I'm by now running through the error lists in the bug tracker and have about 10 left I want to look into for 0.2.3 (but only if they are quick to fix or disturb game play a lot). I have one issue open that I noticed while testing a new feature: Left-clicking onto a known map tile now causes the player to auto-move there. But there are two problems to this:
- Movement currently does not get interrupted by anything. Which is annoying if something important happens, you see a monster, move onto items, etc. How do other games handle this?
- Occasionally with a touch pad you accidentally click on a position which causes you to move as if on full auto. I already smell dozens of bug reports springing up from this root cause. But what is the solution? Double-clicking?
I think it's on Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup where you have a button for autoexploring. Whenever you find a new item, it would stop and say "You see -insert item name here-".
ReplyDeleteIt would keep track which items you've seen before so either you choose to pick it up or ignore it, either way it won't stop the exploring again. Monsters would always stop it.
The game also keeps tracks of seen items, entrances to different branches of dungeons and so on and there's a command for automatically heading into / looking for any of the things you've seen before. Say you're deep in the cave and you wanna go to Orc Mines which you saw the entrance to before? No problem, press (g)o, (o)rc mines and it heads there, using the same interrupt protocol as autoexploring.
Ramble ramble, anyways, Dungeon Crawl does many other things right too, it feels like a modern roguelike. Maybe you can give it a look sometime? :)
ADOM itself had an auto-move of sorts in the form of the "w"alk command that was pretty reliable about interrupting in case of interesting things. Of course, the method ADOM used to determine whether there is something interesting going on might not be applicable in JADE. (ha! I can still say JADE if I'm discussing the engine!)
ReplyDeleteDeactivate auto-move on the wilderness map, perhaps, and bind it to something. Double-clicking seems a satisfactory solution, but then I don't play roguelikes with the mouse and consider the practice a heathen abomination.
I think for the mouse movement you need the same interrupting criteria used for auto keyboard mode (w+key) only a bit more lenient, i.e., do not stop when reaching forks in corridors (the point of using the mouse as opposed to the keyboard is to be able to navigate several forks with a single click, I guess), and (maybe) do not stop when reaching an item. So the same code you already have should be useful with just a couple of changes, I think.
ReplyDeleteAs for the problem of misclicking, I already gave my opinion on Facebook.
How did you solve the w-move in adom? Maybe you can do something similar?
ReplyDeleteDouble-clicking would get annoying. Maybe ctrl-clicking?
ReplyDeletePerhaps Ctrl-Click or double click. I would prefer double click myself, but a keyboard & mouse shortcut would be a good idea too.
ReplyDeleteHow about right mouse click? (and for macs where there is only one button for mouse, ctrl-click)
ReplyDeleteRight click would require normal laptops to click the button itself instead of touch activated click.
1. You'll need trigger events to alert the player that something interesting has happened. You surely need this anyway, for things like book reading. Interesting events include a monster entering FOV, damage taken, a trap discovered, walking on top of stairs, a corruption happening, walking on top of an item, a status effect occurring, certain sounds and level feelings - probably a few others, but those are the main ones I can think of from ADOM. This will likely need a little tweaking as time goes on as some players get annoyed by certain interruptions whilst others want more interruptions.
ReplyDelete2. I've seen no such complaints from people playing other roguelike with mouse support, so I think your fears may be unfounded. But double-clicking could work. Ctrl-clicking is a bad idea as it requires both keyboard and mouse use at the same time - a waste for those who like exploring with just the mouse. Right-clicking might work, but I'd personally reserve that for using ranged attacks on opponents.
I've been playing a lot of Torchlight and Kingdom Of Amalur recently (yeah, no roguelikes, but bear with me) and I've got a rather philosophical question:
ReplyDeleteHow about color-coding item labels? IIRC you already did that to an extent with ADOM anyway (for uncursed/blessed/cursed stuff), but how about coloring items for their value/importance? You know, green for minor enchantments, blue for major magic items, purple for artifacts and stuff? Even if you don't stop autowalk when discovering items and instead parking the discoveries into a message or screen prompt, the color coded stuff pops out.
I think it doesn't take too much away from the mystery of picking up stuff - you still don't know for sure what kind of curse status or even what bonusses the enchanted item will have, even if you know that the sword on the ground has a "green" label. Not to mention that the scope of ADOM II will be much, much larger than ADOMs and I pretty much guess everyone who's played ADOM knows how much stuff you'll be lugging around near D50 :) So a quick way to pre-sort loot would be welcome.
That sounds like the kind of information that should be restricted to high level Appraising skill, if anything. ADOM II isn't a loot collection game the way Torchlight, and other Diablo clones are.
DeleteThat said, ADOM took away a bit from the mystery by having odd item weights, which made clear the material the item was made from; eternium being strictly better than most iron or mithril equivalents. ADOM II could help fix that by partially randomizing item weights. Why should all iron longswords weigh the same?
Make a click display the information that the look command gave. For the auto move stay consistent and use the (m +) command. M + click solves the accidental movement problems quite well and the look command on click is a feature that will streamline the learning curve.
ReplyDelete