I actually am quite happy with its simplicity. It sports little details (you e.g. can click on the highlighted areas to activate the command explained there). It adapts with every move and tries to guess reasonable commands to choose from.
Hints mode right now is only available when you start a game as a beginner (e.g. from the new beginner screen) but starting with ADOM II 0.3.1 you will be able to turn it on/off in every game.
This is somewhat enhanced by the addition of the contextual action command suggested by Darren Grey in this blog post. SPACE will try to choose the most reasonable cause of default action for the PC when pressed - again starting with the next release of ADOM II.
Both new features probably can be enhanced quite a bit over time but for now they should be a starting point in order to help to reduce the learning curve for the game a little bit.
The hints mode BTW also will be the starting point for tutorial like explanations. I'm still hoping to add that to 0.3.0, too, but I'd prefer to get the next version out before the end of the ADOM crowd funding campaign, so we'll have to see about that.
Command hints will surely make learning the key bindings much less of a hassle. I think the suggestions should be a little more relevant though (I understand this is just a preliminary version).
ReplyDeleteI think that you should only display:
1)ws when standing next to a wall with no monsters adjacent to you
2)w# when there are no hostile creatures in sight
3)5 when there are 1 or 2 tiles between you and a monster to allow the monster to close the gap instead of you approaching the monster and getting hit immediately. (Normally you'd just do this with 1 tile between you and the monster but I fear that in that case the player might just see a hint appear and disappear before they could read it as they move quickly towards an enemy)
Also, you should be able to hide hints (maybe by checking a Hide[] box next to the hint) because some hints are always relevant but might become annoying to see all the time, such as Q to save and quit and Space for a contextual action. If you can hide hints there should be a button to show hidden hints.
Excellent suggestions! Thanks. Please send me your real name and a mentioning of this to creator(at)ancientdomainsofmystery.com to be included in the credits.
DeleteBTW, there's probably a lot more that can be done with hints than we currently think of - but that's one of the great things. Once the basic infrastructure is there it's so easy to add more ;-)