Discussion thread on some UI improvements.

[Stingray1]

Some of us are of the view that a player should not be punished for pressing the wrong key at the wrong time.

Is it possible in a non-tedious way to make these misclicks less of a game ender or otherwise annoyance?

The purpose of this discussion is to establish how to make the user interface more friendly wrt misclicks and to do it here before formulating RFE's with many posts in them, which the creator will have to read through, thus postponing development.

Some RFEs have already been created in this regard, so no need to discuss them again here:

Prompt me if I attack certain pre-defined monsters: RFE (http://www.adom.de/forums/project.php?issueid=2558#note16171)

Accidental bouncing bolts: RFE (http://www.adom.de/forums/project.php?issueid=1776)

Accidentily pressing shift q: RFE (http://www.adom.de/forums/project.php?issueid=2417)

Handling certain items while having poisoned hands or mana battery: RFE (http://www.adom.de/forums/project.php?issueid=1285)

From post #27 (http://www.adom.de/forums/showthread.php/12913-Discussion-thread-on-some-UI-improvements?p=85113#post85113)we discuss non-misclick UI improvements.

[Stingray1]

The misclicks I mostly fall victim to is dipping, equipping and eating.

Wrt dipping, is it acceptable to create a config variable in which some potions are flagged as fine to use for dipping?

Wrt to equipping is it fine if I can expect the UI to prompt me if I want to equip a cursed or auto-cursing item( also defined by a config variable )?

[Blasphemous]

I think potion dipping shouldn't be included, I don't see how the game can discern whether it's desirable to dip a stack of potions of invisibility in holy vs unholy water. Both may be desirable depending on situation and PC's needs. There are plenty of other similar examples. As for eating and equipping items with known status, I guess similar behavior may be justified - boots of slow shuffle for example produce a situationally desirable outcome if the PC wishes to increase exp gains for a short duration.
Still, with the right amount of player customization via adom.cfg, any of the OP's ideas could be implemented.

[Stingray1]

Yes, I was thinking along the lines of receiving a "Are you sure prompt [y/N]?" prompt when I want to dip something into a potion I did not define in the config variable.

Also wrt crown of science or boots of slow shuffle, I'll define them in the config variable and expect to be prompted when attempting to equip them. As you can see from this (http://www.adom.de/forums/project.php?issueid=2215) RFE, I am someone that often change my equipment and I tend to press keys very fast, especially during mid to late game. So mistakes are inevitable, but this RFE will reduce that possibility considerably and speed up my gameplay. Please upvote that and to those 5(and any additional) that voted against it, I hope you die during every lategame. If you even manage to get that far.

Are these code-able?

[magpie]

Please upvote that and to those 4 that voted against it, I hope you die during every lategame.

You're opposed to giving people clear advice about the game, but you want a feature built into the game that rewards carelessness and hastiness?

I don't see that it would be worth his time. You do know that his ADOM-time is pretty limited thanks to his real world commitments, and he already has a long laundry list of stuff that needs adding to ADOM first (because it's been promised in the past).

What's next, demanding that savefiles aren't deleted when your character dies? ;)

And incidentally, there's a game that allows 'equipment sets' to be set to a button click - World of Warcraft. :D

[Silfir]

Some of us are of the view that a player should not be punished for pressing the wrong key at the wrong time.

Since 99.9% of all deaths are preventable, that essentially means nothing. At some point before every death, the player pushed the wrong key at the wrong time and gets punished for it.

I absolutely think players should be punished for pressing the wrong key at the wrong time, and when it comes right down to it, so do we all. What's important is that the UI should not be confusing and obnoxious. There is nothing more obnoxious than a confirmation prompt you didn't need. There's no problem with adding them where it avoids hassle for the player, such as the confirmation prompt for attacking neutral creatures (saving them from having to 'l'ook all of the creatures up), or prevents less experienced players from falling into non-obvious danger (Huh, it's asking me if I'm sure if I want to dive into the water - it's probably not a harmless thing to do). Bouncing spells in your face is an obvious danger. Creature types that are undesirable to attack are an obvious danger (If you choose to play the game too fast, that's really on you; none of these are common or deadly enough to justify putting any degree of work into such a feature). There's a potential for mixing up which potion is meant to be dipped into which other potion, so that might be something to consider. ("You're attempting to dip the holy water into the holy water. Proceed?") Don't see much of a necessity there, either, and it would get real old real fast if you ever want to dip several times in a row.

Bringing up the shift-q thing again (seriously, you suggested it yourself, and it got 1 to 13 votes? wasn't that enough of a hint?) didn't endear me to this thread's start at all, so I apologize for coming off like a grumpy dinosaur. I pretty much am.

[Al-Khwarizmi]

Since 99.9% of all deaths are preventable, that essentially means nothing. At some point before every death, the player pushed the wrong key at the wrong time and gets punished for it.

I absolutely think players should be punished for pressing the wrong key at the wrong time, and when it comes right down to it, so do we all.
I think you know this, but the important distinction is between (1) pressing the wrong key because you chose to do the wrong action, or (2) pressing the wrong key because you chose to do a good action, but failed to use the right key for it.

The first case is what a game is all about and it should be punished. The second case, as long as we agree that ADOM is not a twitch game where reflexes are important, is extraneous to the game and should be minimized. This is UI design 101. It's not even arguable, no software engineer of the 20th century would think that having an UI feature that leads a significant number of users to perform a disastrous action against their will is OK.

Bouncing spells in your face is an obvious danger, as you say, and that's precisely why it should have a confirmation prompt. Because it's obvious. If it weren't so obvious, it would make sense to have players figure that out by themselves. This happens with kobold corpses, for example - I wouldn't introduce a prompt for eating them, it's something that players need to learn and the process of learning it adds fun to the game. But in the case of bouncing bolts, since it's totally obvious, a player that does it probably doesn't really want to do it, he just fat-fingered. It doesn't add any wealth to the game to kill him, it only detracts from usability, and contributes to make people weary of playing on netbooks (let alone smartphones if the game is ported at some point).

In the issue about Shift-Q I also voted against, because I think that change would actually kill more characters than it would save, but I did suggest an alternative, and other people in the thread did the same. I don't think the 13 votes against that means that people is against preventing UI pitfalls, it's just that that particular proposal was not good.

[Stingray1]

I listed those RFEs so they don't get discussed again. Added that to the OP.

@magpie Maybe WoW has it, you would know. Is it a bad feature there? e: BTW, it makes the game less tedious and straining on the eyes. Equipping should not be an exercise in tedium, I believe. It is really annoying to search the screen for a piece of armour and then look down at the keyboard to make extra certain you don't press the wrong key. Using quickmarked numpad shortcuts is all I'm asking for, but no because some people don't play like others it should not be done. I started that RFE at priority 10, but I was requested to raise the priority. Which means I was happy if it was looked into right at the end of development.

e: I'm opposed to giving people advise, either they did not ask for or realized that it will spoil their fun of figuring it out themselves. I know, I hate it when people spoil something for me and if they give me good reason to believe that getting spoiled is bad I still get to choose otherwise. At least they gave me the option and did not shove it in my face. The fact that I was able to figure the game out and win it without any help gave me great joy and I want others to experience that joy for themselves. Every little simple thing I figured out, which you maybe think are minor things, was exhilarating.

[JellySlayer]

[edit]I've moved this post to the relevant RFE (http://www.adom.de/forums/project.php?issueid=1776).

[Stingray1]

Ok, discuss them here then. :p

What I was thinking, is in the config file I would set a variable for potions which I do want to dip in without a confirmation prompt. Water, poison, exchange, raw chaos, booze, etc. but when I accidently select potion of toughness for example, I would then be prompted. The player himself sets this variable with the potions he/she does not want to receive confirmation for, by default it would be as it now is.

Edit - Oh, lol.

[gut]

> is extraneous to the game and should be minimized. This is UI design 101.

Minimize it by learning to hit the proper keys.

> It's not even arguable,

Declaring your argument as 'not arguable' means you automatically lose the argument. This
is so true that it isn't even arguable.

The whole 'we need prompts' logic makes so much sense that they include it in crawl. It has developed such a fine tuning that you get prompted when you try to quit: "Are you sure you want to quit?" If so, you must hit the proper game-quitting key combination, spell out the word 'yes', then hit enter.

If you ban the 'I bolted the wall' death, how about 'I bolted in a direction the monster wasn't in and died.'? It is the exact same situation and just as dead both
ways. I have died both ways. Should the game see that you are bolting nothing and do a check like "the player obviously wouldn't want to bolt nothing, so..."
"the player is kicking a wall with 1 hp, they obviously wouldn't want to do that, so..."

[Stingray1]

We are talking some easy misclicks, I've had enough. No point arguing with a wall. We don't scum either, if you scum it's maybe fine.

[SirTheta]

Heh? Where does gut even mention scumming? I think he raises some pretty valuable points. The only good suggestion in that first post was made by Sami (and the author of the suggestion and it being good is no coincidence). Like, I don't even understand how people could think any of the other suggestions make any sense (and I've read through them) - what gives? Dumb mistakes killing you is literally the essence of ADOM - even dumb mistakes like casting at a wall and frying yourself. If you don't have a good enough sense of humor to take that in stride, there's no way you're going to take starving to death, etc. (all the other things the game throws at you) in stride either. It's just kind of ridiculous.

(note: not talking about the quit suggestion because I explained why that's a truly awful idea for different reasons in the RFE, plus fatfingering Q/S is actually pretty hard to do, slow down your gaming a little. it's turn-based.)

[Stingray1]

gut has mentioned on numerous occasions that he is a scummer, if you savescum you are not going to be phased over mistakes you make. Nor when you have numerous of the same spellbook or potion obtained through scumming.

I don't care about the RFEs I listed, I've voiced my opinion in the RFEs.

I'm talking about misclicking cursed equipment or potions, which is very easy to do with a mouse. IHO the game should always query the player wrt equipping cursed equipment.

Just having the argument, shrugs, a misclick is a misclick doesn't fly for me. That is being an unimpenetrable wall.

[Al-Khwarizmi]

Minimize it by learning to hit the proper keys.
I'm not talking about me. I haven't had a self-bolt death for the last, I don't know, 10 years or so. And I play in a huge Model M keyboard where it's difficult to fatfinger anything. But I'm thinking about newbies, who are used to other interface conventions and often use hardware that doesn't make it easy to hit the right key (e.g. mouse -or, even worse, trackpad or touchscreen!- or a netbook).



The whole 'we need prompts' logic makes so much sense that they include it in crawl. It has developed such a fine tuning that you get prompted when you try to quit: "Are you sure you want to quit?" If so, you must hit the proper game-quitting key combination, spell out the word 'yes', then hit enter.
And that's a perfectly fine idea actually. Even in a world as unsuspicious of being populated by pussies as the command-line UNIX world, this is a standard for things that have consequences and you really need the user to not hit the wrong key (e.g. accepting keys in an SSH connection). It's the kind of thing that is in UI guidelines and that you get complains for not doing. What is exactly wrong with this? That you lose like three seconds every time you want to quit (not even a frequent command)? You can even include a configuration option if players who don't like it don't want to lose the three seconds, so the inconvenience caused by this is exactly zero. All the opposition to this kind of thing boils down to pure elitism.




If you ban the 'I bolted the wall' death, how about 'I bolted in a direction the monster wasn't in and died.'? It is the exact same situation and just as dead both
ways. I have died both ways. Should the game see that you are bolting nothing and do a check like "the player obviously wouldn't want to bolt nothing, so..."
"the player is kicking a wall with 1 hp, they obviously wouldn't want to do that, so..."
Yeah. We can't fix every problem in the world, so let's fix nothing! These all-or-nothing arguments make no sense. It is obvious that you can't fix every possible wrong keypress by the player, but that doesn't mean that you can't try to prevent the blatantly obvious ones, such as Shift-Q or bolting a wall that is directly adjacent to you.

[Stingray1]

Misclicks are things that rarely happen to me as I am very careful to press the right keys, but they do happen for everyone, probably much less for me than others. For the record, I have never reached the cat lord hostile, but once, which was due to a bug. So, I reckon I am pretty slow and careful when pressing keys. Say what, shit happens?

Still I think the UI should be intelligent enough to realize blatant misclicks.

If most of you don't think so, I would like to know what the reason is. Simply saying, it is funny when others make a misclick or you should press keys carefully(which I do most of the time, but sometimes I do select the wrong item by pressing a key next door) or you deserve it, is plain stupid in my opinion.

[Silfir]

There's another design principle called "Keep it simple, stupid". We could go about adding checks and prompts to even more actions in the game, but unless there's a pressing need to do so, we're just adding bloat that could introduce bugs and increase hassle for the player, or create inconsistencies. (For instance, if the game checks for casting bolts straight at walls, will it also check if the wall is 1 square away? If not, why not? What about two? Three? Why doesn't it protect you from misclicking if there are no walls nearby, but you shoot past the creature, as gut has rightfully pointed out? Who has time to work out these cases? Can we actually name cases where players have actually quit playing ADOM because of stuff like this? Why is it that Stingray still insists we cannot discuss individual RFEs, when it's basically impossible to discuss this topic without bringing up examples?) I think ADOM 1.1.1 itself was in a perfectly reasonable state as far as confirmation prompting went. We can individually evaluate these suggestions and do so in their respective RFEs, but don't get surprised or offended if others end up not agreeing with your assessments. Personally I think, just in general, we could do a lot more to improve the game if we promoted the crap out of 1.2.0 p20 to new players, who are actually qualified to opine on where the game's interface needs work to be better understood by new players and where it's working just fine. When people who I know have posted in the forum a lot go at lengths to opine on how new players on Steam or whatever are going to react to killing themselves due to mishandling the game's controls in a particular way, I'm not sure I can really take it seriously.


gut has mentioned on numerous occasions that he is a scummer, if you savescum you are not going to be phased over mistakes you make.

Holy fuck, what?

Stingray, take a step back and just generally check what you're hitting "Submit" on. gut isn't talking about savescumming. He has probably scored more legit wins than the rest of the people posting in this thread combined. (Well, I think JellySlayer posted, too, so that might not be accurate, but anyway.) "Scumming" in the way the term has been used in this forum for ages now stands for exploit-ish strategies to skip ahead in the game - when he's referring to himself as "scummer", that's a tongue-in-cheek reference to his advocacy of routinely killing NPCs for experience that less experienced players would balk at, such as the old barbarian or various shopkeepers, or his strongly held opinion that spellcaster players who don't start the game getting themselves to level 13 in the bug temple by slaying claw bugs are just being stupid - essentially, if there's any kind of exploit or shortcut available within the game, he's abused it so often that he's been added to the sex offender offender registry. He is not, however, talking about savescumming.



This thread is starting to look like a bit of a trainwreck, and not the amusing kind of trainwreck (http://www.adom.de/forums/showthread.php/417-The-treasure-hunter-talent-sucks). If we can't talk about this stuff without getting angry or insulting and not funny, we shouldn't do so at all.

[Stingray1]

Oh ok, I won't take anything gut says as directly then. There was one post of his though where he said everyone savescums, which made me believe that he does. e: Also in the elementalist thread after we mentioned scumming for spellbooks.

Killing NPCs for xp, then I suppose I am also a scummer in that sense.

I also think it would be best if new player raise their opinion on the UI.

Wrt your last paragraph, I did start the thread in a civil manner and tried my hardest to keep it that way. For some reason, I don't know, people here feel the need to insult my morals/gameplay, dear Silfir.

[_Ln_]

I'm not talking about me. I haven't had a self-bolt death for the last, I don't know, 10 years or so. And I play in a huge Model M keyboard where it's difficult to fatfinger anything. But I'm thinking about newbies, who are used to other interface conventions and often use hardware that doesn't make it easy to hit the right key (e.g. mouse -or, even worse, trackpad or touchscreen!- or a netbook).
Right, no one in favor of these suggestions actually need them because they already play carefully? You want to do it for the newbies, right? Apparently, all new players come from other games which took care of them and had safety labels all over. And if they start playing ADOM, the hostile ADOM UI will viciously destroy their interest in playing.

How about waiting for a lot of new players (and I honestly have hard time in believing this will happen) and seeing if they will actually have problems? Why do you want to decide for them? Why do you take the position of an "adult" that decides which actions are safe for "children"?


And that's a perfectly fine idea actually. Even in a world as unsuspicious of being populated by pussies as the command-line UNIX world, this is a standard for things that have consequences and you really need the user to not hit the wrong key (e.g. accepting keys in an SSH connection). It's the kind of thing that is in UI guidelines and that you get complains for not doing. What is exactly wrong with this? That you lose like three seconds every time you want to quit (not even a frequent command)? You can even include a configuration option if players who don't like it don't want to lose the three seconds, so the inconvenience caused by this is exactly zero. All the opposition to this kind of thing boils down to pure elitism.

Yeah. We can't fix every problem in the world, so let's fix nothing! These all-or-nothing arguments make no sense. It is obvious that you can't fix every possible wrong keypress by the player, but that doesn't mean that you can't try to prevent the blatantly obvious ones, such as Shift-Q or bolting a wall that is directly adjacent to you.

ADOM explicitly prints you the question "Are you sure you want to quit [y/n]?"
What is exactly wrong with you spending 3 seconds to actually read the output? Reading the output is the common practice in UNIX command line word. What do you want to fix with shift-Q specifically?

Finally, to what extent you wish to go with just a blatantly obvious misclick as a wall bolt? That is what gut is trying to tell you.
If I have resistance, I will dig a 2x1 corridor, lure the monster there and bounce it to kill it with no harm whatsoever. Do I have to press "y" everytime? Obviously I know what I am doing, why the game would question me? Because it's inherently dangerous action?
If I need to lose cursed equipment and have resistance, I will bounce a lightning bolt again at the wall.
You yourself said that the amount of self-bolt deaths is minimal. The same is true for me and I use the techniques above much more often. It is counterproductive to add a check because it will hinder my game more that it will help me.

Also, what bolts are there in ADOM? Should this apply to all bolts? Maybe only Magic Missile and Death Ray? Apparently we need to extract in-game logic (which bolts are bouncing) and insert them into UI configuration. That seems to me a very questionable move. I've already said that I despise Auto_pickup because I view it as a huge cheat. I've used it before but stopped. Sometimes I use to pick up arrows after wilderness barbarian/raider encounters, but I always disable it afterwards.

@Stingray:
Honestly, this is like a 10th time I'm thinking of blocking your messages due to your blatant elitism. Yes, we all see that everyone who ever uses any scumming technique deserves to be set on the same level as a savescummer and his/her opinion should not even be considered in any reasonable discussion. You don't have to mock us in our misery.

[grobblewobble]

This discussion reminds me of Dwarf Fortress. Holy crap, that was a UI nightmare. With a lot of struggling I eventually managed to tell a few dwarves they were supposed to train fighting skills and to manufacture armor.. but I never succeeded in making the soldiers equip that armor, or to go and attack something.

[Singbird]

Well, if we're talking about UI improvements, I think these kind of confirmation prompts are at the bottom of my list.

Using skills repeatedly is absolutely tedious.
Quickmarking skills and spells doesn't really achieve anything because you have to push the same number of buttons to use them anyway. In addition, using the non-quickmarked ones just becomes more and more tedious. For some outworldly reason you then have to press '*' to get to the skill list.
You can filter by item type when using 'd', but not when using 'Ctrl+d'.
Throwing items is a chore. Remove bow and arrows, equip throwing item.

As for misclicks I really don't know. I don't remember any other game asking me if I really want to shoot that fireball so close to my party members or if I really want to fire that RPG right now because the grenade will hit the wall and kill me. I also don't remember ever missing it either. To me this isn't even fixing the user interface, it's just putting up safes because the interface is so crappy. Or maybe your input device is so crappy? Maybe it's putting up safes to accomodate input devices the game was not designed for. I'm using a keyboard and never had any misclick problems.

I wouldn't mind if the game warned about firing a bolt on a wall next to me, because I never do that. But then I think the game also should warn about putting on iron items for my mist elf. Of course, it would also be nice if it warned me when entering fire and air temples with items that might get destroyed. You know, physical misclick, mental misclick, shouldn't make a difference (diving in water already is a mental misclick protection). I recently got sacrificed when I stepped on an altar because I wasn't thinking, so the game should warn about that too. So yeah, I don't miss more confirmations for my doings. But if others want them and they can be toggled off, why not. They could be implemented in an easy mode in the enhanced version or something, for example.

[Stingray1]

I think here is maybe the best place to clarify something. I do look down on cheating and of course cheaters, that is my persona. What you and maybe others see as elitist statement is not my intention for them to seem like. Obviously I am doing those statements in the wrong way.

From my perspective they are attempts to deter others from certain unhealthy practices, in my view.

If I do a certain challenge or test it is to inspire players, not to try and indicate to them that I think I'm better than them. I think there are many better players than me, very many.

I shall henceforce really try to rephrase my comments.

[JellySlayer]

Well, if we're talking about UI improvements, I think these kind of confirmation prompts are at the bottom of my list.

Using skills repeatedly is absolutely tedious.
Quickmarking skills and spells doesn't really achieve anything because you have to push the same number of buttons to use them anyway. In addition, using the non-quickmarked ones just becomes more and more tedious. For some outworldly reason you then have to press '*' to get to the skill list.
You can filter by item type when using 'd', but not when using 'Ctrl+d'.
Throwing items is a chore. Remove bow and arrows, equip throwing item.

As for misclicks I really don't know. I don't remember any other game asking me if I really want to shoot that fireball so close to my party members or if I really want to fire that RPG right now because the grenade will hit the wall and kill me. I also don't remember ever missing it either. To me this isn't even fixing the user interface, it's just putting up safes because the interface is so crappy. Or maybe your input device is so crappy? Maybe it's putting up safes to accomodate input devices the game was not designed for. I'm using a keyboard and never had any misclick problems.

I wouldn't mind if the game warned about firing a bolt on a wall next to me, because I never do that. But then I think the game also should warn about putting on iron items for my mist elf. Of course, it would also be nice if it warned me when entering fire and air temples with items that might get destroyed. You know, physical misclick, mental misclick, shouldn't make a difference (diving in water already is a mental misclick protection). I recently got sacrificed when I stepped on an altar because I wasn't thinking, so the game should warn about that too. So yeah, I don't miss more confirmations for my doings. But if others want them and they can be toggled off, why not. They could be implemented in an easy mode in the enhanced version or something, for example.

Pretty much this. A lot of the UI "improvements" suggested so far seem to be designed to remove actual game mechanics that people don't like, not to make the interface easier to work with.

[GordonOverkill]

To quote the theme of a big personality of the present: "Well, you hurt my friends, and you hurt my pride... I gotta be a man, I can't let it slide!"

Stingray's been an extremely nice and pleasant person who gave me alot of valuable hints without ever giving me the feeling of playing like an absolute moron (though I honestly did at times ;-)). He's definitely no blowhard, he has just got kind of a rumbling and direct way to say his opinion at times ;-)

Apart from that Singbird is 101% right with his statement!

[Soirana]

Some of us are of the view that a player should not be punished for pressing the wrong key at the wrong time.

Well, problem is you need mechanically determine if it was misclick or not, which means game engine should predict what you 'ought' not to do in given situation. Well either that or just allowding revert last action. Both ways suck, IMHO. Later does not go well with what I expect from roguelike and former from games I played usually does not work very well unless fixed to very specific and simple rules [like firing rocket launcher gives warning if it would damage friendly units -in turn based game naturally].

So let see at examples:


1. Prompt me if I attack certain pre-defined monsters: RFE (http://www.adom.de/forums/project.php?issueid=2558#note16171)

2. Accidental bouncing bolts: RFE (http://www.adom.de/forums/project.php?issueid=1776)

3. Accidentily pressing shift q: RFE (http://www.adom.de/forums/project.php?issueid=2417)

4. Handling certain items while having poisoned hands or mana battery: RFE (http://www.adom.de/forums/project.php?issueid=1285)

1. Adom prompts when one attacks perma friendly stuff, no? Berserk is obviously designed exception. Don't see what needs to be fixed.
2. Well problem is if one warns about every bouncy damage it gets wierd - trained bolts can easily have higher range than sight [and wands of far slaying too] so that would introduce whole nonsense of "bouncesight" and so on.
In theory it would be nice if there was possibility to lean in game "soft" versions of bolts - that is without bouncing. Player could pick bouncy or not bouncy with their own advantages and disadvantages.
I still view bounces as part of deal for wizzards having good times in adom compared to melee chars.
3. you do get prompted after that. So what do you want to fix?
4. These, in my opinion, are made not to be save. So prompt would work opposite from intended.

Now speaking about UI - stuff I would like to see is getting some sage functios -like command repeating your last action, autoswitch with hostiles, environment message suppression.

On stuff I personally suffered was mostly asassins and Alchemy with overpressing a's [a to apply, a to choose skill [usually first in list], than couple overrushed a's for ingredients] - ends in burnt up charwith half town chasing arround.

[Stingray1]

Soirana, I agree confirmations must be kept to an absolute minimum and only be presented to the player in very likely instances that a misclick might have been occurred.

Berserk has been fixed to also prompt.

This is why, for my "issues", I am considering suggesting config variables. Where through the player will define himself whether (s)he wants comfirmation on said "issues".

Wrt to your "issue" about pressing 'a' too many times, one already existing solution besides taking care is to quickmark skills. Not everyone likes using quickmarks though.

Those sage features are already implemented or will be in the near future.

Edit - I am starting to lean more and more towards us old timers' view on misclicks. That would most certainly be the easiest to implement and forces the player to be careful, which is something I feel should remain in the game. Covering every possible misclick will be ridiculous.

I think most everything has been said wrt misclicks, so unless anyone feels something more needs to be added. If you want to discuss misclicks a little more, I'll shift my posts. Maybe we can move on to actual UI improvements as Singbird started on. I will thus search now for RFEs regarding non-misclick UI improvements and link them in my next post. If I do miss any, please be so kind as to mention them.

We can thus maybe try to concentrate on stuff that hasn't been RFE'd yet.

[Stingray1]

Search engine to find items easier in inventory: RFE (http://www.adom.de/forums/project.php?issueid=2173)

Stacking those annoying small stacks of missiles: RFE (http://www.adom.de/forums/project.php?issueid=1415) and another (http://www.adom.de/forums/project.php?issueid=1705)

Combine single repeated actions: RFE (http://www.adom.de/forums/project.php?issueid=1236)

Lvl 18 Healer classpowers (minor one): RFE (http://www.adom.de/forums/project.php?issueid=2388)

Lvl 18 Thief classpower (minor one): RFE (http://www.adom.de/forums/project.php?issueid=1940)

More teleportation to shortcuts: RFE (http://www.adom.de/forums/project.php?issueid=2518)

Extend extended drop: RFE (http://www.adom.de/forums/project.php?issueid=2346)

Auto-pickpocket: RFE (http://www.adom.de/forums/project.php?issueid=1825)

Quickmarking ':u'sable items in inventory: RFE (http://www.adom.de/forums/project.php?issueid=2200)

'l'ook targeting like 't'hrow: RFE (http://www.adom.de/forums/project.php?issueid=1969)

Select multiple items for sacrifice: RFE (http://www.adom.de/forums/project.php?issueid=124)

Yeah that's all I could locate.

[Stingray1]

Ok, I'll start so long. Wrt to quickmarked skills/spells, I never used it when I started playing. Nowadays I cannot go without it. What I like about it is that I can most of the time keep my right hand on the numpad and my fingers know exactly where those keys are. My left hand is on 'a' and 'w' and 's' and 'z' and near 'e'. Very convenient setup in my view.

Sorry Singbird for not understanding, but I don't understand how the current quickmarking UI is inconvenient?

[Singbird]

Sorry Singbird for not understanding, but I don't understand how the current quickmarking UI is inconvenient?

Well, I think my problem is mainly that quickmarking a skill or a spell in actuality "slow-marks" all the other skills and spells. If you quickmark something, using something else then becomes slower. How to fix, I don't know. 'a'pplying a skill could open the list as usual, just the quickmarked skills could be selected with the numbers as right now, or another skill could be selected with letters. Or have a different key to use the quickmarked things. Make 'a' use a quickmarked skill and 'A' use normally or to quickmark them. Or when you have a skill quickmarked and you 'a', make 'Z' take you to skill list and not abort. That would speed things up nicely I guess.

[SirTheta]

Sorry Singbird for not understanding, but I don't understand how the current quickmarking UI is inconvenient?Quickmarking doesn't save you any keypresses - just finger movement, and then only for like 6 skills/spells at most, and keypress related errors [learning new spell -> spell shifts down one -> you choose wrong spell] - and it makes accessing a non-quickmarked skill a HUGE pain in the ass. I don't have any suggestions for making it better, but there's a lot of room for improvement (bringing up the screen has occurred to me, but a very nice thing about quickmarking is it doesn't bring up the screen...)

[Stingray1]

I think 'a' taking you to the skill screen is a good solution. Either pressing the quickmarked number or corresponding letter next to a skill. Thus completely removing the need to press '*'.

Edit - wrt what Sirtheta said with the screen coming up, when one gets used to using quickmarked skills/spells one presses the keys in quick succesion. I think it coming up wouldn't be a major strain. I might be wrong though.

I must not keep slipping up to thank GordonOverkill for his kind words, that was very courteous of you. The whole debate around misclicks was slightly heated and unfortunately when parties are of opposing opinion some, me especially, do become frutrated and say things that should have remained. Of course guts statements was not at all outrageous, mine was however and I'm not feeling proud of them.

[gut]

This is no way to flamewar. No more of this "enemy's statements were not outrageous" stuff.
Behold, a wall of text, generated in under 15 minutes! Hopefully we can move this thread away from UI enhancements and back to flaming.


> if you savescum you are not going to be phased over mistakes you make.

last savescum for me was probably mid-late 90s. I am including game-crash related restores in this.

> I'm not talking about me. [snip] But I'm thinking about newbies

Yes. I told THEM to learn to hit the proper keys. Adom already taught you and I long ago.
http://www.adom.de/forums/showthread.php/11663-Thank-you-ADOM-by-gut?p=65951#post65951

> Misclicks are things that rarely happen to me as I am very careful to press the right keys

Yes, either adom taught you caution as well, or you have an IQ higher than the room temperature
and so are capable of tasks such as thought and learning. I wonder what would happen if typing
teachers adopted the philosophy of not counting misclicks against students. Sjohnthing thkls
meie thav woruld woob be ha horrmild pvaklkce to ligve.

> And that's a perfectly fine idea actually

We have different definitions of 'perfectly fine' then. I embrace an extremely rare facepalm
more heartily than hourly (or... minutely!) annoyances. Facepalms are great teachers, but
routine irritation is not.

> you get complains for not doing

You get those complaints from people who fatfinger a key, then want someone to blame. Catering
to the mentality of 8-year-olds inevitably alienates the non-8-year-olds.

> What is exactly wrong with this? That you lose like three seconds

3 seconds for that, and 3 seconds for this, and, and, and, and... and pretty soon I'm not
using the program anymore.

> include a configuration option if players who don't like it

How about include a configuration option if players who *like* it.
No wait, don't. For an example of what I mean, here is a paste of one of (!) crawl's config files.
http://pastebin.com/Xb49UFtK It is 15612 characters long and is not the only config file. Examples:
runrest_ignore_poison += 1:20
easy_confirm = all
allow_self_target = prompt
confirm_butcher = never
auto_eat_chunks = true

These are but a few lines, there are countless dozens more. I have contacted crawl programmers
regarding some of these when I was going through the tedious, hours-long process of trying to
understand how to manipulate these abominations, and they didn't know what some of this madness
did (without researching it).

> the opposition to this kind of thing boils down to pure elitism

If 'elitism' is defined as 'those who have gone through the simple learning curve' of not
hitting the key combination of SHIFT+Q THEN Y unless you really mean it, then yes. Consider the
alternative of a ui designed for noobs, with the burden of configuration placed upon your
more devoted players. The result is that you will have fewer devoted players and crawl-style
config files.

> Yeah. We can't fix every problem in the world, so let's fix nothing!

Again, crawl is a game that tries to fix everything. Its user interface makes me want to vomit
everytime I try to play. "Are you sure you want to walk into that cloud of steam? Y/n", "Are
you sure you want to wield this dagger of vampirism? Y/n?", "You are about to lose your
bouyancy, would you like to..." JEEZ! YOU STUPID GAME! YES! I AM NOT A TARD THAT CAN'T UNDERSTAND
THE CONCEPT OF RAMIFICATIONS! UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE, DON'T ASK ME IF I AM SURE I WANT TO DO
ANYTHING I'M TELLING YOU TO DO! JUST TAKE IT FOR GRANTED THAT I WANT TO WALK IN THE DIRECTION I
COMMAND, KILL WHAT IS IN THE DIRECTION I COMMAND, RAPE WHOMEVER IS IN THE DIRECTION I COMMAND,
QUIT THE GAME WHEN I COMMAND, OR ANY OTHER BLASTED THING I COMMAND! STOP TRYING TO THINK FOR ME!
YOU SUCK AT IT! YOU ARE NOT MY BABYSITTER! LEARN YOUR PLACE! huff, huff, huff...

> Who has time to work out these cases?

The crawl team. There are 9000 of them and they all work around the clock and for free. So all
we need is that for adom too.

> If we can't talk about this stuff without getting angry or insulting

What?! The rest of what you said was great, but I have to disagree on this one. Getting folks
angry is 99% of a flamewar, isn't it?

> There was one post of his though where he said everyone savescums,

I think 'has savescummed' would be accurate.

> people here feel the need to insult my morals/gameplay

You left out mother, existence, dog, neighbors, spiritual beliefs, appearance, etc...

> I do look down on cheating and of course cheaters,

Cheating on taxes matters. 'Cheating' in a game of adom THAT YOU DON'T INTEND TO POST ON A
HIGH SCORE TABLE OR VICTORY FORUM is hardly the same.

> Stingray's been an extremely nice and pleasant person

Obama has been a charming, loving, wise leader who enjoys the support of the masses, both
in his own country and abroad. His benevolence and genius are surpassed only by Grey's.

> he has just got kind of a rumbling and direct way

bulldozers have that same trait

> Adom prompts when one attacks perma friendly stuff, no?

No, and thanks god! Sage fixed that by use of the autoswap command. Before that it was
always "Are you sure you want to walk through a town and keep your sanity? Y/n?" Understand,
this beautiful convenience comes at a cost. Autoswapping will cause occasional angering of
a citizen, followed by said citizen's occasional untimely death, followed by entire villages
turning hostile, followed by entire games being ruined, yet I'll bet 99% of dedicated adom
players consider this a fair trade off.

> Player could pick bouncy or not bouncy

Sorry, I just vomited a little.

> Berserk has been fixed to also prompt

Please tell me you are kidding me. I'm not kidding.

[Stingray1]

Why aren't you using quote tags?

[Singbird]

Why aren't you using quote tags?

I think this might be one of the reasons Porkman has something against you. : )

Back on topic... What is the use of not bringing up the skill list? I cannot think of anything except speed, and the screen always comes up fast enough for me, even though usually I tap the two keys in quick succession.

Another thing that could be improved are the drop commands. To me 'd' and '\Cd' could well be merged into one command. Dropping a single item with Ctrl+d is only marginally more annoying, requiring you to press Space or 'z' after selecting the item. With the pick single item it is useful because you can just alternate ',' and 'a' to pick up multiple items, which for me is faster than going through the alphabet, but I don't have any similar use for 'd'. Parts of the ':d' command could also be integrated in this so that for example if you press a category key twice, you select all items of that category. So, 'd', '"', '"', '?', '?', Space and you have dropped all your books and scrolls. I don't mind the different drop commands though, but it does feel excessive to have three commands for that.

[_Ln_]

Epic gut is epic. Haven't laughed like that since yesterday when I got sacced by a solar.

Not to create an empty post: I swear I've seen an RFE to allow item type filters for ctrl-p command, so that you don't have to wade through anything in order to mark necessary items. But I can't seem to find it, maybe I'm missing something. I use ctrl-p almost exclusively and I would certainly like something like that.

[GordonOverkill]

Obama has been a charming, loving, wise leader who enjoys the support of the masses, both
in his own country and abroad. His benevolence and genius are surpassed only by Grey's.

Why the hell do you mention Obama? Does he even play ADOM?


bulldozers have that same trait

You know what bulldozers don't have? A mouth to defend themselves against perky accusations.

[Silfir]

@gut:

Unfortunately, I have to confirm that you're prompted about attacking hostiles even in true berserk mode now. (In regular berserk, you always were.) I don't understand it any better than you do.

Also, that was way better put than I could've managed in two lifetimes.

@Ln:

This is very unhelpful to be sure, but I find using regular "," pickup and hitting return after the first pickup is pretty much just as fast for picking up lots of items, and allows filtering while it does. Ctrl-p, in comparison, is really only better for large scale pickups, if you really need that ability to reconsider what items to pick up before you execute it.

The major trouble with filtering in the ctrl-p prompt, I would imagine, is what happens if items you marked get filtered out. It's not at all obvious how to get them back on-screen, and whether the code is such that the program can still keep track of it (There is an "everything" filter but I don't remember what it is.) If it would require major rewriting to implement, it's probably not worth the trouble.

EDIT:

@GordonOverkill:

The main point gut is making is that someone someone being a nice guy doesn't lend value to their positions, and the purpose of a discussion is to actually discuss the topic at hand, rather than how nice the respective participants are or aren't. Blunt, brutal takedowns of bad arguments are more effective than sugarcoating, and time spent beating around the bush or worrying about coming off as a nice person will often be time wasted.

Do keep in mind that gut's temper has been raised to a fair degree also by the fact that Stingray made the assumption that he is a savescummer, which is a) irrelevant, b) mistaken and c) insulting. In any case, a debate isn't a politeness competition; it stands and falls with the quality of the arguments involved. And it's a bit telling that no one has argued back yet.

[_Ln_]

@gut:

Unfortunately, I have to confirm that you're prompted about attacking hostiles even in true berserk mode now. (In regular berserk, you always were.) I don't understand it any better than you do.

Also, that was way better put than I could've managed in two lifetimes.

@Ln:

This is very unhelpful to be sure, but I find using regular "," pickup and hitting return after the first pickup is pretty much just as fast for picking up lots of items, and allows filtering while it does. Ctrl-p, in comparison, is really only better for large scale pickups, if you really need that ability to reconsider what items to pick up before you execute it.

The major trouble with filtering in the ctrl-p prompt, I would imagine, is what happens if items you marked get filtered out. It's not at all obvious how to get them back on-screen, and whether the code is such that the program can still keep track of it (There is an "everything" filter but I don't remember what it is.) If it would require major rewriting to implement, it's probably not worth the trouble.

Yeah, the same argument was mentioned in that thread too (unless it's an imaginary RFE which only I remember). I'm not too sure that rewriting this is really that time and resource consuming. Marking functionality is implemented only for ctrl-d and ctrl-p (as far as I'm aware) so the changes would reserved to direct features.

If it does, I can supply different measures which will not require any rewriting whatsover. A simple "jump" to a certain section (scrolls, potions) implemented with the same mechanic of next/previous page shifting will offer practically the same amount of flexibility.

[grobblewobble]

Stingray made the assumption that he is a savescummer, which is a) irrelevant, b) mistaken and c) insulting.
d) hilarious

I knew it, gut! You dirty old savescummer.

[GordonOverkill]

The main point gut is making is that someone someone being a nice guy doesn't lend value to their positions, and the purpose of a discussion is to actually discuss the topic at hand, rather than how nice the respective participants are or aren't. Blunt, brutal takedowns of bad arguments are more effective than sugarcoating, and time spent beating around the bush or worrying about coming off as a nice person will often be time wasted.

Do keep in mind that gut's temper has been raised to a fair degree also by the fact that Stingray made the assumption that he is a savescummer, which is a) irrelevant, b) mistaken and c) insulting. In any case, a debate isn't a politeness competition; it stands and falls with the quality of the arguments involved. And it's a bit telling that no one has argued back yet.

No need to insult helpless machines, though! Don't take my last posting too serious, I just thought that I might join the flame-game for a round ;-)

[gut]

Hold the presses, I just realized I forgot to link the 105 KB 'guide to crawl options' file that attempts
to explain what the +500 lines in crawl's 15 KB init.txt actually do. Here it is: http://pastebin.com/SJfUe2L3

My favorite part comes at line 1253 (I'm not joking):
"
autofight_stop = 30
Autofight will not act if your HP is at or lower than this
percentage of your max HP. For example, to remove this stop
you would want:
autofight_stop = 0

autofight_throw = false
If your quiver contains a throwable item, autofight will throw it
at enemies out of melee range. Without this option, only a wielded
launcher (a bow, crossbow, sling or blowgun) will be considered.

autofight_throw_nomove = true
This works same as above, except that only for ===hit_adjacent
rather than ===hit_closest; this is usually bound to shift-Tab.
"

I can't wait for adom to implement auto fight! Just think of how many needless interface deaths
that would avoid :D

EDIT: this is a snapshot of my opinions as of 2009 on this matter: http://www.adom.de/forums/showthread.php/764-Holy-F!?p=10533#post10533

[Stingray1]

I'm not putting up a front of being a nice guy. I believe all my comments was relevant to the discussion, unless I was placed in a position to defend against statements attacking me.

I am always being myself and if you don't like that I can accept that, but don't go assuming the wrong things about me.

@Singbird I'm afraid I'm not understanding again. You think Porkman maybe does not like me, because gut doesn't use quote tags or me being curious as to why not?

Sorry for the off-topic, but I'm not going to read how people try to paint the wrong picture about me and not say anything.
Sometimes I read and respond in haste as I'm at work, so I do appologize for any errors.

[Silfir]

Maybe it's because this


Why aren't you using quote tags?

is perhaps the lamest post in the history of mankind?

[Stingray1]

You've lost me. Anyway I'm tired of reading your attempts at insults. They are a waste of everyone's time and only slows discussions.

[Silfir]

The thing that's slowing discussions right now is that no one actually has a rebuttal to gut's post.

[grobblewobble]

Now speaking about UI - stuff I would like to see is getting some sage functios -like command repeating your last action, autoswitch with hostiles, environment message suppression.

Some of this has already been done, I think? At least the "repeat last action" command was added.

[Stingray1]

Some of this has already been done, I think? At least the "repeat last action" command was added.

Yes, all three those were implemented. Non-hostile switching wasn't working correctly though, so that has been temporarily disabled. I'm sure we'll have it in the near future though.

True Berserking was made to prompt attacking non-hostiles, because I think to prevent accidentily attacking one when using the 'w'alk command. Switching this back to old behaviour is pretty debatable. As it further inspires a player to be attentive to what (s)he is doing.

[Al-Khwarizmi]

The thing that's slowing discussions right now is that no one actually has a rebuttal to gut's post.
To be honest I still don't see the point of all-or-nothing examples and I still haven't seen any argument as to why preventing some of the most blatant key-deaths, such as bolting and adjacent walls, is bad (no one is proposing the Crawl prompt jungle, there is such a thing as a middle ground).

But anyway I see that I, and those who think alike in this, are in a clear minority and our arguments don't permeate the old-school crowd, so there is no reason to discuss this much more (I do appreciate flaming for the sake of it but I prefer to flame about TH and that stuff, not about RFE's which should be productive suggestions for TB).

Something where do you have a point, though, is in that we will be able to discuss the needs of noobs and Steam players much better when we do have them. If at that point there is significant criticism about this (and I think there will be) I will raise the discussion again.

I also concur with you in that we should start doing promotion, now that we have a p20 which is already very stable and presentable (maybe except for the absence of graphics for bolts, which seems like a hole in an otherwise complete and well-polished game). I don't know much about promotion and have never been good at it, but any initiatives in this direction would be useful.

[_Ln_]

To be honest I still don't see the point of all-or-nothing examples and I still haven't seen any argument as to why preventing some of the most blatant key-deaths, such as bolting and adjacent walls, is bad (no one is proposing the Crawl prompt jungle, there is such a thing as a middle ground).

I still haven't seen your justification of how a 100% in-game mechanic should be regulated by an external UI configuration variable. Explicit statement of bolting nature of some magical projectiles (namely Death Ray, Lightning Bolt, Stun Ray, Magic Missile) is not mentioned in the game (unlike item types which are used in auto_pickup) and should be reserved to player knowledge and experience specifically.

Also, when you split the message to about 10 parts, it's annoying to copy-paste quote tags. ">" symbols are a standard approach for text-based e-mailing (and other) clients to render quote blocks. Nowadays people use graphical thingies for easier visual identification, but gut has problems with modern technologies on account of him being a hillbilly :D

Seriously, he can't even handle such a basic device as a lawnmower.

[Stingray1]

Thanks _Ln_ which is the point I was trying to make. From his referrings of Crawl configuration and not using quote tags, one may assume that he clearly does not like these lenghty and uncomfortable practices.

He is not forced to use them either. All I was asking for is a handful of configuration variables, two in fact and Blasphemous is asking for one.

I am also fine without them, but would like them.

P.S. I was hoping gut would answer my question, but unfortunately that took(or didn't) longer than I hoped for.

[grobblewobble]

Seriously, he can't even handle such a basic device as a lawnmower.
Oh no don't mention the lawnmower. :O

[_Ln_]

Oh no don't mention the lawnmower. :O

But some newcomers haven't seen the foot pic! ;)

[Porkman]

Right. I see my name has been called into this flame...er, discussion.

his is no way to flamewar. No more of this "enemy's statements were not outrageous" stuff.
Behold, a wall of text, generated in under 15 minutes! Hopefully we can move this thread away from UI enhancements and back to flaming.


> if you savescum you are not going to be phased over mistakes you make.

>>last savescum for me was probably mid-late 90s. I am including game-crash related restores in this.

ANd who gives a toss! Scumming is one way to toss the finger to the community that develops this game with the intention to screw players over in every possible way. If something is too good, and some players use it, bang there comes the nerf. Starting from monsters gaining power but dropping in xp, bolts you throw guaranteed to hit you back, and all other things - which I can think of a dozen more of -- that a truly neutral GM would not do in any rpg. Half of the RFE in here make me wanna tell their creator to go choke on a sack of doorknobs.

> I'm not talking about me. [snip] But I'm thinking about newbies

Yes. I told THEM to learn to hit the proper keys. Adom already taught you and I long ago.
http://www.adom.de/forums/showthread...5951#post65951

This is not a difficult issue to solve. Do like nethack, where you have an option for paranoid_quit, if it is set to true, then instead of a y/n prompt you must type the word "yes". This way fatfingerers are covered, and gutt is free to let his cat dance on his keyboard and quit all his games as he pleases. And it won't take that much to code for it either.

> Misclicks are things that rarely happen to me as I am very careful to press the right keys

Yes, either adom taught you caution as well, or you have an IQ higher than the room temperature
and so are capable of tasks such as thought and learning. I wonder what would happen if typing
teachers adopted the philosophy of not counting misclicks against students. Sjohnthing thkls
meie thav woruld woob be ha horrmild pvaklkce to ligve.

Stingray: you're also the guy who has four different sets of equipment and switches it all for each monster they kill, switching back again to walk three squares, etc. Just out of sadism in your regard I would like to magically hex your games with the the paranoid_remove option from nethack too, where you must type yes to remove any piece of equipment. Not that there's a real use for it, but it would make your life even harder and thus make me laugh. hysterically.

> And that's a perfectly fine idea actually

We have different definitions of 'perfectly fine' then. I embrace an extremely rare facepalm
more heartily than hourly (or... minutely!) annoyances. Facepalms are great teachers, but
routine irritation is not.

> you get complains for not doing

You get those complaints from people who fatfinger a key, then want someone to blame. Catering
to the mentality of 8-year-olds inevitably alienates the non-8-year-olds.

Everytime I fatfinger a key I proceed to burn Gutt in effigy. Along with the effigy of his cat.

> What is exactly wrong with this? That you lose like three seconds

3 seconds for that, and 3 seconds for this, and, and, and, and... and pretty soon I'm not
using the program anymore.

I kinda agree with gutt here. If you want to implement somethign like that, make it an option and not a mandate

> include a configuration option if players who don't like it

How about include a configuration option if players who *like* it.
No wait, don't. For an example of what I mean, here is a paste of one of (!) crawl's config files.
http://pastebin.com/Xb49UFtK It is 15612 characters long and is not the only config file. Examples:
runrest_ignore_poison += 1:20
easy_confirm = all
allow_self_target = prompt
confirm_butcher = never
auto_eat_chunks = true

These are but a few lines, there are countless dozens more. I have contacted crawl programmers
regarding some of these when I was going through the tedious, hours-long process of trying to
understand how to manipulate these abominations, and they didn't know what some of this madness
did (without researching it).

> the opposition to this kind of thing boils down to pure elitism

If 'elitism' is defined as 'those who have gone through the simple learning curve' of not
hitting the key combination of SHIFT+Q THEN Y unless you really mean it, then yes. Consider the
alternative of a ui designed for noobs, with the burden of configuration placed upon your
more devoted players. The result is that you will have fewer devoted players and crawl-style
config files.

Clearly you have not enjoyed the wonders of playing while shitfaced drunk, learning curve or not.

> Yeah. We can't fix every problem in the world, so let's fix nothing!

Again, crawl is a game that tries to fix everything. Its user interface makes me want to vomit
everytime I try to play. "Are you sure you want to walk into that cloud of steam? Y/n", "Are
you sure you want to wield this dagger of vampirism? Y/n?", "You are about to lose your
bouyancy, would you like to..." JEEZ! YOU STUPID GAME! YES! I AM NOT A TARD THAT CAN'T UNDERSTAND
THE CONCEPT OF RAMIFICATIONS! UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE, DON'T ASK ME IF I AM SURE I WANT TO DO
ANYTHING I'M TELLING YOU TO DO! JUST TAKE IT FOR GRANTED THAT I WANT TO WALK IN THE DIRECTION I
COMMAND, KILL WHAT IS IN THE DIRECTION I COMMAND, RAPE WHOMEVER IS IN THE DIRECTION I COMMAND,
QUIT THE GAME WHEN I COMMAND, OR ANY OTHER BLASTED THING I COMMAND! STOP TRYING TO THINK FOR ME!
YOU SUCK AT IT! YOU ARE NOT MY BABYSITTER! LEARN YOUR PLACE! huff, huff, huff...

Gutt: i love you. Not really, but kinda, I do.

> Who has time to work out these cases?

The crawl team. There are 9000 of them and they all work around the clock and for free. So all
we need is that for adom too.

> If we can't talk about this stuff without getting angry or insulting

What?! The rest of what you said was great, but I have to disagree on this one. Getting folks
angry is 99% of a flamewar, isn't it?

How about we implement some flame software detection that gives you 130 prompts before allowing you to post any inflammatory material? That would be funnnnnnn!!!

> There was one post of his though where he said everyone savescums,

I think 'has savescummed' would be accurate.

Calling out on another's vices to cover one's own ineptitude... wait a minute. Pot, Kettle, Black?

> people here feel the need to insult my morals/gameplay

You left out mother, existence, dog, neighbors, spiritual beliefs, appearance, etc...

No, I just think you are annoying and simply out to implement as many measures as possible that screw people's games up. How *you* play your own games is your own problem. The attitude of "Hey, players are cleverly using this feature to gain what I think is an unfair advantage, let's change that", and every new idea being to the player's disadvantage is not how a roguelike should be managed. The universe should be neutral, set the rules in place, and allow smart people to find ways to game the system as they see fit, with changes only being implemented in the most egregious cases of bugs (rather than feature exploitation), such as piety overflowing.

> I do look down on cheating and of course cheaters,

Cheating on taxes matters. 'Cheating' in a game of adom THAT YOU DON'T INTEND TO POST ON A
HIGH SCORE TABLE OR VICTORY FORUM is hardly the same.

THis sounds to me like apple deciding which software you can and can't play on their devices. You give me the game, i do what the hell i want with it.

> Stingray's been an extremely nice and pleasant person

Obama has been a charming, loving, wise leader who enjoys the support of the masses, both
in his own country and abroad. His benevolence and genius are surpassed only by Grey's.

Yeah, and the catholic church has been the beacon of tolerance throughout all the middle ages!

> he has just got kind of a rumbling and direct way

bulldozers have that same trait

> Adom prompts when one attacks perma friendly stuff, no?

No, and thanks god! Sage fixed that by use of the autoswap command. Before that it was
always "Are you sure you want to walk through a town and keep your sanity? Y/n?" Understand,
this beautiful convenience comes at a cost. Autoswapping will cause occasional angering of
a citizen, followed by said citizen's occasional untimely death, followed by entire villages
turning hostile, followed by entire games being ruined, yet I'll bet 99% of dedicated adom
players consider this a fair trade off.

> Player could pick bouncy or not bouncy

Sorry, I just vomited a little.

> Berserk has been fixed to also prompt

Please tell me you are kidding me. I'm not kidding.

prompt what?

[GordonOverkill]

Not using any markings for your quotations is true anarchy... and really anoying to read.

[Stingray1]

It's much easier though, fuck what others think of it. ;) Anarchy is much better.

> Stingray: you're also the guy who has four different sets of equipment and switches it all for each monster they kill, switching back again to walk three squares, etc. Just out of sadism in your regard I would like to magically hex your games with the the paranoid_remove option from nethack too, where you must type yes to remove any piece of equipment. Not that there's a real use for it, but it would make your life even harder and thus make me laugh. hysterically.

To be frank, I have no idea what your point is with this. Edit: I want 9 or 10 actually, as there are 9 number keys on the numpad.

> Clearly you have not enjoyed the wonders of playing while shitfaced drunk, learning curve or not.

Wrong.

> No, I just think you are annoying and simply out to implement as many measures as possible that screw people's games up. How *you* play your own games is your own problem. The attitude of "Hey, players are cleverly using this feature to gain what I think is an unfair advantage, let's change that", and every new idea being to the player's disadvantage is not how a roguelike should be managed. The universe should be neutral, set the rules in place, and allow smart people to find ways to game the system as they see fit, with changes only being implemented in the most egregious cases of bugs (rather than feature exploitation), such as piety overflowing.

These are for the Creator to implement.

> THis sounds to me like apple deciding which software you can and can't play on their devices. You give me the game, i do what the hell i want with it.

I'm still looking down.

> prompt what?

True Berserk prompt whether you want to attack non-hostiles.

[grobblewobble]

> Adom prompts when one attacks perma friendly stuff, no?

No, and thanks god! Sage fixed that by use of the autoswap command. Before that it was
always "Are you sure you want to walk through a town and keep your sanity? Y/n?" Understand,
this beautiful convenience comes at a cost. Autoswapping will cause occasional angering of
a citizen, followed by said citizen's occasional untimely death, followed by entire villages
turning hostile, followed by entire games being ruined, yet I'll bet 99% of dedicated adom
players consider this a fair trade off.
In fact I never use autoswap for this reason. (And because it makes it impossible to backstab a peaced monster.) I'll walk around in towns with 2 shields, if possible. That is the only way to get the behaviour I want: no confirmation, no attack, no swap.

[Porkman]

Not using any markings for your quotations is true anarchy... and really anoying to read.

Harrrrrrrr!!!

[Blasphemous]

Pepsi? Check
Popcorn? Check
Now go! I want some more of this tasty verbal diarrhea.

[Porkman]

On the other hand, the "you rage!' corruption gives you a chance to splatter peacefuls instead of swapping. That is cool :p

[Stingray1]

>Soirana, I agree confirmations must be kept to an absolute minimum and only be presented to the player in very likely instances that a misclick might have been occurred. Posted by Stingray1

I've read gut's posts now for the 3rd time, each time slower and slower and still I don't see anything of value added to the discussion in them.

What is the fuss over them?

[gut]

> P.S. I was hoping gut would answer my question, but unfortunately that took(or didn't) longer than I hoped for

I have answered in the past, in different threads. I have written notetab scripts for forum posting.
Yes, this proves my love of wasting time and of saving it. I like to do all of my time wasting as
efficiently as possible, you see. This one, for instance, colors text and creates attribute
marks:



^!Set %Value%=[COL*R="#1A557A"]>
^!Set %Value2%=[/COL*R]
^!KeyboardDelay 020
^!InsertText ^%Value%
^!Jump Select_End
^!InsertText ^%Value2%
^!Jump Select_End
^!Keyboard enter
^!Keyboard enter


But this one will will wrap code tags around text:



^!KeyboardDelay 020
^!Set %Value1%=[CO*E]
^!Set %Value2%=
^!Set %Value3%=[/CO*E]
^!InsertText ^%Value1%
^!Jump Select_End
^!Keyboard ENTER
^!InsertText ^%Value2%
^!Jump Select_End
^!Keyboard ENTER
^!InsertText ^%Value3%
^!Jump Select_End
^!Keyboard ENTER
^!Keyboard ENTER


And this one will do invisitext:



^!InsertText [COL*R="#FAFAFA"]
[/COL*R]
^!Jump Select_End


I have a boatload more vbulletin stuffs. Some of them are probably written badly, as I wrote
some long ago, but they work, so I don't rewrite them. Using the forum features/editors is
cumbersome, slow, and asking for trouble, in my experience. Good old text editors and your
own tools for the most speedy and enjoyable internetting.

> Do like nethack, where you have an option for paranoid_quit

Drats, back to progress for a moment. I will +1 the 'paranoid quit' option, but we need to make
it part of a package. The setting needs to be one line, something like 'prompting_level = 1, 2, 3'
so that a few dozen settings are changed with a single line. Make the prompt lovers suffer as
many prompts as possible and if they dare complain we will repost their own logic at them as to
why they should like it.

> Yeah, and the catholic church has been the beacon of tolerance throughout all the middle ages!

HA! :D

> Clearly you have not enjoyed the wonders of playing while shitfaced drunk

Last time I was drunk was even longer ago than when I savescummed for any reason other than testing.
I was 5 and got into the liquor. No wonder I haven't gotten drunk again since.

[grobblewobble]

About preventing missile bounces..

As Laukku pointed out, he already proposed (http://www.adom.de/forums/project.php?issueid=773) this before. And it was rejected. And no one addressed the argument yet that TB had for rejecting it:


This would allow for too many abuses/unsatisfying situations (e.g with wall beasts, illusionary walls, invisibility, etc).

He is worried that this feature interacts badly with things like illusionary walls. A warning would let you know that a wall is not illusionary, in a way that isn't possible without such a warning. And he doesn't like how this interacts with monsters that look like walls, either.

So if you are a proponent of such a feature, you'd best reply to TB's worries. He is the one who decides.

[Stingray1]

I did in the RFE (http://www.adom.de/forums/project.php?issueid=1776) that I linked in the OP.

Although it is not necessary to prompt the player in the cases of monsters that look like walls, because they don't look like walls in tile modes and in ASCII mode the player can already 'see' them with 'l'ook or 't'hrow.

Does anyone here maybe know what he meant with invisibility?

[_Ln_]

Does anyone here maybe know what he meant with invisibility?

Probably identifying an invisible monster between you and a wall by the absence of a safety prompt.

[Stingray1]

Ok, so my suggestion would work fine it that case too. I'll remind him about the wallbeasts not needing a prompt.

P.S. I can completely understand now how gut cannot use a lawnmower. Besides being a hillbilly he's also an absolute geek.

[gut]

I'll have you know I had the pleasure of scrapping that lawnmower! I watched it get crushed and melted and it was the happiest day of my life.

[GordonOverkill]

Just lost a very charming drakeling merchant. He wanted to convert a chaotic altar to neutral and lured a kobold towards the altar. I lacked a little concentration, pressed the diagonal button a turn to early, hit the altar myself and got sacced. Would this have happened if I were asked if I really wanted to enter the square with the altar? Surely not! Do I want to be asked this question? SURELY not! I made a mistake and died, that's just the way it is. And it's definitely my own fault, not the game's or the interface's or whatever. Of course that was superstupid behavior that would never happen to any real hero, but seriously: The character played by the AI (the Kobold) did a fine job! I was the one who failed. The fact that ADOM doesn't hold your hand and guide you smoothly through the game is an advantage towards today's average RPG in my eyes. Really hope that won't be changed, cause otherwise the joy about a victorious run might greatly decrease.

[Singbird]

Of course that was superstupid behavior that would never happen to any real hero

Yeah. If we were to think what the PC would actually do, I think he wouldn't do a whole lot of things. Would he really walk towards a greater titan for example? I really doubt it. He probably would never step on any altar at all, instead opting to throw the stuff on the altar attached to a rope or something. On the other, I think he would really have no reason not to kill cats for example, until he met the cat lord. Seeing a thing like Fistanarius he would probably shit his pants and die on the spot and so on.

[GordonOverkill]

And he would DEFINITELY not do all this scumming stuff like stair-hopping, ring-dipping, tactical allignment-changes etc. ;-)

[Stingray1]

And he would DEFINITELY not do all this scumming stuff like stair-hopping, ring-dipping, tactical allignment-changes etc. ;-)

+1

Or going back in time.

[GordonOverkill]

As an old pen-and-paper-roleplayer, that's definitely my prefered way to play ADOM (and more or less all other games). At the same time one has to admit that roleplaying is not the only way to play. There are also players who just enjoy power-gaming more... trying to get the biggest advantage out of the rules that a game provides. Both ways have a right of existence and it's fine to me that everybody can chose his position within this continuum.

[Stingray1]

Cheating is outside the rules though.

[GordonOverkill]

Indeed, though I don't really care about that in single player games. In the end the only one who is truely cheated is the cheater himself.

[Stingray1]

Ja, it is quite pointless. I was hoping we could discuss ways to improve the UI in this thread and save reading time for the Creator, but I see Porkman did post his own idea in a RFE (http://www.adom.de/forums/project.php?issueid=2566) before discussing it here.

So, I think we can just close this thread now. Or change it to a flame thread. :p

[Singbird]

Open a new thread without the flaming. This thread's total shit already so discussing anything here is pointless.

And making it a thread on UI from the get go. Your opening on this thread kind of laid the base for what was to come, at least in retrospect. : )

[Stingray1]

Please start a new thread Singbird, mine fails.

[Singbird]

OK, I will.

[Stingray1]

Thanks, I appreciate it.

To honest I never even read past the first sentence in your this post:


>Quote Originally Posted by Stingray1 View Post

Why aren't you using quote tags?
I think this might be one of the reasons Porkman has something against you. : )

Back on topic... What is the use of not bringing up the skill list? I cannot think of anything except speed, and the screen always comes up fast enough for me, even though usually I tap the two keys in quick succession.

Another thing that could be improved are the drop commands. To me 'd' and '\Cd' could well be merged into one command. Dropping a single item with Ctrl+d is only marginally more annoying, requiring you to press Space or 'z' after selecting the item. With the pick single item it is useful because you can just alternate ',' and 'a' to pick up multiple items, which for me is faster than going through the alphabet, but I don't have any similar use for 'd'. Parts of the ':d' command could also be integrated in this so that for example if you press a category key twice, you select all items of that category. So, 'd', '"', '"', '?', '?', Space and you have dropped all your books and scrolls. I don't mind the different drop commands though, but it does feel excessive to have three commands for that. Posted by Singbird.

Because of distractions, so hopefully we can keep that one clean and continue flames here.

[Stingray1]

>Something where do you have a point, though, is in that we will be able to discuss the needs of noobs and Steam players much better when we do have them. If at that point there is significant criticism about this (and I think there will be) I will raise the discussion again.

I also concur with you in that we should start doing promotion, now that we have a p20 which is already very stable and presentable (maybe except for the absence of graphics for bolts, which seems like a hole in an otherwise complete and well-polished game). I don't know much about promotion and have never been good at it, but any initiatives in this direction would be useful. Posted by Al-Khwarizmi.

The thing is AL, it might indeed be very difficult to get a hold of new players. I remember I refused to look up any ADOM websites for many years while playing. I'm not saying everyone is so phobic about getting spoiled as I, but there is a chance that there is many ADOM players that simply don't want to get spoiled. You yourself know that most of this community is heavily spoiled, because that is what they wanted. I hope this makes sense.

I'm thus saying we might have to make do with what we have.

[_Ln_]

I'm just going to chime in with others rule about using ">" for quoting, namely:
1) You should append ">" to every line of the block you are quoting (including empty lines), because otherwise there is absolutely no way to understand which portion of text belongs to different authors.
2) Also, if you want to include double-quoting, you have to use ">>" for that.
3) Take into account that the text on the forum will be split differently from how you are typing it in the reply field. Thus, it is a good idea to make your own lines with fixed width that will definitely fit on one line of the displayed text. The standard old school width is 80 characters, although vBulletin editor doesn't show column number, so just use any appropriate.

[kapsi]

Turn off the mouse cursor.
Turn off sound.