[Game] Dungeontest (very WIP)

[Ferk]

He asked nicely. He even said he checked out my game and liked it.

I was thinking about being nice and changing the name if I come up with something that sounds good. But so far I didn't find any name I liked. Dungeontest is very appropriate for a Minetest game.

I suggested him to keep both names and see.. it wouldn't be the first time 2 open source projects have the same name. After all I think my game is not very popular outside of the Minetest community, so I doubt it would hurt him. If in the future any of the projects gets popular enough that the conflict starts being annoying we could always change it.

I'm not gonna spend money on registering a trademark, so if he actually does register it I might have to change the name. However, it's unclear to me how this would apply in the internet.. I mean, if for example someone registers a trademark in the UK for Dungeontest and I live in Germany, would I be forced to change it?

[BobbyBonsaimind]

Without being a lawyer, no, it would not effect you in any way as long as the other party does not have a Europe wide, or even world wide trademark. If the trademark is registered in the UK, the other party (or sometimes it's enough if the servers are) must be in the UK, otherwise there's pretty much nothing you can do except spit out threats which you can't keep.

There are few examples of naming collisions, one of the most prominent ones is Chromium, both being a game and a browser. The problem which might arise is the usage of names for repositories, if the other one *also* wants a repository on Github, though, it is of course not unheard of to add a prefix or postfix to the name to make the repository unique again.

[Wuzzy]

I won't comment on the trademark thing, but if possible you both should somehow try to arrange that both projects have different names in the end, simply for practical reasons to avoid a naming collision and thus confusion.

I also don't care much which project will be named “Dungeontest” in the end or even if any project is called “Dungeontest” as long as the names are different.
But I would slightly prefer your project to keep its name because you used the name first and the name “Dungeontest” is accociated with this game (at least for me xD). If suddenly the other project will take the name “Dungeontest” and your project won't, it can be the cause of some confusion. This may be an issue the other party might consider.
Especially if the other project is also a Minetest subgame.
If not, then a naming collision might only be slightly annoying, since I consider Minetest subgames to kinda have their own “name space”.

Please note: I am arguing purely from a practical viewpoint here, not from a legal or moral one.

[npx]

Good work! Your subgame is amazing!

[Neuromancer]

This is an awesome subgame. I was wanting to do something incredibly similar but as a mod.
https://forum.minetest.net/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=13887 Ruben Wardy pointed out that you had already done most of what I wanted. But what I would like is to take this, and this work with the regular game, meaning, dungeons are not everywhere, they appear randomly and of different sizes. If I just wanted rooms, traps, mob spawners and loot, but not all of the other stuff, do you have any ideas if your subgame could be changed to do that? Could I just rip out a bunch of mods and change a few config files? or would I have to re-code the whole thing? I'm looking to use it as a mod, not a sub-game. How hard would it be to make the dungeons not go on forever but spawn randomly of random size?

[Don]

I can not speak for Ferk but what I think is that this game is too advanced to be a mod. It would take a lot of work to change it to be a mod. You would be better off making a few schematics and then have blocks to spawn them similar to my mymineshafts.

Make a few schematic. Say you have 5 different ones. You just need to do math.random (1,5). That ill make it so you have different ones. Use minetest.register_ore to place the spawner blocks so that they are randomly place throughout the underground.

Ferk is far beyond me in programming skills so he might have better suggestions. I hope what I have said helps.

[Ferk]

The current version of Dungeontest no longer generates dungeons that are infinite across the X-Z plane of the map. Each dungeon is limited to 5x5 rooms in the XZ plane (80x80 nodes.. ideally matching a mapchunk). They are only infinite in depth (Y axis, so you can keep going deeper and deeper down the dungeon), and in number (immediately next to each dungeon there's another independent dungeon, but not interconnected).

This means that, in theory, it would be possible to add an optional probability for dungeons to be generated. This way you could leave big random gaps, and have, for example, only 10% of the underground be replaced with dungeons.

But, like Don, I don't think this should be a mod. There are many aspects that have to be balanced and the dungeon might not work very well depending on how your game is. I depend on some manipulation of the default mod. Also I'm disabling some things that could spawn in the underground and interfere with the dungeon (this doesn't mean they couldn't be re-added, but perhaps not in the same way). Not to mention the changes in crafting/mining.

What kind of game experience are you looking for? I didn't get rid of much of the stuff in default (at the moment), so most mods are compatible with Dungeontest, maybe we could come up with some way to make it possible to have an interesting survival experience outside of the dungeon as well. The thing is that I wouldn't want to change too much the mining and crafting limits inside the dungeon to prevent exploits. But it would probably be interesting to see if we can come up with some tools or some mechanics to overcome the limitations when in the surface, which might give another interesting aspect to the game.

But the point of Dungeontest is the dungeons, so while I'm open to improving the surface, anything too crazy would make more sense as a mod that could be combined with this game. After all, like I said, mods that just add stuff to the surface of vanilla Minetest would work all the same in Dungeontest.. once we find a compromise for the mining/crafting constrains.

Btw, I'm not having much time these days for this project, I'm sorry about that. Hopefully I can come over soon. Also npx has sent me some more Dungeon rooms to add to the collection :) thanks!

[Neuromancer]

It might not be that hard to create a Dungeontest modpack that acts more like Sokomine's villages Modpack. Meaning it isn't a complete game. It just adds interesting flavor to the game. I took all of the dumgeon* modpacks and nothing else and enabled them in a world. I had to add a depends.txt with a default in it to one of the modpack folders. It worked fine. It still would need some of the following modifications:

• There were a few unknown blocks in the chests
• Need to make smaller fewer random dungeons
• Need to make everything destructable

My biggest concern is performance. Map generation is pretty slow when you add a bunch of other Mods. Hopefully by greatly reducing the number of dungeons and limiting their size, it will speed things up.

See my post https://forum.minetest.net/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=13893 to see why I think having a DungeonTest Modpack is incredibly useful.

[Neuromancer]

I think this might work. Create a Dungeon Modpack that has configuration settings so that it can be used both as a standalone modpack that just adds a little spice to the default minetest game, and can be used by the DungeonTest subgame. Configurations would be something like:

• Destructable-true/false
• Dungeon depth-# levels/infinite
• level size- number of rooms per level
• Dungeon frequency=percent chance of occurence of a dungeon in a map chunk/sector.

Or whatever settings are easy to implement.
That way any improvements to the modpack would immediately be available to the game and the modpack.

[Neuromancer]

I tried the following:

\mods\dungeon_rooms\mapgen.lua Line 22:

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Code: Select all

        -- Chunks above will either be pure air or hard to predict mountains.
        -- lets just keep the entrance generation in ground-level chunks
        if (maxp.y > 80) and (math.random(100)>10)then return end

But it didn't reduce the dungeons.

I also tried:
\mods\dungeon_rooms\nodes.lua line 83:

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Code: Select all

minetest.register_abm( {
   nodenames = {"dungeon_rooms:room_spawner"},
   interval = 1,
   chance = .5,
   action = function(pos, node, active_object_count, active_object_count_wider)
        minetest.set_node(pos, {name="air"})
      dungeon_rooms.spawn_room(pos)
   end,
})

But again no dice. Am I going down the right path?

[Neuromancer]

I know I've been real pushy about splitting your subgame into a configurable Modpack. But that's because I'm incredibly excited by what you have created. Turning DungeonTest into a Mod would be very difficult. But you don't seem to realize what you have here. If DT were turned into a Mod, it wouldn't be just another mod. It would be The Mod that turns Minetest from an interesting sandbox to a game that is compelling to play like Terarria or Minecraft, because it is just so much fun to play! You have created pure mese. This would be the turning point for Minetest. So yes it will be hard to convert DT to a Mod. But there isn't a choice in the matter. It has to be done. DT mod would put Minetest over the top. I realize you probably don't have the time to do this, and I wish I were the one to be able to do it all myself, but maybe someone like paramat could lend a hand and help you bridge the gap by enhancing the engine or minetest game so it could support as much of the functionality of what you have now, and still enabling the rest of the standard minetest game like being able to place blocks, destroy dungeon walls, and make dungeons somewhat rare. But the more of your game we get into a modpack the better, mob spawners, interesting decorations, community designed rooms, traps, loot, etc. Maybe spells, spawners, and loot are turned into separate mods that can be added or not. What truly makes DT so special is that you have made it easy for anyone to create and share interesting dungeon rooms.

[Ferk]

Sorry, Neuromancer, that it took me so long to answer.

Yes, it's doable, but many rooms and puzzles would make very little sense without established constrains.
If everything is destructible a lot of puzzles would make no sense. And at the same time, maybe people making new rooms may assume that you can destroy the nodes which would result in their rooms being unsolvable obstacles whenever destructible==false.

In essence, this means that if we want to support both types of rooms we will have to end up splitting the collection of rooms, which would be a pity, since a single big common repository of dungeon rooms could be much richer and varied if we stuck together. One of the problems there is with Dungeontest at the moment is precisely that there's often a lot of repetition.

IMHO, if we turn this into a modpack it should have established guidelines to get the most out of it. The destructible true/false flag, for example, is too game-changing to be switchable. There are other aspects, like crafting. Most of the stuff in the dungeon doesn't even have a crafting recipe.

Also some rooms might want to use nodes or items from other mods, which results in the "unknown" node/item problems that you found. Whenever there's such a problem you only have two options:

a) Strip the mod from the modpack, and possibly perhaps the entire room, as well as any other room that might rely on the item/node to do something (like if you remove the scrolls you have to remove the rooms that may have a big pit only crossable by flying, for example)
b) Include the mod, because maybe it'd be cool to have that item, node or spell in the dungeon and use it for puzzles to engross the collection of dungeon rooms.

The problem with "a" is that your collection of rooms will be limited then, because you won't have complete freedom on what can you add.
The problem with "b" is that you end up having a modpack that will quickly become huge.. it'll start including huge amounts of mods, to the point that you will basically be turning it into a game on its own. And then it makes very little difference between having it as a modpack than as a game. Except that as a game you have more freedom to change other things.

Then there's the problem of incompatibilities... in the dungeon_* mods there's also a slightly modified mobs redo, also xdecor and some other mods. The modpack will also become huge, and as you've seen, the performance would be affected.

...all that said, perhaps you are right and making a modpack would expose Dungeontest more and would in turn result in more people making rooms and having a cooler dungeon.

But for this to work I should probably embrace the fact that the repository of rooms would get split. I should probably have several different directory paths where to look for rooms, to organize them better. This is also something I have thought of doing in the past already.

About your attempts at adding the probability. The place where you were changing it would only have affected it per-room.. I might have to do some changes in the code so that a whole dungeon can be disabled, maybe I'll have a look at it later today.

[Neuromancer]

First of all let me say thank you a million times over for even considering this. I was losing lots of sleep thinking of what could be done to make this happen. Things like is it the ABMs that need to change? Do the map sectors have a number which we could use a mathematical formula on to randomize the appearance of dungeons? Will Ferk really be angry with me for being a pest and make this all impossible? etc.

Yes, it's doable, but many rooms and puzzles would make very little sense without established constrains.
If everything is destructible a lot of puzzles would make no sense. And at the same time, maybe people making new rooms may assume that you can destroy the nodes which would result in their rooms being unsolvable obstacles whenever destructible==false.

In essence, this means that if we want to support both types of rooms we will have to end up splitting the collection of rooms, which would be a pity, since a single big common repository of dungeon rooms could be much richer and varied if we stuck together. One of the problems there is with Dungeontest at the moment is precisely that there's often a lot of repetition.. IMHO, if we turn this into a modpack it should have established guidelines to get the most out of it. The destructible true/false flag, for example, is too game-changing to be switchable.

Agreed. I think what you want is to leave the dungeons as indestructable and un-buildable. Make it like the villages Modpack that says "The villagers prevent you from modifying the village." That being said, I ran into the situation where I was unable to place blocks anywhere in the world even on the surface. So if you make the dungeons configurably rare, the user will still be able to do mining and cave exploring outside of them, but be limited when they are in the dungeons themselves. That way you have the best of both worlds. When outside the dungeon, the player can do anything they normally do. When inside, they play by your rules.

There are other aspects, like crafting. Most of the stuff in the dungeon doesn't even have a crafting recipe.

I'm not sure this is a bad thing. In Terraria, there are some things you can't craft, but can only get in dungeon. But that gives you a reason to go into the dungeon to get these cool things that you can't get anywhere else. It makes it worth overcoming all the dungeon challenges to get these items. That being said you want to minimize the core mods that DT modpack depends on. e.g. Forcing 3d armor on everyone just because they want the DT modpack is not a good idea. Scrolls on the other hand seem to affect the gameplay a bit so might not be bad to include them in DT modpack core.

Also some rooms might want to use nodes or items from other mods, which results in the "unknown" node/item problems that you found. Whenever there's such a problem you only have two options:

a) Strip the mod from the modpack, and possibly perhaps the entire room, as well as any other room that might rely on the item/node to do something (like if you remove the scrolls you have to remove the rooms that may have a big pit only crossable by flying, for example)
b) Include the mod, because maybe it'd be cool to have that item, node or spell in the dungeon and use it for puzzles to engross the collection of dungeon rooms.

The problem with "a" is that your collection of rooms will be limited then, because you won't have complete freedom on what can you add.
The problem with "b" is that you end up having a modpack that will quickly become huge.. it'll start including huge amounts of mods, to the point that you will basically be turning it into a game on its own. And then it makes very little difference between having it as a modpack than as a game. Except that as a game you have more freedom to change other things.

Then there's the problem of incompatibilities... in the dungeon_* mods there's also a slightly modified mobs redo, also xdecor and some other mods. The modpack will also become huge, and as you've seen, the performance would be affected.

I think you are on the right track. You are going to need a core group of dungeon items/blocks without which you simply can't have any decent dungeon. So there needs to be a core set of items that simply must be included for this modpack to make sense. A bunch of stuff from x-decor, and castles, and just a few things from Home Decor. What you could do is make these mods optional. If HomeDecor is included by the user, then use its nodes. If not then spin up the nodes yourself in the DungeonTest core objects. (This prevents clashing/duplication of items). If someone creates a room outside of the core then you could create a configuration for the player to either include all rooms minus the missing stuff, or exclude the rooms that are missing stuff. You will find users that will want variety above all else, and others that want only rooms that are missing nothing. I think you are going to find that this Modpack is going to be so popular that you are going to have more rooms than you could possibly imagine even just ones using the core items/blocks.

As far as Mobs are concerned I think that at some point (lower proirity) it would be wonderful to have a spawner mod with a config file that allows users to specify what mobs can be spawned where, allowing even mobs from new mods you hadn't known about. The config file would have lines with "Mob mod name", "Mob Name", "dungeon level/difficulty", "Rarity" or something along those lines.

For Loot you could do something similar to what I suggested for Mobs. A system that handles both pre-placed chests that are part of the room and also the random the placing of chests with loot. There could be a config file that makes it easy for users to add items to it. The file could contain ModName, ItemName, LevelOfDifficulty, & Rarity. This would allow items from any mod to be added to loot. That way, the loot mod could scan through the config file and add things as appropriate. If your loot system doesn't work you might be able to use some ideas from Blockmen's.

...all that said, perhaps you are right and making a modpack would expose Dungeontest more and would in turn result in more people making rooms and having a cooler dungeon.

I'd be stunned if this modpack doesn't become the most popular modpack ever. Everyone complains that Minetest is missing interesting content, challenges and gameplay and that is where DungeonTest shines. That being said, at some point it wouldn't hurt to consider (as a very low priority) offering a sensitive configuration that changes scrolls to schematics, pentacles to generic spawners, noblood and the like so that those who love the hardcore elements can have them, and those who might be offended by them to still enjoy the modpack. DT modpack would simply be too important to exclude groups of people from playing it. It's your call, and I don't mind these elements, but I can see people asking for it at some point.

But for this to work I should probably embrace the fact that the repository of rooms would get split. I should probably have several different directory paths where to look for rooms, to organize them better. This is also something I have thought of doing in the past already.

This probably makes some sense. Some people won't care, they will want variety in rooms at any cost, others will want every room to be a compelling puzzle that doesn't work exactly as designed.

About your attempts at adding the probability. The place where you were changing it would only have affected it per-room.. I might have to do some changes in the code so that a whole dungeon can be disabled, maybe I'll have a look at it later today.

Awesome! I'm doing cartwheels! Most of the stuff I mentioned is wouldn't be needed to make DT work as a modpack. The only things that I can see that are absolutely needed:

• Make dungeons configurably rare.
• Make the world outside of the dungeons behave normally (digging and placing of blocks etc.)
• Have a core set of items/blocks that players can safely design rooms with, and a way to deal with rooms that use stuff not in that list.

[Glorfindel]

My personal opinion: Make it so everything is dig-able and etc, but disable crafting of picks or something, that way it would be like in nethack: if you find a pick or mattock, you can dig down to the next level, but if not you have to go through the one you are on.

And I would prefer it the way it is right now, you start this world and go on a quest through the dungeons, i.e. dungeons not "rare" at all.

[Neuromancer]

My personal opinion: Make it so everything is dig-able and etc, but disable crafting of picks or something, that way it would be like in nethack: if you find a pick or mattock, you can dig down to the next level, but if not you have to go through the one you are on.

And I would prefer it the way it is right now, you start this world and go on a quest through the dungeons, i.e. dungeons not "rare" at all.

If dungeons aren't rare, then you lose all the other underground activities that the other mods give you (mining, underground realms, caves, ores, goblins, etc. ) Dungeon rarity should be a configurable parameter so the player gets as much dungeon as they want and no more.

[Glorfindel]

My personal opinion: Make it so everything is dig-able and etc, but disable crafting of picks or something, that way it would be like in nethack: if you find a pick or mattock, you can dig down to the next level, but if not you have to go through the one you are on.

And I would prefer it the way it is right now, you start this world and go on a quest through the dungeons, i.e. dungeons not "rare" at all.

If dungeons aren't rare, then you lose all the other underground activities that the other mods give you (mining, underground realms, caves, ores, goblins, etc. ) Dungeon rarity should be a configurable parameter so the player gets as much dungeon as they want and no more.

Yes, I understood that, but personally, I would rather build in one world and do dungeon exploring on a completely different one.
Again, this is just my opinion ;)

[paramat]

Neuromancer i'm not interested in working on a mod similar to this, my only interest is in dungeon generation methods and this uses a fairly regular grid generation which doesn't interest me.

[Neuromancer]

Yes, I understood that, but personally, I would rather build in one world and do dungeon exploring on a completely different one.
Again, this is just my opinion ;)

I get where you're coming from, I think there are going to be folks like you that want a more focused experience, and people like me that want a rich and varied world where we can experiment with different mods and create interesting experiences. That's why I suggest using DungeonTest both ways by making the rarity configurable. As Ferk stated, because the dungeons are 5x5xinfinite depth, it is definitely possible to allow for any rarity of dungeons including infinite which is your preference.

[Neuromancer]

Neuromancer i'm not interested in working on a mod similar to this, my only interest is in dungeon generation methods and this uses a fairly regular grid generation which doesn't interest me.

That makes sense based on your like for natural, chaotic, fractal, map generation. Though I can see why Ferk went this route. He's focused on gameplay, interesting puzzles, and community created rooms, and had he chosen a less regular pattern it definitely would have complicated things if not made them impossible. I like both kinds of dungeons. But this fills a glaring need of Minetest, fun gameplay. I think that Terraria could teach us a lot about fun gameplay, but DungeonTest dungeons are much more fun than Terriaria dungeons by a long shot. If he does manage to turn this into a Modpack, I can't imagine a world I would create without it going forward. Plus I think it will be great fun to attempt to create challenging rooms of my own.

[Neuromancer]

I created my first room. It may need some tweaks.

[stu]

Do you plan to continue the development of this? The reason I ask is because I have been thinking of doing something with a roguelike/dungeon theme myself but do not want to step on any toes or compete with an existing project.

While this has got a few issues in it's current state, I think it is a very good start with a great deal of potential.

[Ferk]

I plan to continue working on this, but at the moment it's in a dormant state. I'm busy with some things IRL.

But I don't think it would be a problem if you wanted to make your own implementation or if you like the design and wanted to join and help me with it, together we might be able to make a better dungeon than separate.
What ideas did you have in mind?

[stu]

I plan to continue working on this, but at the moment it's in a dormant state. I'm busy with some things IRL.

But I don't think it would be a problem if you wanted to make your own implementation or if you like the design and wanted to join and help me with it, together we might be able to make a better dungeon than separate.
What ideas did you have in mind?

Well, I was rather hoping you might say that, you may have noticed that I already made a fork. Like yourself, I also have RL commitments that limit the amount of time I can spend on these things.

There is not a great deal I would want to change, I really like your solution to the perma-death problem. What I would like to experiment with is a more random level generation for better re-playability, though the custom rooms could still be used as special 'quest' type rooms, or 'boss' levels.

Something I have noticed when playing are a lot of ABM warnings, it is difficult to tell whether or not they have an impact on gameplay but perhaps some of these can be replaced by the new LBM's, I have not really had time to study the code.

btw, you might want to add my new 3d_armor_stand mod, maybe even an 'animated' one ;-)

[linushsao]

a little question,why i could only dig,buy could'nt put down anything?

[Don]

a little question,why i could only dig,buy could'nt put down anything?

This game is not like minetest_game. Game play is very different. Building and mining are not a part of the game play.

The game is still a work in progress as the title suggests. It is meant as an adventure type game instead of a minetest_game like game. The goal(goals not completed yet) will be to make it to the end of the dungeon maze. Each level gets harder. I know Ferk had a few ideas for advancing to the next level but they are not done yet.

[linushsao]

a little question,why i could only dig,buy could'nt put down anything?

This game is not like minetest_game. Game play is very different. Building and mining are not a part of the game play.

The game is still a work in progress as the title suggests. It is meant as an adventure type game instead of a minetest_game like game. The goal(goals not completed yet) will be to make it to the end of the dungeon maze. Each level gets harder. I know Ferk had a few ideas for advancing to the next level but they are not done yet.

Don,tks for you explaination,the game is amazing,wish it could be released.

[Wuzzy]

Hi, I think you should update the HUD bars mod since currently the HUD bars are displayed incorrectly (probably because of an old bug in the mod, sorry).

[Ferk]

Hi, I think you should update the HUD bars mod since currently the HUD bars are displayed incorrectly (probably because of an old bug in the mod, sorry).

Thanks for the heads up. I'll get to it on the weekend.

EDIT: Did it.
I also changed the room spawning to use the new LBMs and fixed some warnings. No big additions other than that though.