Re: Bug#718323: RFS: hyperrogue/3.7+dfsg-1 [ITP] -- non-euclidean graphical rogue-like game

2013-08-03 Thread Adam Borowski
On Fri, Aug 02, 2013 at 01:21:26PM +0200, chrysn wrote:
 On Wed, Jul 31, 2013 at 12:39:13AM +0200, Adam Borowski wrote:
  If the player grinds long enough, he will gain access to an unfinished
  land that doesn't work yet.  In game.cpp, you'd want to comment out
  the following lines:
if(tkills() = 2000  gold() = 2000)
  tab[cnt++] = laCocytus;
 
 that's far beyond the game's high score

Well, this is a roguelike game, and thus, players looking for degenerate
ways to break the game is probably more prevalent than playing it straight.

I've found three ways to get an infinite score so far (bounded by patience,
as it's hard to connect a bot to a graphics-only game):

* Alchemist Lab (tested):
  0. don't touch any gold anywhere else
  1. get 30 gold in, say, the Jungle
  2. stand at the edge of the Lab with no Jungle in sight, kill 5000 slimes
  3. harvest infinite gold with no slimes being able to spawn
* sandworm farming (tested):
  1. find a Desert entrance that forms a corridor
 a. they sometimes occur naturally
 b. Living Caves trolls can be used for terrain modification
 c. a well-fed sandworm with its head out of range stays dormant
  2. ensure no interlopers come from the other side.  This might be either
 a land you picked no gold in (thus no respawns), a trolled-off
 Living Cave, crossroads with all lands in sight harmless (Lab,
 Eternal Motion, overgrown Jungle, blocked Living Caves), etc
  3. kill all spawning desert men, watch sandworms explode, pick up spice
* edge dipping:
  1. take gold from only one land
  2. walk in a safe[ish] land, at some distance parallel to an edge
  3. find an entrance with no other entrances close
  4. fight hordes upon hordes of pre-spawned enemies
  5. walk closer, fighting respawns, and hordes from areas that just came
 into view
  6. grab a few gold (there's one in every cell, but dipping too far wakes
 new hordes, and respawns come too fast)
  7. tediously repeat the whole process
  This works for only some combinations of farmed/safe lands, it is easy
  to make a mistake, and I have no proof it can be done infinitely.

You may edit the source to set a land's items/monsters to 10, this is
an easy way to see how a land degenerates, and to test strategies how to
keep collecting gold even in such a degenerate state.

Possible fixes against these strategies:
* allow purple slimes to spawn on items, or
* don't allow any spawn chance to reach 100% (other than asymptotically)
* allow sandworms out of the Desert

 cocytus may be visually and balancing-wise unfinished, but it's not like
 it makes the game crash.  (it's inaccessible even without orbs of
 teleport).

I'd say it's in a bad enough state that it shouldn't spawn in a released
version, and thus if I were you, I'd comment that out.

  The desc of Dead Orb (classes.cpp) is actively misleading: it claims
  these orbs have no use, while they can be used to flip slime colours.
  No matter what is one's stance on spoilers, documentation shouldn't
  outright lie.
 
 i think it's ok for an in-game help (which the text in classes.cpp is;
 it gets displayed when pressing F1 on the orb item) in a role playing
 game to lie, even more to omit particular uses. (i presume its primary
 use is to serve as breadcrumbs to mark the way back to an orb of yendor
 from its key).

Even games that heavily rely on spoilers (like Nethack) don't provide false
information, merely omit it.  It's especially jarring in a spoiler-less
game like Hyperrogue where the docs are otherwise complete[1].

What about a wording like [...] No _apparent_ way to use them [...]?


[1]. Other than the bizarre rules for greater-lesser demon conversion in
Hell.
-- 
ᛊᚨᚾᛁᛏᚣ᛫ᛁᛊ᛫ᚠᛟᚱ᛫ᚦᛖ᛫ᚹᛖᚨᚲ


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Re: Bug#718323: RFS: hyperrogue/3.7+dfsg-1 [ITP] -- non-euclidean graphical rogue-like game

2013-07-30 Thread Adam Borowski
On Tue, Jul 30, 2013 at 10:23:54AM +0200, chrysn wrote:
 * Package name: hyperrogue

Why do you use ttf-bitstream-vera?  fonts-dejavu-core is a superset, and
is installed on about every X-capable Debian system thanks to existing
dependencies.  Upstream wants an ASCII-only font for a smaller download,
but in Debian that's a net loss of both disk space and memory.

There's quite a few projects shipping a convenience copy of vera that's
patched away using dejavu in Debian.  Please, join the club.


A few upstreamish issues:

The window's title is Untitled window.  You want to call
SDL_WM_SetCaption().

If the player grinds long enough, he will gain access to an unfinished
land that doesn't work yet.  In game.cpp, you'd want to comment out
the following lines:
  if(tkills() = 2000  gold() = 2000)
tab[cnt++] = laCocytus;

The desc of Dead Orb (classes.cpp) is actively misleading: it claims
these orbs have no use, while they can be used to flip slime colours.
No matter what is one's stance on spoilers, documentation shouldn't
outright lie.

-- 
ᛊᚨᚾᛁᛏᚣ᛫ᛁᛊ᛫ᚠᛟᚱ᛫ᚦᛖ᛫ᚹᛖᚨᚲ


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