Grimrock

Jgwman wrote:Isaac, you're making a Bog room; what party/champion level is that designed around?

It would be nice to know; right now I don't. However I can always tweak it to better match the expected party, or fit the difficulty level needed.

I'll have to take a look at Xanathar's bog room.

Implemented the progression for all areas up until the final encounter area, and sent the file to minmay. For now, I'm requiring 9 ores to continue to Twisted Forest and Dark Tower (don't know off the top of my head how many rooms offer ore, but this number can easily be changed). If you have any pre-Twisted Forest room and the quest reward isn't 1 meteorite ore, let me know and we can fix during testing (Eleven Warrior, yours was 3 and I went ahead and changed it to 1). Quest rewards should still match exactly to what the PDF file in the mod files says (meteorite before forest, remains in forest, "or3_power_crystal" in Dark Tower).

All that's left is implementation according to the schedule above, adding texture/GUI icon for "or3_ore_meteorite", making and adding texture for "or3_anvil" (need someone to help with this), and making the final boss. Then we just need to do testing/balancing, make the intro sequence/trailer and get this thing released

We're going to act for now as if John's room is done, and if we get to release time and still no contact we can figure out where to go from there.

Like I said, I'll be out of town around 6/3 - 6/6 and likely won't have internet, but other than that I'll be hanging around to keep things moving!

Isaac: Xanathar's bog room is medium difficulty: large concentration of fairly easy mobs around entrance, two 350HP minibosses in small rooms. Basically, make it however hard you want, but keep in mind it's pre-Twisted Forest/Dark Tower (other than that could be completed very early or late relatively depending on the player's preference).

Should the reward for my second room (both in asylum) also be 'or3_ore_meteorite'?
BTW: My second room is almost ready, still needs lore and some tweaks, but it will be ready for implementation on the due date.

Also any suggestions on monster levels for asylum is welcome, this is something we can tweak once all rooms are ready, but I gladly take suggestions already so I can tweak monster levels in both my rooms when implementing the second one.

Yep, we're just having everything be open for ore collection before Twisted Forest.

Don't have a great idea of a level to tell you yet. Should be 4 ore collection areas where catacombs is easy and the other three can vary a bit, just being easier than Twisted Forest. I'll have a better idea soon; for now just go with what you did in your first room.

I've finished my room and passed things on to aaneton. I ended up including both the high-detail and low-detail versions of my room; see the readme.

I have a few concerns about this project.

First of all: do we have anyone to actually finish the levels? All the outdoor areas, including the graveyard, are completely missing decorations and don't even have reflection maps, except inside some people's rooms. And the areas outside of any rooms still need to be made for real. People seem to be glossing over this. It needs to be dealt with. There are also no appropriate ambient tracks for the outdoor areas...
Also, why are there instant death traps in the Hall of Mages basement?
I can finish, decorate, and score the intermediate areas if you want.

Second: WTF are these "new" races/classes/skills for? I hope these are not going into the release version, they add nothing to the game except player confusion.

Third: rendering performance. In ORRR1 and 2, rooms were placed such that they would mostly occlude each other thanks to the level geometry, and in ORRR2 there was a (complex, and held together by prayers and twine) system to destroy lights etc. that were not in the current room.
But this round seems to be using the honor system for occlusion, and nobody is obeying it. Most of the rooms do not occlude each other, especially not in the outdoor areas. This leads to serious performance problems. My room fully occludes its exterior while the player is inside, and fully occludes its interior and disposes of most lights while the player is outside, but this means little if nobody else does it.

Fourth: The combat balance is HORRIBLY out of whack.
Most of the early rooms are too damage-heavy for the level of parties that are supposed to do them. I am very good at optimizing parties and
exploiting monster AI so I didn't ever die or anything, but I imagine less experienced players will die excessively.
THOM forces the party to eat two fireballs in a row, then a third one later, and that's if the player knows about the trap in advance; then they encounter a monster that will probably total party kill if they decide to see what its attack does. Furthermore, if you enter his room you are forced to complete it before you can leave, so unless the player stashed a saved game from before the room, they might restart entirely if
they get stuck. Also, you can render items permanently inaccessible by putting them in a chamber that permanently closes once you kill the goromorg (why does it close, anyway?)
Azel has a timed challenge that kills you if you take too long and makes you avoid lots of monsters at once, with almost no indication of how you're actually supposed to get out of the pit (trial and error), and of course any items you leave down there are lost forever - potentially rendering the game unwinnable.
Dhomochevsky's room spawns monsters right next to the player with no warning, and has mosquito swarms and an ogre that takes ages to kill...
Xanathar's room starts with an encounter with multiple overleveled ratlings in a place where there's no open space, so most parties can only kill them by ladder dancing (quite tedious), and also has mosquito swarms (the blockers make most of them not really a threat, but that's rather bad).
And all of these rooms are encountered very early when the party is level 1-6, and has almost no equipment and very little damage output.
Don't lose sight of your target demographic, not everyone playing this is as good at combat as you, and unlike you, they aren't going to know everything about your room in advance.
I would suggest that if you want to make very difficult combat or puzzles, you make them optional, instead of requiring them to get the quest item. You can still reward the players that tackle them by awarding a secret and some loot.
Or, geez, at least pick a later room if you want to throw a bunch of high-level monsters at the player...having encounters where it takes a gruelingly long time to kill monsters looks really unprofessional, and makes the mod suck to play.

Seriously, Azel and THOM's rooms, which are ostensibly supposed to be seen by level 1 parties, have more damage and higher level monsters than the Asylum rooms and Skuggasveinn's room. That's ridiculous. Dhomochevsky's room does more damage to the party than any other room in the mod despite supposedly being mid-level. These NEED to be adjusted or this dungeon is going to be borderline unplayable.

Finally: this needs an actual team of testers. This is really the most important point. Don't want to release something broken.

Here are the bugs I have found:
AdrTru's room:
- FATAL: The game crashes if you exit the room while you have ceremonial arrows inside a container.
- MAJOR: The flute sounds are played way too loud, producing clipping, especially when several are played at once. This is exacerbated by the wind noise also being extremely loud.
- MAJOR: The SoundComponents need to be cleaned up better after playing the melody; they all play at once if the game is saved and reloaded, which is likely to damage the player's ears.
- MAJOR: It's easy to toss arrows over the water, rendering them inaccessible and the room impossible to complete. One could also kill both archers without getting any arrows from them, and it seems you need at least one.
- MAJOR: The archer doors open on the 7th and 14th notes even if those notes are wrong, as long as the previous notes were correct...which permanently prevents the player from getting the rewards, because they check whether the doors are open to determine whether the rewards have already been given. So if they get the first 13 notes right but the 14th note wrong, the room becomes permanently unwinnable and they cannot get the meteorite ore.

Azel's room:
- MAJOR: Elevator's speed changes with framerate, which is very bad. It needs to scale its velocity with Time.deltaTime() and update every frame (timerInterval of 0).
- Minor: You can fall into the obstacle at 11, 21.

Dhomochevsky's room:
- Minor: You can fall into the pushable blocks.
- Minor: The bounding box on the flying crow is wrong, causing it to be occluded when it shouldn't be (and not occluded when it should).

Duncan's room:
- MAJOR: A wall is used as a secret door, even though that wall has an occluder and minimalSaveState, meaning it is broken in two ways: it re-closes every time game is reloaded, and it occludes things behind it even when it's open.
- MAJOR: Walking into the north area seems to trap the party behind mine_door_spear_8 permanently?
- MAJOR: The air elemental spam in the south area is ridiculous; you can fill the whole area with elementals, or farm them for experience. Why doesn't the spawner only activate once?

Eleven Warrior's room:
- Minor: Several of the gravestones have empty text.
- Minor: An hudPrint which I assume is supposed to be a party member's voice refers to "we", but the player could be playing with only a single party member.

Jgwman's room:
- FATAL: Taking the items out of the chest removes the player's ability to save because you used upvalues in serialized functions. I didn't have time to finish this room.

Skuggasveinn's room:
- Minor: You can walk into the wall at 21,24 in the Abandoned Mine.

sps999's room:
- MAJOR: The automatically closing door at 27, 3 can be held open for a short time by simply pressing the button repeatedly, which allows the party to become trapped inside the room behind it, or simply retrieve the bear claw without fighting the spiders in the pit.

The Cube's room:
- FATAL: Clicking on the text box when suggesting something dangerous for the sign causes a crash.
- FATAL: Putting the essences of air on the beacon pedestals causes a crash if you have not destroyed the counterweights yet.

THOM's room:
- Minor: You can avoid being trapped by the force field that appears when you place a Gem of Might by simply strafing left or right while placing it.

Xanathar's room:
- Minor: The fire and ice runes have WallTextComponents that don't say anything?

Other bugs:
- Minor: Someone broke the fw hook for onDrawGui.
- MAJOR: In the abandoned town at 24,16, someone used a plain wall as a door. That wall object has minimalSaveState so it will close again when the game is saved and reloaded, potentially trapping the player. I don't understand why this secret door is even there in the first place.



Other thoughts:
- Unless someone is going to come up with more cohesive NPC interaction, the abandoned town should actually be abandoned (get rid of the ratlings). A bunch of identical rapier-wielding ratlings just standing around looks silly, especially when they don't care about being attacked or having things stolen before their eyes...
- ORRR2 had full support for Toorum mode; should we have that in ORRR3 as well? At the very least, people should make sure their rooms work for single-character (or two-character or three-character) parties since those are possible to start with in Grimrock 2.
- Someone's going to have to go back after all the rooms are done, and adjust the loot given out. Right now everyone seems to have conspired to not include any good heavy weapons, whereas you can get a sickle sword pretty early.

I've already discussed with John that my room might be too strong. I didn't refused that. We ended up with having things tweaked at the finishing process.

I don't know when it's a good point to sort things out you mentioned. If it's now - I can do my part. But don't we need some more playtesting before we change things in one direction and have them perhaps change back if we made them too hasty?

Of course the rooms needn't be rebalanced right away, I'm saying it needs to be done eventually.

AdrTru's room:
- FATAL: The game crashes if you exit the room while you have ceremonial arrows inside a container.
- MAJOR: The flute sounds are played way too loud, producing clipping, especially when several are played at once. This is exacerbated by the wind noise also being extremely loud.
- MAJOR: The SoundComponents need to be cleaned up better after playing the melody; they all play at once if the game is saved and reloaded, which is likely to damage the player's ears.
- MAJOR: It's easy to toss arrows over the water, rendering them inaccessible and the room impossible to complete. One could also kill both archers without getting any arrows from them, and it seems you need at least one.
- MAJOR: The archer doors open on the 7th and 14th notes even if those notes are wrong, as long as the previous notes were correct...which permanently prevents the player from getting the rewards, because they check whether the doors are open to determine whether the rewards have already been given. So if they get the first 13 notes right but the 14th note wrong, the room becomes permanently unwinnable and they cannot get the meteorite ore.

Realy thank you for testing and feedback. You are the one.
I want to fix my bugs, in time when project will be free.

Thank you Minmay for both the file and your extensive testing. In ORRR2 I remeber we had probably +1000 issues we fixed before release. Once ala rooms are implemented we'll have testing rounds and release candidate rounds. Then we can also do moster level tweaking. But of course any bugs found now is helpful.

I will try to get my second room implemented to main file I send it forward at latest on upcoming thursday.