Add a warning when a bolt will hit yourself or your companions
issueid=4121 11-30-2015 07:33 AM
Senior Member
Number of reported issues by quik: 20
Add a warning when a bolt will hit yourself or your companions
As above

"The magic missile will hit you. Are you sure? [y/N]"
Issue Details
Issue Number 4121
Issue Type Feature
Project ADOM (Ancient Domains Of Mystery)
Category All
Status Suggested
Priority 8
Suggested Version ADOM r64 (v2.0.3)
Implemented Version (none)
Milestone (none)
Votes for this feature 6
Votes against this feature 11
Assigned Users (none)
Tags (none)




11-30-2015 08:44 AM
Senior Member
Agree, only because of the 10 times I've killed myself accidentally hitting 7 instead of 8 and taking 30 lightning bolt bounces to the face.

11-30-2015 09:10 AM
Ancient Member
I disagree. I had perhaps ~5 self bolting deaths in the last 5 years and it was always a reminder I need to focus because I'm getting sloppy/careless/feeling immortal.
It's a nice feature besides, I think it adds something to the game, a certain grim consequence to player's poor choices, the power of magic backfiring on the amateur caster.
Also, this RFE is a duplicate of an older one:
http://www.adom.de/forums/project.php?issueid=1776

If we had this, the next thing I expect to appear would be another prompt when equipping iron items on mist elf.
After this, what keeps us from prompting every time you might accidentally hit a hostile cat?
What about stepping on the frozen red lake with too many carried items?
That's insta death too, easily done when you click the wrong key.

11-30-2015 10:20 AM
Ancient Member
Agree wholeheartedly with the proposal, I have always thought this is needed. I don't think dying from pushing the wrong arrow key is a reminder of anything worthwhile or teaches anything useful.

ADOM is difficult and cruel, yes, but the cruelty should come from the game world, not from the UI. If I have made a wrong decision, I should die. If I have made a good decision but there is some factor outside the game world that makes that good decision mistranslate into a bad move and I die, that's not OK, and the problem is that there is something wrong in the interface between me and the game. In some cases, this isn't the devs' problem (cat jumping on the keyboard) but in this case it is.

This is purely an UI problem, it's not that there is any deep strategic thinking involved in not shooting a lightning bolt towards a contiguous wall. It's just that the game can kill you while you are thinking perfectly right, just due to pressing the wrong key. This is even more important taking into account that laptop controls without a numpad are less than optimal at the moment, and it becomes even more important when there is talk about the game possibly hitting tablets. Fat-fingering in a tablet is something that will happen during a game no matter how careful you are.

I don't think Blasphemous's examples are comparable at all.

Equipping iron items -> 99% of the time won't kill you directly.
Killing a cat -> Won't kill you at all, it's just an optional side quest.
Stepping on the frozen red lake with too many items -> A death that comes from the game world, not from the UI. Totally different.

11-30-2015 12:38 PM
Ancient Member
Quote Originally Posted by Al-Khwarizmi
I don't think Blasphemous's examples are comparable at all.

Equipping iron items -> 99% of the time won't kill you directly.
Killing a cat -> Won't kill you at all, it's just an optional side quest.
Stepping on the frozen red lake with too many items -> A death that comes from the game world, not from the UI. Totally different.
Al, the first case can kill you in the wilderness and it's a finger-slip worthy case so it's very much comparable. If I wanted to equip a different amulet while in the wilderness but my finger slipped from D to F which is an iron amulet, I will die upon exiting inventory.
This is a very much the same situation as fat fingering during bolt casting. Your intention was different, your finger simply slipped. Mist elves have very low HP and the iron damage in wilderness is quite huge.

Killing a cat - yes it won't kill you in the long run if you survive the cat lord but has a tendency to screw up your game plan considerably and reduce the fun factor. Then again, we're talking about unintentional wrong key press and that principle remains.

Finally, stepping on frozen lake ACCIDENTALLY is exactly the same as casting bouncing bolt directly at the wall ACCIDENTALLY. You see the relation?
You can't convince me there is the smallest tangible difference - both result in death unless your HP is high enough; both are unintentional and both result from fat fingering.
In both cases a prompt is equally viable because the input conditions are identical.

There are many more situations where fat fingering leads to your death, do they not deserve the same treatment as the proposition in the RFE?
How can you distinguish between what's accidental and unfair and what's acceptable?

11-30-2015 01:48 PM
Senior Member
Quote Originally Posted by Blasphemous
Also, this RFE is a duplicate of an older one:
http://www.adom.de/forums/project.php?issueid=1776
Sorry about this, I should have searched better before posting.

Quote Originally Posted by Blasphemous
If we had this, the next thing I expect to appear would be another prompt when equipping iron items on mist elf.
After this, what keeps us from prompting every time you might accidentally hit a hostile cat?
What about stepping on the frozen red lake with too many carried items?
Regarding these ones, good ideas :DDD.

For the first case, I think a warning like "You feel some pain in your <part of the body>. Are you sure you want to continue?" in the wilderness is in order.

Regarding cats, a warning when you're going to hit some monster outside of LOS is interesting or, even better, make all spells ranges smaller than your LOS (although this causes a problem when using farsight, as LOS may be bigger than the actual screen when playing with tiles).

For the last one, definitely yes. In DCSS you could step into lava and die. This possibility was removed from the game a while ago and I think it was a good change. Now you can only fall into lava if you're flying and you run out of your flying means while over it, which may pose interesting strategical situations.

11-30-2015 02:31 PM
Ancient Member
I think bolting yourself because you pointed it at the wall next to you is not really a good "game feature" and should be removed.
I think bolting yourself because you didn't think enough about the range of your magic missile and you fired off at a distant wall and still had too much range should *maybe* stay in. On the other hand, the range calculation is "known", you could do it by hand.

I'm going to vote yes, but *only* when your character knows about the wall that you're going to bounce off of. If you fire out of your LOS and hit a wall you never saw and it bounces back and kills you - that's your fault, not fat-fingering.

11-30-2015 03:45 PM
Personally, I've never considered bolting myself to be an unfair death to me or my companions. I believe bolting yourself for the first time is a notable and respectable occasion. Is there an achievement for it? (I'd call it "To Smithereens! -- blast yourself with a bouncing bolt.")

I think the suggestion is easier to say than to do. Is the wand even identified, do you know it's a bolt? Do you know it's a bolt that bounces? Sounds like the game might spoil the discovery. Have you explored the entire area, or is "purposely firing the want into the darkness to figure out there is a wall there because you received a bolting-yourself warning" a desired feature? You know, I don't even know if lightning bolts bounce of off living walls... and I'd prefer to find out myself; i'd prefer to be punished if were so, as it seems logical and I can make a better decision than blasting it head on without thinking about it.

Anyway, implementation is not straight-forward; all contingencies are hard to see. Isn't it also forward-limiting? If we wanted to bounce-bolt ourselves or our companions, we would then be subject to the tedium of all the warnings. What if we had a bouncing healing bolts? What if we wanted wands or spells with a random range -- sometimes it wouldn't reach far enough to bounce, other times it might. What if we wanted the bolt to bounce in a random direction (as D&D ChainLighting does, albeit when it strikes creatures.) Also, we do have wands with random effects... it can't randomly select a bolt and then let you cancel it because it's a bad outcome for you this time.

It's not even clear if the currently implementation computes the destinations before the fact, it most likely computes it on the fly, which would mean you're asking it to predict the future. Of course it could be restructured/rewritten, but ... no.

11-30-2015 05:26 PM
Ancient Member
I think I'll just repeat what I said in the other post because I don't really have much to add beyond that:

What about wands of far slaying? If I put a massive charge in it, I can easily get a range of a couple hundred squares on it. Should I be able to use this prompt to be able to figure out the correct direction to zap the wand so I won't fry myself? Or is there an inherent danger to using a long range weapon where it is difficult to predict the outcome? What if I have a bolt spell with spellpower 200 or so where my bolts can have comparable range? What if my character has poor perception but normal bolt ranges, and there's a wall somewhere I can't see that will reflect the spell back at me when I attack a monster with it? Should I be able to use the prompt to protect my character against threats that they can't even see? What if I'm in darkness, blind, confused, etc.? What if I'm in the room where the directions are reversed?

In the particular case of bouncing bolts, if there must be a prompt, my inclination would be to only have a prompt if the PC targets the bolt directly into an adjacent wall. There seem to be few enough circumstances where doing such a thing would ever be intentional, and minimal ways that it could ever be exploited that having a safety catch for that particular case is probably fine. If you're shooting into an empty square and the bolt reflects at some later point and hits you, well, tough. And it should be turned off in the room where the directions are reversed, because the whole point in those areas is that the UI is supposed to be screwing with you.

11-30-2015 06:42 PM
Senior Member
Quote Originally Posted by Blasphemous
How can you distinguish between what's accidental and unfair and what's acceptable?
Self-bolting is a very different case to these others.

Cat killing is nonfatal, and irrelevant to the apparently 90% of new players who don't even get to level 10 (according to tb's comments).

Equipping items in the wilderness is comparable but a rare thing to do after game start. Casters cast bolts in dungeons continually.

Standing on ice while over weight is an easily made legitimate mistake. Same with chaotic altars. They're also things that come up much less frequently than casting bolts.

The things that set self-bolting aside for me are:
- it's something that's almost 100% fatal to most characters with the wrong keypress
- it's not something you'd likely choose to do through inattentiveness or inexperience - it's almost always mis-fingering
- bolting in dungeons happens hundreds of times a game, giving it a much higher chance of slipping on this activity

Given those three factors, I'm okay with a warning for this. It's not going to spoil your game now is it Blas?

11-30-2015 06:45 PM
Ancient Member
Quote Originally Posted by Blasphemous
Also, this RFE is a duplicate of an older one:
http://www.adom.de/forums/project.php?issueid=1776
Which in turn is a duplicate of http://www.adom.de/forums/project.php?issueid=773, rejected by TB.

11-30-2015 06:57 PM
Senior Member
Quote Originally Posted by anon123
Which in turn is a duplicate of http://www.adom.de/forums/project.php?issueid=773, rejected by TB.
Hopefully, nowadays he is in an adequate mindset regarding improving ADOM's old UI.

11-30-2015 07:26 PM
Senior Member
What if you only get the message if you have a wall directly on both sides of the direction you're casting the bolt? I don't really see any exploits in this case, and that's really the spirit of the ticket I think (I was originally on the fence because I think dying because you didn't calculate range is a good thing).

11-30-2015 08:25 PM
Senior Member
I don't think it is a UI issue at all. It would be if we get more annoying prompts... On the other hand I would not be against making this an optional feature toggled in config.

12-01-2015 12:38 AM
Ancient Member
Quote Originally Posted by shockeroo
Self-bolting is a very different case to these others.
Standing on ice while over weight is an easily made legitimate mistake. Same with chaotic altars. They're also things that come up much less frequently than casting bolts.
It's not different. I think you misunderstood the situation.

When you cast a bolt in the wrong direction because of fat fingering, then it bounces back at you and you die, that's considered accidental right? That's what this RFE aims to cover with extra prompt, correct?
When you pick up your items and proceed to leave the Tomb of the High Kings but you pick the wrong direction because of fat fingering and you step on the ice, that's not accidental anymore?

Is miss-stepping somehow different from miss-casting a bolt due to finger slipping off the key being the cause in both cases? Come on, cut me a slack here, the logic is identical.

I'm not talking about deliberately stepping on the ice while carrying 2k+ stones, I'm talking about the exact same case of pressing the wrong direction key and dying.
If there is a prompt to save the PC from that, there has to be a dozen other prompts to save to PC from a very similar situation where poor choice of direction with a single key equals death.
I can't see this as something doable or desirable.

Given those three factors, I'm okay with a warning for this. It's not going to spoil your game now is it Blas?
No, it's not, though I'd very much like to have the option to disable the prompt in adom.cfg.

12-01-2015 01:45 AM
Senior Member
Quote Originally Posted by Blasphemous
It's not different. I think you misunderstood the situation.

When you cast a bolt in the wrong direction because of fat fingering, then it bounces back at you and you die, that's considered accidental right? That's what this RFE aims to cover with extra prompt, correct?
When you pick up your items and proceed to leave the Tomb of the High Kings but you pick the wrong direction because of fat fingering and you step on the ice, that's not accidental anymore?
Your argument here is that it's wrong to fix one instance of a problem because we can't fix every instance of a problem, which is I think flawed in itself. But even if that were the case; the difference between bolts and everything else you've pointed out so far is frequency. You visit the TotHK once per game - if you make it that far. Equipping in the wilderness - doesn't even happen most games, and it's only a problem for one race and with certain items. Even chaotic altars aren't a constant part of anybody's game.

However, any caster with bouncing bolts is going to rack up hundreds of situations over a game in which a mis-key on one of their regular spells is fatal. It's a keying they'll repeat several times in a row, many times over on a lot of levels, and they pretty much have to keep doing it to play their character sensibly. This exponentially increases the chances of accidental death. This to my mind is what makes implementing this change valid as a standalone.

That said, having been denied by TB and heavily voted against, it looks like it's dead in the water. But I would have been okay with it.

12-01-2015 02:37 AM
Junior Member
I'm against any kind of warning. I have bolted myself a few times over the years. (And it is just that -- a few deaths in a decade and a half of playing.)

The first time it happened to me, my initial reaction was shock/horror, then I just burst out into laughter. It's times like this that coined the term YASD. And what's going to happen to those YASD posts on the forums if we can no longer bolt ourselves to death? ..Whether it's mis-judging the range, or hitting a corner and getting a direct bounce-back when you thought it would deflect, I wouldn't want to get rid of any of those deaths. They've been immensely entertaining, and I wouldn't want any new players to miss the experience either. (Seriously, I wouldn't.)

12-01-2015 08:36 AM
Ancient Member
Quote Originally Posted by shockeroo
Your argument here is that it's wrong to fix one instance of a problem because we can't fix every instance of a problem, which is I think flawed in itself. But even if that were the case; the difference between bolts and everything else you've pointed out so far is frequency. You visit the TotHK once per game - if you make it that far. Equipping in the wilderness - doesn't even happen most games, and it's only a problem for one race and with certain items. Even chaotic altars aren't a constant part of anybody's game.

However, any caster with bouncing bolts is going to rack up hundreds of situations over a game in which a mis-key on one of their regular spells is fatal. It's a keying they'll repeat several times in a row, many times over on a lot of levels, and they pretty much have to keep doing it to play their character sensibly. This exponentially increases the chances of accidental death. This to my mind is what makes implementing this change valid as a standalone..
I was going to say exactly this.

Come on, fat fingering in the precise moment where you have frozen the lake and are walking on the verge of it, which is a situation that only happens once per game (in my case probably a single turn in the whole game, as I try to stay off the edge for that very reason) is very very rare. And it is also something that coincides with a legitimate error (thinking that the ice supports more weight than it does) so adding a prompt would somewhat spoil that situation for newbies, it achieve do more harm than the very very rare good it would do.

A wizard on the other hand casts thousands of bolts per game, and no one ever cast a magic missile directly in a corridor and perpendicular to its direction on purpose, because it makes zero sense. Even if you are a total noob and you don't think the bolt bounces, it still makes zero sense because you would just attack a wall. It can make sense when the wall is farther away, but I'm OK with that case not having prompt - prompts for the cases where you bolt directly ahead at a contiguous wall with a second contiguous wall behind you would cover the vast majority of accidental deaths for this reason, while not overlapping with any legitimate mistake and thus not spoiling the game at all.

Regarding mist elves in the wilderness, I think the fact that you can die in a single turn from equipping the wrong item is, in fact, an UI problem that should be fixed, and it could even be considered a bug. What logical reason is there in the game world for an adventurer in a dungeon to equip an item and have plenty of time to realize that it's hurting him, while the same adventurer in the wilderness dies without even having a chance to take the item off? Zero reason. The actual reason is a side effect of the way the passage of time is modelled, but this is a flaw of the game, and I hope it gets fixed. A prompt saying that you feel the touch of impure metal, making the damage it makes in a dungeon, and saying "Do you still want to continue your journey through the wilderness? y/N" would be in order.

12-01-2015 10:30 AM
Ancient Member
I will concede my point then, frequency of occurrence is indeed the important factor.
Both the red lake and mist elves plus iron is a rare situation compared to casting bolts.

However, there is still the question of how many actions are performed - technically speaking you have to invoke the spell/wand first and then select direction.
I'd say that fat fingering at this point is solely the user's fault, whereas the other situation happens during a continuous action - walking.
You hit the 6 or 9 on numpad while leaving the bottom level of TotHK and your finger slips during that and hits 8 which takes you over the ice.
Yes it's rare but I'd say this is by far the more accidental event and fat-finger worthy case.

With spells/wands, you have to stop whatever you're doing, press z or Z and then select direction.
There is a certain period of inaction and consideration before you press the direction key.
In that case, I'm sorry, but if you pressed the wrong key you're totally at fault here, it's not the UI that killed you.
You had more than enough time to take a careful look at which keys your fingers are pressing.

12-01-2015 10:44 AM
Senior Member
If I double-checked what key I was pressing every time I was casting a spell I'd die of boredom as a wizard. Fatigue is certainly a factor in producing mechanical errors (it takes 3-4 keypresses to cast a spell and 1 to melee). Whether that's a another layer of difficulty I suppose is for TB to decide, and I can see the argument either way.

I still think my suggestion (you only get the message if you have a wall directly on both sides of the direction you're casting the bolt) is fine and doesn't negatively impact the game in any way, as I can't think of any case where you'd actually want to do that unless you're purposely killing yourself. Nearly all, if not all, of my bolt deaths are from accidentally casting in between 2 walls instead of down a corridor.

+ Reply