Talk:Linley's Dungeon Crawl

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Contents

[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.

As noted in the Talk section following, but just for the record, this is nonsense. Moreover, I can state with some authority that the above claim is not true on several levels even as Crawl was being reworked for version 4.0.0. During that development cycle, many instances of the noted if-then-else management logic were rewritten, and as a part-time developer then I can attest that points (a), (b), and (c) above were rampant issues even so far along the development curve. If Crawl introduced any programmatic approach, it wasn't the one mentioned here. Linley himself was always quite quick to point out that he had learned to program by writing Crawl, as anyone who has inspected the code at length will surmise. Perhaps things are different with regards to the internals of DCSS. D. Brodale (talk) 07:17, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

[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)

Crawl is being worked on at http://crawl-ref.sourceforge.net/.

[edit] Significance

I think this article would be served by a write-up of the defining and significant features of Crawl. At present, there does not seem to be ample evidence as to why Crawl is a notable game in its genre. It is. Some things off the top of my head, most in terms relative to the roguelikes in existence at the time of its original authoring by Linley:

  • Depth of play/complexity in player characters (choice, choice, choice)
  • Emphasis on skills against "simple" leveling
  • Two-tiered magic system (both mnemonic and skill-based)
  • Reputation as one of the more challenging titles to complete
  • Diversity in role of religion/worship
  • Tiered artifacting (fixed magical artifacts and semirandom ones)
  • Popularity on Usenet, at times overwhelming r.g.r.misc, periodically the source for calls to split into a new group
  • Thorough level persistence (maps, objects, and monsters)
  • UI (I cannot recall (m)any roguelikes that recentered the play area as the player moved when Crawl was introduced)

Of course, some of these may be colored from my perspective as a past developer. D.brodale 21:58, 2 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] DSCrawl

Strangely enough, the page hosting DSCrawl went AWOL in the past two weeks. By chance, can someone please relocate it or remove this link, as its maintainer seems unable to stabilize its hosting. D.brodale 09:57, 12 July 2007 (UTC)


[edit] Version

Which version ought this article to focus on? I was going to edit it to reflect the addition of Lugonu and Beogh and the deletion of Hill Dwarves and common Elves, but then it occurred to me that all these changes are in Stone Soup only. Ekaterin 15:29, 12 November 2007 (UTC)

I'd first ask whether the mentioned differences are notable or "game guide"ish. Seems to me to be the latter. D. Brodale 20:14, 12 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] New Version of Stone Soup

The blurb about Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup near the bottom was recently updated by myself to reflect the release of the new 0.3.4 version as of January 28th 2008. For some reason this keeps reverting to mention only the old version 0.3.3. Why does this keep happening?

Not sure what you're talking about. I see no such reversion having taken place. D. Brodale (talk) 09:01, 1 February 2008 (UTC)