Message about picking pockets (successfull or not) is overwritten by monster attacks. Really annoying.

It seems some effects (e.g. poison) get a (more) prompt, but disarming doesn't.

And I can reproduce what asdf says: player actions get overwritten by other messages. So in the case of pickpocketing, one has to check the message buffer every time to see what the result was...

I don't know how difficult it would be implement as I've never programmed an ASCII game (or any game for that matter), but wouldn't this problem be solved by making it possible to customize the length of the message area? Like up to a max of 10 lines? That would be enough to display the messages in almost any situation. On top of that, messages like "-foo- disarms you" should be given a color to make them easier to spot.

It's obviously not easy as otherwise we would have done it. Very likely the NotEye mode soon will have a long buffer but for ASCII the story sadly is a lot more complicated.

This actually is a tough problem. I totally had forgotten about the important combat messages. Is there any way to summarize the ones you would consider important?

So far we have:
- being disarmed
- seeing the results of pocket picking

But basically I'm afraid that my current approach probably was not as good as an idea as I had imaged. I have restored the old default behavior for now.

@mimhoff: I BTW can't reproduce the behavior for multi-line quest messages. Could it be that you have been pressing ENTER instead of space or other keys? ENTER skips all messages. And always did.

"@mimhoff: I BTW can't reproduce the behavior for multi-line quest messages. Could it be that you have been pressing ENTER instead of space or other keys? ENTER skips all messages. And always did."

On checking, they do indeed work as they did before. That one was just my impatience.

It's vital to know, what happened. I frequently :m to see what status changed and if I don't see it on the first page - btw. HiColors are nice, +more is essential to find out, what ails my character, what monster caused what.

Personally I don't see anything wrong with the old behaviour. If I'm fighting a horde of weak monsters which give a lot of spam I can use Ctrl-k to quickly fight through it; if I'm fighting tough monsters then I want to be sure that I take in every line.

Some of the messages could be shortened or condensed perhaps, but that would be enough I think. (e.g. "you deflect the giant rat (x8)")

Getting hit, disarming traps while under attack (gremlin cave), walking onto interesting item while under attack, etc etc etc...

Perhaps everything while under attack - you cant really see anything if several monsters hit you.

There is some discussion also in this thread: http://www.adom.de/forums/project.php?issueid=3042

I think condensing identical messages into "The rat misses you. (x8)" would definitely be a big step in the right direction.

Having it just be (more) is a good idea, for ASCII, if nothing else. Maybe we should keep that there, and let Noteye have the fancy message stuff, thus letting the ASCII be the ADOM Classic?

Any critical hit on you could be considered important. I've lost several characters because I suffered a couple of critical hits in a row and didn't notice that my HP had dropped from over 100 to 10.

Could messages be graded by importance, eg 1. Stuff that's not directly happening to the PC (eg spider-spam, confused monsters), 2. Stuff that is happening to the PC (probably all those monster attacks that fail to hit or damage, maybe some other things, 3. Stuff stuff that is happening to the PC (pretty much everything else, damage taken, stats changed, poisoning, stunning, disarming, messages that result from player actions the pickpocketing). You could then the game to show all messages, grades 2+3, or just 3.

Crits should definitely be in red like stat decreases. Maybe non-attacking PC-monster interactions could have a colour too?

I would suggest the old behaviour with just small tweaks. Such as what Al-Khwarizmi suggests.