Mouse and menu support
Giving JADE a better UI for new players
Simple proposal: Allow mouse support in JADE, so you can select where on the map you want to look or teleport to or aim at (ADOM Sage supports the teleport feature of this already). Include a top menu through which all game commands can be accessed, or at the very least the most needed ones. This is of course an alternative rather than a replacement to traditional keyboard-only gameplay.
The main reason for this is that new players have a lot of trouble picking up roguelikes because of the large number of keypresses that are hard to memorise. This is the biggest complaint I have heard from people I try to introduce ADOM to (ADOM's :k command list is particularly unfriendly - full of fairly redundant and little used commands, with the important things hard to find). Personally I was introduced to roguelikes by Hack on the Amiga, and it was only thanks to its menu bar system that I was able to quickly learn the commands (I haven't played it in 8 years and still know q is to quaff a potion). JADE is a huge next-gen roguelike with the potential to draw in people who have never experienced the genre before - it should be easily accessible to them in order to be successful outside of the roguelike community.
An example of one branch of a menu:
>Items
->Eat food ................... e
->Drink potion .............. D
->Inventory .................. i
->Backpack .................. I
->Pick up ..................... p
->Drop ........................ d
->Use item .................. U
->Use tool ................... u
->Read scroll/book ......... r
->Zap wand ................. z
->Dip into potion ........... !
->Give away item .......... g
->Choose drop .........Ctrl-d
->Fast drop ................ :d
->Choose pick up .... Ctrl-p
->Fast pick up .............. ;
This way players can quickly learn the faster keypresses (whilst experienced players won't notice the difference - though personally even I forget certain commands sometimes, such as redrawing the screen). It's possible that this is already planned, since I note in the video demo there is a "Game" menu that is unrevealed.
A further suggestion though... scroll bars on all menus, such as the inventory screen and the skills screen. This would be in addition to the traditional +/- feature, but some people would find it easier to use. Particularly laptop users who don't have a numpad. For laptop users it might even be nice to have the direction commands accessible through a small grid at the bottom or side of the status bar (I've seen this done well in other games).
And further to this (though getting less necessary) the ability to choose everything on screen with the mouse. For instance instead of having to press a direction key for which person to chat to, you click on them with the mouse cursor. In particular I'd like to see this with menus - when doing an extended drop for instance, it would be nice to scroll through the list with a mouse and click on the items you wish to be dropped. This would not only be easier to use (in my opinion) but would prevent errors in incorrect keypresses leading you to dip a RoDS into a PoRC instead of holy water (not happened to me, but I have made silly mistakes with keypresses before).
What might also be nice (but situation dependant) is a more complex 'w' command, where instead of simply choosing a direction you choose a destination, and the PC takes the shortest path there unless interrupted. Using arrow keys to choose the destination would be utterly redundant, but using the mouse cursor would be very practical.
As I've said, this is all in addition to the existing commands, not a replacement. But I think it would make the game more user-friendly, which is important in getting it accepted beyond our own little crowd. Post here your own suggestions on improving the UI and accessibility of JADE, especially for laptops (since I have no experience with that myself).