All of the elemental anomalies are different colors than all of the types of altars, so it's not something that can mess you up if you're aware of the possibility and/or are paying a reasonable amount of attention. D:48 having altars is rare, occasionally useful, and led to a hilarious (and completely fair) death - it would be a shame to change this.

Is this a serious request??

Yes it's a serious request. People shouldn't die to mistaking two identical ASCII characters. Kindly note that not everyone can differentiate color.

(Changing the rift character would also work, but I can't think of what's appropriate/available.

Essentially my point is that something somebody is expected to step on to advance in the game should NOT be visually indistinguishable (excepting colour) from something that can instagib them.)

I doubt that the player in question not being able to differentiate between colors was the issue here, it was more likely simply not paying attention, but that is beside the point.

The object can be identified by a 'look' command, and the player would do well to routinely check anything altar-looking that way anyway before stepping on them, because that's the way they get to know its alignment. The situation is the same: hey look, this here has the icon '_', it might be a chaotic altar, let's check. Whether the list of "might be chaotic altars" include only lawful altars, neutral altars and chaotic altars or additionally some other somewhat similar special objects (the elemental anomalies) does not matter much.

That's massive fucking ballache and beyond what anyone should reasonably be expected to do.

My point boils down to this:
A -STONE ALTAR- should be very distinct from an -ELEMENTAL RIFT-.

There's only so distinct you can get with ASCII, there is a very restricted set of characters that can be used, so it's inevitable that sometimes even not strictly related objects will need to be distinguished by color. And if this needs to happen, it'd better happen with objects that are special and don't commonly occur, preferably only in special places (like the rifts), limiting the number of times that'll come up -- rats and molochs having the same icon could be much worse. :) If you can find some other character that's free and better suited, fine, but I don't think this is a problem per se. And no, checking an altar's alignment really is not beyond what should be expected. *I* check the alignment before stepping on it. I do it either by looking at the character's color in ASCII or the particular graphics in tiles mode -- the elemental rifts are easily distinguishable from altars by their colors. But if I had a problem with seeing the colors of the characters, I *would* use 'look' by default.

I wouldn't object to the colors being extremely distinct (for that matter, I think N and L altars could use a little more contrast as well). Changing statues from gray (forge) to white was a great decision IMO and it really stands out now with no ambiguity.

I'm not saying don't do it -- feel free to make the colors more vibrant or whatever else is needed to make the rifts stand out as unique. It certainly wouldn't hurt anyone. I'm just arguing that this really isn't as much of a problem as this RFE seems to suggest. Someone died, yes. They didn't pay attention, it happens. People have died for stupider reasons. :)

Now I'm tempted to make an RFE for the existence of rare elemental rift coloured altars in deep CoC. Maybe they should exist only when the PC is doomed though.

Which is a different RFE than eliminating altars from d48, and while probably not needed - how often has this occurred over the years - it is good design.

I don't understand the negativity with respect to this RFE. Sure, we can live without it as we have done all these years, but indeed I agree with the OP that dying for UI reasons is a shame.

Commenting as one of the no-voters: I consider this a useless change. I mean, we're talking *one* level in the entire game. A level where the 5 _:s are by default the non-dangerous ones and you need some serious bad luck to a) even encounter an altar there in the first place, b) it being of a dangerous (chaotic) alignment and c) having a monster see you when you step on it the first time, still d) being hindered so that you can't tell colours. And you still know after the first time that this level has those underscores, and by the time you get there, you know that underscores also mean altars.

I agree that it's not nice to die because of UI issues, but in my opinion, this doesn't qualify as a priority 10 item, it's more of a priority 27 one. There are eleventy billion more crucial ones to tackle. I won't cry if this gets fixed somehow, but I really also don't see the issue here. It's not a UI issue one frequently or even rarely faces. It requires a freak-of-nature level chance.

Or just make a hidden exception for D:48, that monsters can't sacrifice the PC on that level.

That would make absolutely no sense though, it would be a completely arbitrary and unnatural restriction. Making the UI clearer is fine and is appreciated, but forcibly eliminating a perfectly normal way of dying in a certain very specific situation is both unnecessary and totally contrary to any kind of game design philosophy.

Man, this community is full of sadists. Go play DCSS or something, so that you can see how an actually user-friendly roguelike plays.

No idea what this argument is based on, other than perhaps your own lack of imagination. For one, there are characters that, to my knowledge, still aren't used for any object, e.g. lowercase v (though uppercase V also makes sense as it is associated with elemental vortices, which are very close thematically). Other than that, more obvious graphical tells could be used, such as shimmering of the rift square and appropriate coloring of the adjacent floor squares, so even if you are colorblind, the difference in tone should be easily noticeable.

Useless for you ≠ useless for everyone. If I can easily navigate my apartment without lights on, I can't realistically expect a guest to do the same. This lack of consideration for players who are yet to take in the incredible amount of information required to succeed in ADOM is one of the strongest detractors. Thankfully, at least Thomas himself has caught on to this.

It wasn't based on anything in particular, just the fact that there are more objects/monsters in total than ASCII characters. I didn't claim there are no appropriate free characters or anything, nowadays I tend to play in tiles, so I don't consider myself a reliable source of information as to what is and isn't already used anyway.

Harkila said it was not useless/almost useless *not* because it is useless for everyone/most people *predicated* on the assumption that the situation described occurs, but because this assumption is so rarely fulfilled that this almost never becomes an issue. And there is indeed a list of priorities, and if you look at the number of merely the recent (2.3.*) bug reports and RFE's you'll see that this isn't anywhere near important enough to be worked on right now. They explained that their "no" vote was not a theoretical, but a practical one, because they didn't think this should be worked on right now.

I'm sure insulting people who disagree with you is the best way to argue your point.
Grow up.

+1

In general, does having altars on d48 improve gameplay? I don't think so.

Does RFE make significant improvements? Not likely.

So, I am not opposed but that seems very low priority to me (I have hard times believing there are lots of new players playing in ASCII instead of graphic mode, for example).

I don't agree with OP either. I was sacrificed numerous times by the time I finally reached D48. Unless game changed a lot since 1.1.1 a player hardy can get used to see _ as rifts rather than altars even on D48 before he is experienced enough to check it and before he is used to death enough to learn from it and take it easy. If issue exists this is UI issue. So why does it need a fix in-game?

There is a point:
So why can't it be directly addressed as an RFE? I would 100% upvote change in ASCII character for rifts. Altar isn't something any ADOM player would like to confuse with relatively safe dungeon feature. Gave a tentative 'yes' to this RFE therefore.