Chambers of Xeric - the framework

[Mike]

Hi everyone,

It's been a while since we've had one of these devblogs, so I figured it was about time to inform the community of the current status of things we're working on.

First of all, we finally got around to giving Thoby the necessary tools to create his own in-game 2D interfaces. These are needed for the upcoming slayer expansion update. Looking at the amount of code changes he's done in the past months, it looks like that update is going to be a pretty huge one. Lots of smaller issues will be addressed in that update as well. I'll be sure to assist him in the process and lend a helping hand in finishing that update where needed.

In the meantime, I'm focusing my energy on the Chambers of Xeric, the next major piece of content I'd like to bring to PkHonor.

It's no simple feat and certainly much harder to work out than the Theatre of Blood. Each chamber separately will not take nearly as much time to implement than those in the Theatre of Blood (thankfully so, because there's a lot of more of them), but getting the details right will be very hard. Mostly because the rooms can occur in any random order and I'm not entirely sure about the precise mechanics of how the entire raid is built up.
I am aware of the following:

• There are two possible "rotations" of boss rooms
• A rotation can be either clockwise or counterclockwise (so there are four different possibilities of boss room combinations)
• A raid starts at a random point on one of the boss room rotations
• There can be anywhere from three to five boss rooms in a raid in total (I think)
• There can be any random number of skilling rooms in between the boss rooms (not even sure about this one)
• A raid always ends with the Great Olm as final boss

However, there are literally three different versions of each room to pick from (a few rooms are not shown here are as they are at a different height level):


It's going to be quite the challenge to puzzle them together in a way to make everything fit properly. Our raid layouts will certainly differ from OSRS simply because I lack the knowledge of how everything is supposed to work, but I'll do my best. I'll also have to utilize some code from our construction skill (which I wrote over six years ago) to pick specific parts of the map and put them together to dynamically build the layout of each raid.

Please do let me know if you think I got any of the information wrong. Also, if anyone has specific insights in the raids (that are not otherwise listed on the OSRS wiki), feel free to let me know here, so I can make our raids as close a match to OSRS as possible.

The layout is going to be the first and at the same time biggest challenge for the entire minigame. Once I've figured out what all the possible room combinations are and how I can fit all the map pieces together, I can get started on working out the rest of the mechanics along with each room itself.

I'll be sure to keep you guys know once I've managed to get past this major hurdle.

[Empty]

damn good works

[Church]

Hey man, as long as it works and is fun, that's cool with me.

[Thierryu1]

Progress!

[Nazuths]

Great to see progress on Chambers of Xeric!

I've heard @Tom brady is quite the OSRS expert, I don't know if he's willing to or you are willing to, but I think a collaboration between the two could greatly speed up the development process.

[Jayden]

thoby getting more access and cox??? what a wonderful time it is, cant wait

[Monys]

@Iron adam is also quite knowledgeable in terms of cox! He spends HOURS in each raid trying to understand all of the mechanics.

Great work per usual!

[Troll n roll]

This is gonna be a lot of work!

[Declan harp]

Mike, if you manage to make the raid sequence to be random. make sure if possible that you make a scouting mechanic like in os rs.
where players where able to go in the start room and look at what rooms where in the raid. and if there where rooms they didnt like they would scoute another raid.

[Tom brady]

@Mike @Nazuths

I’m more than willing to help out with Chambers development if you have any questions. My only issue is that most of my knowledge is limited to 3 combat 2 puzzle raids, as these are the most efficient and fastest raids to complete, and thus are the most desirable and the ones we scout for.

One thing I noticed in the blog is that you talk about the 3 room variations. Each OSRS raid has a “static” layout of the rooms (combats/puzzles/scavengers/farming) which are then randomly filled based on the 2 boss rotations AND the 4 puzzle rotations. Depending on the layout, say SCSPFCCSPF (this means a scavengers room, then combat, another scavs, puzzle, farm, etc.) it will determine which of these three rooms for bosses/puzzles are used. The scavenger rooms (and I believe farming?) come in 1 of 2 potential layouts per layout. The number of farming rooms is not random, in fact the raid is never random. The room locations are predetermined, only the combat/puzzles that fill them are randomly chosen based on the rotations.

You can have between 3-5 combat rooms and 1-3 puzzles. The minimum raid size is 5 rooms (a mix of combat/puzzle, not including farming or scavs), either 3c2p or 4c1p.

Feel free to @ me with questions.