Talk:Linley's Dungeon Crawl

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Contents 1 "Internal Structure Explained" 2 "Internal Structure?" 3 Appearance of "typical screen" 4 New crawl?

[edit] "Internal Structure Explained"

The statment "First modern internal structure utilizing extensive data tables for almost all things in the game" means that Crawl was the first game that abandoned the traditional model for its content. Traditionaly, early roguelikes consisted of multiple levels of "if then else" logic to acomplish management and retrieval of game data. This has significant drawbacks in that

a) it hides the probability distribution of different objects in the game (e.g., an over-abundance of gold would quickly unbalance the game), b) it makes it signficantly easier to introduce bugs since each object has its own logic implemented in source code c) it makes it significantly harder to maintain and expand the game (i.e., adding a new object requires many changes)

For background, consider that the original roguelike game 'Rogue' has around 125 things in the game. Crawl, by contrast, has many hundreds of items. This greatly increases the task of making sure thoes items make for good balanced gameplay.

[edit] "Internal Structure?"

On the page currently, I see: "First modern internal structure utilizing extensive data tables for almost all things in the game"

1. Does that even mean anything, and
2. if it means what I guess it might conceivably mean, how can it possibly be true?

I'm inclined to just delete it as nonsense. Nandesuka 05:13, 19 July 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Appearance of "typical screen"

For an ASCII game, this screen rendering includes a surprising proportion of Unicode characters, and the results (on my browser) seem nonsensical. Not sure if this section is desirable, but if it is a simpler dump is probably in order. Hv 22:25, 22 July 2005 (UTC)

If anyone has interest, feel free to use this screenshot I made for purposes of sharing with my friends. This is a literal exact copy and paste of the characters used by the game on Linux, with only the colors (understandably) removed. http://kmods.dyndns.org/~jrodman/orcs.txt You are free to use this text under any terms of your choosing, whether they be GFDL, general open content. I make no restrictions at all about the reuse of it, nor I think am I entitled to for so trivial a document. JoshuaRodman 07:14, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] New crawl?

Does anyone know if a new version of Crawl is being worked on?

Current crawl development seems to be mostly centered around a yahoo group http://groups.yahoo.com/group/crawl-dev/ Discussion there is so slow at the moment, however, that I wonder if they have found an alternate location to work on crawl. Certainly development was occuring out of sight among a few key folks. In any event you can download 4.1.2 beta from this group after joining, although one of the key developers, Darshan, said in usenet post Jan 2006, "And as that URL suggests, 4.1 is in alpha right now... 4.1 shows lots of promise, but it's not quite playable yet." He doesn't mean literally, since I've built and played it a bit, but I guess it is not baked.

Also, this appears to be a currentish resource, http://www.thewholeclan.com/will/crawl/index.php/Main_Page although the best resource is rec.games.roguelike.misc JoshuaRodman 07:11, 21 January 2006 (UTC)