Re: My take on the Unique Quests/Castle in Scorn thing

[Peter Mardahl <peterm@tesla.EECS.Berkeley.EDU>]

> On Tue, 13 Jun 2000, Peter Mardahl wrote:
> 
> 
>    Yeah, it sounds like you've got a set of standard quests that consist
> of finishing random maps. As my main experience of the random maps is the
> one next to the Jones' House, I don't know *that* much about them. Do I
> take it you get the code to place specific items somewhere in the random
> maps, to finish the quests?

One of the features of the random map generator is that you can
specify the dungeon depth and the map at the end.  I.e., you can say,
"after 5 levels of random maps, load this named (non-random) map
and put the player in it.  All of the quest maps have a "last" map
that I designed, though they're not anything very special.

>   I mainly wrote because I felt my idea had some merits, and I wanted
> it to have some chance before your version was all done and established
> (does that sound nasty? not meant to), such that either my (imaginary)
> code could go into the game and your new maps could use it, or perhaps
> some of my ideas could get incorporated into your mapset in some way. Or
> something.

Your idea does have merit.  It would be cool.  It also doesn't conflict
with what I've done already at all, IMHO.

>   Are the ranks implemented by placing special invisible rank items in
> the player inventory, or by other, new means? Do you have some way (like
> check-inv tiles) to only allow entry to players who've been given quests,
> and block those who've finished them? Or are the quests open to all?

The quests are open to all.  However, attaining the ranks in the
HallOfQuests must be done in order, and are open to one player at a
time only.  Ranks are implemented by using invisible objects in
the player's inventory.  These ranks can be detected by certain objects
in the game such as "check inv".

> difficult and awkward to make, but powerful). Quests for high priests
> might result in getting very unusual blessings from gods.

Yeah, this would be cool.

> > I wrote the random map part.  :)  How about you write the rest?  :P
> 
>   Yeah, obviously if I want it, it's right and fair I should write it...
> I was kind of hoping everyone else would want it ;) Apart from that, I'm
> not going to start applying effort to this if everyone says it's no good
> or that they prefer your implementation. And finally, I haven't written
> any proper code for some time now, my C skills are kind of ropey, and
> I don't know the CF code enough (ie-at all) to know where to put the new
> necessary bits.

Well, as I said, random quests seem like a fine idea, and to do it,
you'd probably want to use my random map code.  I truly don't see any
conflict between anything you've proposed and anything I've done:  in
fact, the contrary:  stuff I've written makes your stuff possible.  
(E.G., the random map code, the marker object...)

PeterM