New Beta - Bugs, Notes and Suggestions for Dev Team

[Kelibath]

First off, kudos, everyone! I love the sheer amount of content in this new update - thank you Thomas! A good deal of it is very attractive and functional as well.

The new introduction is lovely and the quests pre-Terinyo make a lot of sense. Nice work alphabetising the character gen lists, too! The new art - from animated sprites to backgrounds to new UI - is absolutely exquisite. A lot of the changes are slightly jarring at first but are clever and intuitive eventually; $ for payment as well as to check coin on hand is a really sensible one, for example. Automated exploration is still a little jarring with how the animations parse but you actually see the travel route now - no teleporting - which makes much more sense. I really love the new level up screen.

I do have some early notes, though:

Firstly, it frustrates me no end to be now unable to simply walk through and auto-open closed doorways using 'y' and the numpad keys via the "Open this door?" Y/n dialogue. I appreciate that we can now press 'o' and have the nearest door auto-open, but I'm so used to hitting SPACE or 'y'. To hit 'o' I have to move the hand that's already using the numberpad keys, which makes the game so much less streamlined for non-automated exploration, especially for someone like me with physical strain issues. This coming from someone who chose their laptop based on whether it had a numpad specifically so they could keep on playing this game..!
I'd accept that the generic resistance to this was down to laziness, but compared with other changes, doors are just such a frequently encountered event. I don't think we need a pop-up dialogue every time we want to change room.
Is there no way to keep the old functionality where we were asked if we wanted to open a door we walked into and could just answer 'y'es? Even if it's only included as a toggleable option in the settings?

On a similar note, while I love the new tilesets and enjoy the extra dimension (literally, heh) that they add to the game, I'm still looking for an old-school ASCII-style mouseless experience in general. To that end pop-up boxes which require the clicking of a 'Close' option are a frustration. They're attractive and helpful for those who miss commands but I find that they get in the way of play for the more experienced. It seems there's a way to disable at least some of these but it might be easier for them to fade out automatically after a few seconds - that way they perform the task of notification while still leaving their text contents in the message buffer, but they're not in the way?

Also I'm finding the location of the pop-ups quite a hassle. They usually appear far off-centre but still need attention before they close. This has led to me repeatedly 'cancelling out' of a door-opening dialogue.

Tactics, as well - I actually like the new 1-7 pop-up box system for choosing them, but it'd be great if we could retain the option for using the +/- version my fingers have learned, again, as a Settings toggle.

Messing around with the settings to find solutions to the above (and failing, thus far), I've found a major issue with the auto-save setting. It says it defaults to 1000 when pressing ENTER and otherwise can be manually set from 1-100, or disabled using 0. This is inaccurate. It defaults to *100* when pressing ENTER, and even turning it off and on again won't restore the original setting after it has been changed the first time. Presumably the maximum amount was MEANT to be 1000 and the extra decimal point was left off accidentally? In any case, what this means for the game in general is that, if a player tries to change the auto-save frequency even once, they're stuck with a permanently over-frequent autosave from that point on. Considering the weight of the graphics engine on RAM as-is this quickly makes the game sluggish and nigh-unplayable.

I note that the right-hand textbox during mode selection and character gen is still just a bit too small for some streams of text to fit inside. Would recommend extending the length of that box by another line or two.

The new messages and new intro are things of beauty, but is there some way to prevent them from being automatically applied to non-standard game modes? Specifically the Challenge of the Week - it's really weird to be given an entire backstory of the Drakalor Chain and then to be told to 'go to Terinyo' before embarking on a quick CotW dungeon dive without any Terinyo in the game world there

Please just choose a name for the original ADOM difficulty setting, the one with built-in achievements? Currently it's referred to in-game as Classic Mode, Hard Mode AND Roguelike Mode! I think Roguelike Mode is the best of these followed closely by Classic Mode but YMMV - however please choose one, and stick to that keystroke as the shortcut? After all you can always use the textbox to explain that said mode is harder than standard, or the original classic setting, or what a roguelike is..

Having a difficulty setting called Standard Mode which DOESN'T offer achievements and is considered 'an easy entry into the world of ADOM' seems counter-intuitive, as well. Maybe calling that Exploration or Story Mode works better.

Seconding aerol, too, regarding Ctrl+n m. Classic configuration might be super-old-hat now but it'd be great to have a config option for it nevertheless!

Lastly, the CotW characters still all seem to default male. Maybe that's just my experience rather than an absolute but I've played about thirty and only one was female (because gender was selectable..).

Hope you don't mind the issues I've raised here - let me know if I've missed anything or if any of these are helpful.