Discussion thread on some UI improvements.

[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. 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.