of a room full of Worms? I don't think it was a choice...

beowuuf · Post by **beowuuf** » Wed Feb 28, 2001 4:53 pm

I think four things:

1) We all have common sense and know if the all MON party we are taking into a small dungeon is a little too biased. Dungeon designers can actually say - 'don't play this with experienced characters..or 'don't play this with anything below adept characters', etc. when it might not be clear. I like the idea of only allowing characters from previous dungeons you know though to create sequels...i'd like that to be an extra option rather than the only one though

2) All item strip as standard - hopefully you might be dealing with new dungeons where there are no common items, and i'm guessing that comparing the inventory would be a pain for coding......Basically, it would be up to the individual dungeon designer who was allowing this option to place the marker in the 'house' of a champion, where they could pick up one or two items first before stepping into a blue haze and facing the main dungeon. Unless part of the story were that they were captured, etc...
Maybe the 'sequel' option would allow full item portability though...lol, campaign dungeons! How's that for creating a great story arch...that would be really cool infact...

3) Remember, my suggestion with the dungeon builder marking the start position rather than it being the same as the default means that parties can be started in a totally different area creating a new game for expereinced parties...so theoretically you could play the dungeon again with the party that finished it and have a totally different experience for the first few levels, if the designer has done this. Alternativly, the start position lands you on pads that trigger several bonus levels shutting down, several monster generators being activated..etc. to create blanace.

4) I do think part of the fun of gaining levels is to beat up creatures that used to be tough..having them build up to the initial level is good for start up, but shouldn't be constantly applied in the game. Maybe
like DM where the level 'depth' is set, which affects thinngs like gaining experience and creatures, a few new modifiers based on the character could also added - also customisable by the builder. Maybe there is the option to bias expereince gained (lowered) and generator toughness (increased) vs party initial stats, so that the game is harder for a more experienced party.

One final thing (ok, two related thoughts)..how about having a) the characters can be deselected before the game starts, so that only one of the four actually begins the game, etc if you want, and b) allow dead characters to be replaced from the hall of champions by others rather than still taking up a character slot. So reincarnate a character if a vi altar exists, or maybe just free a new champion instead..i don't know how this would be workable around the old champions bones though...

Wow, long post..ah well...

George Gilbert · Post by **George Gilbert** » Thu Mar 01, 2001 1:59 pm

When I said adjusting the health/number of monsters according to the party level I meant that all of that should be done once, before the party enters the dungeon.

That way, say, there will be twice as many monsters, each with double the health. Obviously as the party goes through then attacking a screamer at the end will be easier than at the start; it's just that both will be proportionatly harder than when starting the dungeon with zero experience characters.

Adjusting each monster as the party gets to it is clearly daft - everything would be the same then.

On a seperate note, mixing and matching characters from parties before merging into a new dungeon would also be easy to do...

Post by **cowsmanaut** » Fri Mar 02, 2001 7:52 am

That covers one part of it but what about not being able to gain more levels? Once you reach mon master everything you don't go up.. so you would not be getting stronger which would leave you defenceless at the later stages of the game..

theadder · Post by **theadder** » Sun Mar 04, 2001 12:21 am

Blimey, opened a can of worms there.

I would suggest that THE OPTION is there to import characters into a new game from an old one - the monsters would be scaled at the beginning of the game to match the level of the characters. Obviously people can still play the dungeon the normal way - since it is such a (relatively) simple option to add, why not add it? If someone doesn't like it, they don't have to use it.

There would, of course, come a time when characters are too good to be used in a game and create any challenge - but I have so far used DMute to carry my characters forward from DM to CSB and then on to every one of the ten+ dungeons people have made with DMute and they still haven't reached Master level so thats over ten games they have played through. Because I want to train my characters until they can't get any higher - and then I'll start again with new adventurers. My choice.

In the case that the characters being imported are already MON Masters in everything (I think thats the highest, if I remember correctly) then the game would create more monsters to make a bigger challenge. Perhaps a flag could be set in the save game to say how many times MON Master champions have played through dungeons and the monster population could get progressively higher

There would be a point where you wouldn't be able to move for monsters, of course, but then you really would have to start again.

Oh, and Final Fantasy is my favourite game ever. So there

Post by **Gambit37** » Sun Feb 01, 2004 5:08 pm

*bumping an interesting old thread that didn't yet get a final resolution*

Post by **Lunever** » Mon Feb 02, 2004 6:20 pm

Ok, RTC already does adapt monsters strength and other things, so you do have the possibility of playing with your favoured party over and over again without getting over-powered, yet I think it has been interesting to bring up that topic again.

I would really STRONGLY favour (*begging on knees*) a solution, that leaves the choice how to handle difficulty upgrade to the dungeon designer, with the following options:

1) Auto-adapt all difficulty settings to imported parties power (default).

2) Disable adaption alltogether.

3) Ban party import alltogether.

4) Allow only parties from certain dungeons.

5) Only allow complete party import (no selecting from more than 1 different savegame).

6) Only allow up to X characters to be imported.

7) Individually set every aspect of adaption: Whether monster speed and/or armor/health and/or attack/damage and/or maybe IQ should be adapted, whether drain of food and/or water and/or stamina should be increased.

8 ) Set conditions like: IF party is imported from dungeon XXX THEN disable auto-adaption ELSE adapt monster SPEED only.

I hope very much that George will include such options in some future version.

beowuuf · Post by **beowuuf** » Mon Feb 02, 2004 6:42 pm

3 you can do by simply dumping an import party in a dungeon sqaure with a wall text saying 'no importing allowed in this dungon'

i can't imagine 4) or

being easily doable, but 7) would be very welcome!

George Gilbert · Post by **George Gilbert** » Tue Feb 03, 2004 11:06 am

To confirm beowuufs comments and expand...

1) Done.
2) Could do.
3) Can be achieved - put a duff location as the import tile
4) Almost impossible to codify sensibly
5) Messy, but possible.
6) I like it - good suggestion.
7) Messy, but possible.
8) Messy combination of 4 and 7 (so very messy!)

Overall, I think 1 and 6 have the highest priority of being done then 7 (which would automatically do 2) and possibly make 3 more explicit.

4, 5 and 8 are very unlikely I'm afraid...

Post by **Lunever** » Tue Feb 03, 2004 12:36 pm

Well, if you could do 7 I'd be more than happy!

Post by **Lunever** » Wed Jun 30, 2004 6:16 pm

*bump*
Since V 0.29 seems to be near and this is what I would wish for more than any other fix/improvement: Pleeease!!!!

George Gilbert · Post by **George Gilbert** » Thu Jul 01, 2004 10:04 am

As suggested I've implemented option 6). There's a new "MAX_PARTY_SIZE" parameter in the dungeon text file that takes a value of 1 to 4. That number is the maximum you can have in a party either through imports, selection from mirrors (or both).

Post by **Lunever** » Sat Jul 03, 2004 6:23 pm

Yes, but as I said before (and have some support in this by Beowuuf and Kaspian also said to me that he would welcome it): It may be messy, but it is 7) that I desire most. After playing RTC for a while on high difficulty levels I got the hang of fast and aggressive monsters. Playing any DungeonMaster-version/clone without this seems utterly boring to me now, because with the only exception of some tricky rooms, a normal monster encounter at normal slow speed like most regular encouners in the DM- and CSB-Dungeon is not a challenge to a really experienced DM-veteran. But on the other hand, the incredibly tight time limit and necessity of slaying hundreds and thousands of screamers and rats resulting from the fast stamina&food-drain that comes inevitably with the fast monsters spoils the game totally for me. That's why I haven't played RTC for monthes now. If you could implement just this one configuration option - to be able to remove/reduce drain adaption from the overall difficulty auto-adaption - it would increase the fun of playing RTC very very much for me. It would be ok if such savegames disqualify for the global HoC or somehow get reduced in score, but it would make RTC playable again for me. So please, even if it may be messy, add just this one aspect of 7) and I promise I'll stop pestering you with it.

copperman · Post by **copperman** » Sat Jul 03, 2004 9:57 pm

Could (7) be implimented initially as a design time thing, so dungeon designers have more control over difficulty settings. This would allow you to fine tune your dungeon to avoid the "the over drain" on stats at high level.

George Gilbert · Post by **George Gilbert** » Mon Jul 05, 2004 10:23 am

I think the issue here is that the food drain is out of proportion with the increased speed of monsters. The fix is to make them consistent in the code rather than have it as a run-time option.

The stated aim of the difficulty modifier is to make the game "impossible" at archmaster level. It seems that that is pretty much the case for the food side of things, but not the monsters, so I think I should up the difficulty of the monsters so that they become "impossible" to beat at archmaster too...

Post by **Lunever** » Mon Jul 05, 2004 10:57 am

Ok, if you do this, then I have to ask you, whether you would allow a manual difficulty adaption in the config for import games too instead of the auto-adaption. I want to remimport my old party into the DM and CSB-Dungeons. I want to have fast and aggressive opponents challenging me and my party. I do not want to play under time-pressure resulting from over-drain. I do not care HOW this can be achived, all I care for is, THAT it will be achieved. I know that this will increase the fun I personally can have with RTC very very much, and after all: That's what a game is for, isn't it? And that's, what difficulty settings are for, to adapt the game to the individual player, right?

Post by **Lunever** » Fri Sep 10, 2004 2:30 pm

*bumping the most important issue for V 0.29* !!!

George Gilbert · Post by **George Gilbert** » Mon Sep 27, 2004 10:58 am

Fixed for V0.29.

As mentioned lots before Archmaster level is meant to be impossible. Therefore I've left the food drain as is, but massively increased the speed, health and damaged caused by monsters so that they're in proportion. The higher difficulty levels should therefore now provide a more balanced challenge!

Post by **Lunever** » Thu Sep 30, 2004 5:42 pm

Well, too bad, for I think the monster speed and strength had been perfectly balanced, at Archmaster the monsters had been exactly at a speed, that was just on the edge of still being playable.
So if you say "fixed", does that mean you only changed the above-mentioned settings to make the high difficulty levels completely inoperable, or does "fixed" also inlcude any means to override the auto-adaption of the engine? I would just like to know, because in any case I won't continue asking you, for if you include it, I will be happy and don't ask for any further changes, and if you already have decided that you don't want and will not inlcude it, RTC will not be of any further interest to me anyway.

George Gilbert · Post by **George Gilbert** » Fri Oct 01, 2004 10:03 am

The best bet is to play it and see. It's all very well talking about what stat has gone up and what's gone down, and I could even quote numbers at you (such and such is now 20% more or whatever) but that would be pretty meaningless against playability.

Try it; if you like iy great, if it's still unbalanced then we'll have another go at tweaking the parameters.

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Portablility of characters

Portablility of characters

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Re: Portablility of characters

Re: Portablility of characters

Re: Portablility of characters

Yes but..

hey I guess we were answering that at the same tim

Re: Portablility of characters

Re: Portablility of characters

Yes but..

Re: Portablility of characters