This seems a good time to dust off this suggestion and put it in the spotlight again. Since team ADOM blessed us with cinematographic landscapes and musical score, having to exit fullscreen and switch to some note-taking program shatters the immersion even more cruelly. So, even more than before, we need an ingame journal to write down the location of dungeon features such as altars and forges or other things we need to remember.
Earlier in this thread, TB pointed out that
Originally Posted by
adom-admin
actually implementing a worthwhile editor is quite a bit of work (you'd need to get at least all the cursor handling correct, then ENTER, then BACKSPACE, then probably TAB, next probably indentation, then suddenly someone calls for deleting whole lines or blocks, then it's searching, then...).
I agree that we cannot risk a feature-creep escalation. However, we don't need a full-fledged editor. In fact, we don't even need an editor. We just need a way to add entries to a journal, display them, and mark them for removal. See for example the previous comments by Sami, snowball_ii, and Aielyn for some ideas along these lines. Here I'll add another example of how a simple journal could work; I took inspiration from the skills display screen and the 'Drop items in a comfortable way (Ctrl-d)' command, hopefully this will allow for some code reuse and make the journal easier to implement.
The journal would use two new keybindings, let's say 'j' and 'J': the first displays the journal, the second prompts the player to write some text.
Prompt
Suppose you gold-detected a royal vault in PC4, but you have no means of reaching it at the moment. Press 'J', and the game prompts you to write a note:
Code:
Enter a note for the journal: _
Write something, press 'Enter', and it will add the text to the journal. If you just press 'Enter' without writing anything, it does nothing. We could have a limit of 65 characters, which should suffice for most use cases and assures that each entry takes up a single line in the display screen.
Display and removal
To display the journal, press 'j':
Code:
---------------------------------- JOURNAL ----------------------------------
A - 1st kill outlaw leader
B - UC6 white altar
C - PC4 royal vault in SE corner
[+] Page down --- [-] Page up --- [Z] Exit journal
[A-C] Mark an entry for removal
Later in the game, when you don't need the note about the royal vault anymore, display the journal and press 'c' to mark the entry for removal; maybe it could display an 'x' on the left, like this:
Code:
x C - PC4 royal vault in SW corner
and, when you display the journal again, the third entry has been removed.