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Dimensional Sundial, holiday items and Roguelike-ness (discuss.tchncs.de)
submitted 1 month ago by basxto@discuss.tchncs.de to c/pixeldungeon@lemmy.world
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I started wondering whether this breaks Roguelike-ness, since a run gets influenced by external factors.

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[-] TrashboxBobylev@lemmy.world 2 points 1 month ago

It depends on your scale of dedication to exact definitions.

Holiday foods are deliberately designed to be nice subversions of pasty, but not something you would depend on (mostly due to rarity).

Dimensional Sundial is a reference to vanilla's day and night differences, and could be seen as detrimental, depending on how you handle increased spawns. Also you choose to invest into it and don't get it every time.

[-] cevn@lemmy.world 2 points 1 month ago

Ever play Nethack? It had events for Friday the 13th and new moons. Maybe full ones too?

[-] basxto@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 1 month ago

That’s a good point and for later reference: Time @ NethackWiki

But I never really played. At most a few times, but not enough to run into something like this.

I pretty much only played Pixel Dungeon, Shattered Pixel Dungeon, Brogue and Dungeons of Dredmor.

But this is probably more an issue for speedruns than roguelikes, because I somewhat assumed that runs should be deterministic.

[-] CrayonRosary@lemmy.world 1 points 1 month ago

I somewhat assumed that runs should be deterministic.

Then you have to throw trinkets like Mossy Clump, too. It changes entire floors. Same with Trap Mechanism.

Also, if you spend more time on a floor than other people, more enemies spawn. So the game is not even deterministic in that way without the sundial.

[-] basxto@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 1 month ago

No I mean that exactly the same inputs on the same seed with same class have the same results (moving, attacking, alchemy, giving talent points…), but that depends pretty much just on how RNG works. Hero's remains break that a bit, since your last run influences your current one.

[-] 00_Evan@lemmy.world 2 points 1 month ago

That doesn't happen actually, only levelgen is affected by the dungeon seed, after that things like combat rolls and enemy drops are totally random. I made the choice to handle it that was as normal players would have their RNG diverge almost immediately anyway, and I wanted to prevent strats like 'do this specific sequence of inputs to spawn a thief on floor 4 and have it always drop an artifact'

[-] basxto@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 1 month ago

Understandable, but sad. Though deterministic RNG is indeed extreme in some way. But that means levelgen related items are deterministic?

On the other hand it could allow recording and replaying run with minimal data needed (the inputs)

I’d say the risk is low, since seeded runs are unranked and excluded from achievements. Such instruction would only work for a specific version. General "tips & tricks" tutorials already have issues with not being up-to-date and "the wiki" to keep up with new and changing content.

It would allow something similar to speedrunning (more about amount of inputs than time), which is always a very different way of playing games. Especially tool assisted speedruns would circumvent permadeath and unidentified items. But there are already speedruns happening, they just have to depend on the fixed items. Though the UI already does a good job in distinguishing game modes. It’s pretty clear in any screenshot or screen recording which version was used and if it’s a custom seed (stairs colors).

If the enemies don’t move in the same way, that would make TASing (basically botting) impossible. But there are always ways to automate inputs, since any device can pretend to be a USB keyboard/mouse/gamepad

[-] 00_Evan@lemmy.world 1 points 1 month ago

Replaying runs is not that simple I'm afraid. Firstly the RNG must be perfectly deterministic for every single action and reaction in the game (harder from a coding standpoint that you might think), and replays would break any time the game is updated.

[-] Vencedor@lemmy.world 1 points 1 month ago

Technically, the RNG is still deterministic. Technically, the whole universe is, actually, and we don't have free will, but, going back to RNG, yeah, it still is deterministic

[-] miaomix@lemm.ee 1 points 1 month ago

OG Pixel Dungeon had day-night spawn rate differences too. And I'm told DCSS has something affected by lunar cycles?

Not sure what the answer is, but SPD isn't the only game that has this.

this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2024
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