Difference between revisions of "Levels"

Revision as of 18:32, 24 July 2011

Levels are the heart of DoomRL, and without them there would be no game. It is where the player explores, where enemies roam, where special items lie in wait. They are filled with either fortune or your own personal doom.

Basic Objects

All levels are made of basic objects like floors, walls, and doors.

• HP: This is one of the parameters that governs how difficulty the object is to destroy. Whenever an object takes damage, it's HP is decreased. Once its HP falls to 0, it changes to a floor tile. Some objects cannot be destroyed; these are indicated as "none". Also, some objects have two versions: one that can be destroyed and one that can't.
• Armor: This also makes objects harder to destroy. Whenever an object takes damage, the object's armor is subtracted from the damage before the damage is subtracted from HP. Unlike the armor of the player and his enemies, objects' armor may reduce damage to 0.
• Fragile: Objects can usually only be damaged by plasma, fire, or acid damage. Fragile objects can be damaged by any damage type.

Random levels

The archetypical level in DoomRL is a randomly-generated one. It is produced in such a way that no two games are particularly alike. There are many special considerations within the game engine, although many of these are technical and unimportant from a gameplay perspective.

• Level type
• Level feeling
• Level event
• Monster Generation
• Item Generation
• Room Generation
• Fluids

Special levels

In stark contrast to random levels, special levels are constant and many of them appear every game. As you gain more experience playing DoomRL, these become stepping stones used as a grip against the turbulent flow of random levels.

For obvious reasons, all of these pages are considered spoilers if you wish to learn how to beat them yourself. Some are particularly spoiler-heavy, though, and are indicated as such here.

• Phobos Base Entry
• Hell's Arena
• The Chained Court
• The Wall
• Hell's Armory
• Halls of Carnage
• Phobos Hellgate
• Unholy Cathedral (SPOILERS!!!)
• City of Skulls
• Spider's Lair
• The Vaults
• The Mortuary (SPOILERS!!!)
• The Lava Pits
• Phobos Arena (MAJOR SPOILERS!!!)
• Hell Fortress (MAJOR SPOILERS!!!)

Special level placement

Special levels (besides Phobos Base Entry, Hellgate, Phobos Arena, and Hell Fortress) each have a dlevel range and a probability of appearing. When a new game starts, the program iterates through the special levels. For each, it rolls to determine if the level spawns, then, if so, chooses a dlevel from the range and places the special level there. If another special level later chooses the same dlevel, then the first special level is overwritten. Thus, the order of iteration is important. The order is: The Wall, The Lava Pits, City of Skulls, The Mortuary, The Vaults, Hell's Arena, Unholy Cathedral, Spider's Lair, Hell's Armory, Halls of Carnage, The Chained Court.

The following table summarizes the probabilities and dlevel ranges, with a separate column for the probability one overwriting is accounted for (which is what players will observe).

Additionally, some levels don't spawn on I'm Too Young To Die: Hell's Armory, Unholy Cathedral, The Vaults, and The Mortuary. This means that The Wall is more common on that difficulty level: 19/28 = 67.9%.

Also, for those levels that get overridden, the likelihood of appearing on different levels is skewed.

Here is a table showing the distribution of which specials stairs are likely to be on each level assuming there are stairs and that none of the possible levels have been encountered previously.

Special stairs are always placed on a random empty tile.