Big ASCII monsters

[Quasist]

I mean monsters that are larger than 1 cell drawn in ASCII.

Considering LOS, these monsters are must not be taken as another game elements like items, mobs or map tiles.

So I think these monsters must:
1. Be made of personal symbols that is not used by items, monsters and map tiles.
2. Cells of big monster must have equal backgroung color (not black)

Is there any info or advises how to draw (to paint in ASCII) these mobs?

[BirdofPrey]

It really depends on what kind of monster you're aiming to make. In a few games there are long worms with a 'w' for a head followed by a trail of '~'s. I imagine you could make a large creature with some monster designator for a head with whatever kind of body you wanted. The trouble with that is you have to take into account the direction the monster is facing.

[Quasist]

I think also about kind of monsters that technicaly can grow in size up to the size of whole dungeon.
Some kind of slime monster fed by corpses, or gas spore monster. For example gas spore may be used as a trap with lifespan of turns 10-20.
It also hepl be a result of Highlevel Druid's spells - weeds growing throgh the dungeon with random vegetable food spawns around.
Classic example from AD&D - Living Wall (and ADOM had one). They killed you and build a new section
Bug swarms effects also neat

[corremn]

Incursion has large monsters, they are the default ascii symbol surrounded by '+' symbols.  These seemed to work quite well in the game as they have no facing just the area they take up. A giant worm would be occupy an area rather than a head followed by a tail. Which makes more sence for a fast moving worm, that can wriggle back on its self with ease.

Incursion also allows a lot of the large monsters (dragons and elementals) to transorm to a smaller size if they wanted to chase you. Also they could squash up against walls removing about a third of their bulk.

I dont really think it is necessary but it could work well with some effort.

[BirdofPrey]

Incursion has large monsters, they are the default ascii symbol surrounded by '+' symbols.  These seemed to work quite well in the game as they have no facing just the area they take up. A giant worm would be occupy an area rather than a head followed by a tail. Which makes more sence for a fast moving worm, that can wriggle back on its self with ease.

Incursion also allows a lot of the large monsters (dragons and elementals) to transorm to a smaller size if they wanted to chase you. Also they could squash up against walls removing about a third of their bulk.

I dont really think it is necessary but it could work well with some effort.

This sounds pretty cool. In many cases, I can imagine it would be a lot more intense if huge monsters would actually rip corridors down and widen them allowing them to move forward rather than just squashing themselves through, but that could depend on the creature in question. Another thing to keep in mind is that it would probably be more visceral to have huge monsters block vision, to show they're so big you can't see behind/around them. Just one of those small touches.

[Quasist]

@BirdofPrey

Having big monsters block vision is bad:
1. Requires more memory of human player to identify the monster by just looking on fewest ASCII- chars
2. Requires 'manual looking' command to identify it
3. You do not knof if there is more that just one of these monster

Even if monsters should block vision, maybe then they must be shown all cells that in a LOS and block the ray after it flew through this big nasty mob

[BirdofPrey]

@BirdofPrey

Having big monsters block vision is bad:
1. Requires more memory of human player to identify the monster by just looking on fewest ASCII- chars
2. Requires 'manual looking' command to identify it
3. You do not knof if there is more that just one of these monster

Even if monsters should block vision, maybe then they must be shown all cells that in a LOS and block the ray after it flew through this big nasty mob

That's actually what I meant: Show the entirety of the big one, but block everything after it. Though I think this approach may make more sense with a single-tile monster that is supposed to be enormous. Sure, there's the downside of not being able to see any monsters behind, but on the other hand monsters behind won't be able to use spells/ranged attacks on the player.

[corremn]

That's actually what I meant: Show the entirety of the big one, but block everything after it. Though I think this approach may make more sense with a single-tile monster that is supposed to be enormous. Sure, there's the downside of not being able to see any monsters behind, but on the other hand monsters behind won't be able to use spells/ranged attacks on the player.

IIRC in IVAN big monsters block LOS, with no real drawbacks and the ESP effect allowed you to see behind them anyway.  A version of SewerJacks tried the same thing, unfortuately that meant you couldn't see your allies that are on the other side of the monster, worse was when  you were teamed up with a large allied monster that blocked your LOS, so the feature was removed.  It did not give anything to the game in this case.

It should be really easy to implement and to test (for single celled monsters).