The Tavern

In all the online text crawl implementations (CAO, CDO CSZO), whenever I encounter a new monster that is unaware of me, the monster's letter in the viewport is reversed (or highlighted, not sure the correct term).

This can be a problem if:
* the color of the monster's glyph is the same color as the "reversed" background;
* and, there's more than 1 monster.

On the square the monster is situated, you don't see a letter. All you see is a solid square of color. You have to manually use the cursor to find out which is which, if that's important to you.

Crawl is so tunable, I know there must be a way to fix this in the options (?), but I cannot find it.

Anyone else already approached and solved this problem?

stab_brand (for sleeping monsters) and may_stab_brand (for awake-but-unaware ones) are the options you want to change in your .rc file or init.txt if you want to change those colors.

You should see a letter though. A yellow monster with the unaware brand should show up as black-on-yellow.

You may need to adjust the settings in whatever terminal program you are using to log in to the server. The attaches screenshot shows a sleeping bat in Terminal on Mac OS X, and it works the same way for me in PuTTY on Windows.

Thanks for your reply. Im on a Mac 10.6.8 using Terminal. Yeah, I think it's either related to, or caused by, my jury-rigged solution to the initial, larger problem I encountered. The initial problem I had when I first started playing was: all explored but unilluminated wall and floor sections were the same pitch-black as if i'd never visited them. My solution was make the transparency of the Terminal window to 50% and playing on top of an all-white desktop background:


On my off-line game (where the app still uses Terminal), the crawl settings worked out of the box, and I didn't have a problem:


So, Terminal "works" for my offline game, and "doesn't work" for the online game. Offline uses blue for unseen floors and rock. Online (for some reason) uses super dark-grey, which is indistinguishable from black, for unseen floors and rock.

Although, I don't think Terminal is responsible for unaware monsters looking weird. That's got to be the online settings defaults(?) Except that it's consistent across CAO, CDO, CSZO...

(The jackal is showing up as yellow-on-yellow, but it's really bright yellow-on-yellow, it's just impossible to discern.)

I think "use bright colors for bold text" is the important setting for that. Here are the settings that work for me. I think I adjusted some of the ANSI colors at some point.

That did it! You rock! Thank you, sir.

While you're here, would you happen to know how to change the background of the online game?
That is, its 100% black for me. (I solved it, jury-rigged, by making it semi-transparent and putting a white background under it, but would be interested if you had a in-Terminal answer.) Using Terminal's Window|Background setting won't work (since crawl takes over the colors)... "options.txt" doesn't seem to be helpful: in "6-b Windows console" section, changing "background" doesnt work...