The Tavern

This is how items are seen right now, using wands as an example. The items are listed in alphabetical order by hotkey.

Code:: Magical devices h - a wand of confusion {zapped: 7} l - a wand of lightning w - a wand of fire A - a wand of draining K - a wand of fire {zapped: 12} M - a wand of slowing X - a wand of confusion {zapped: 1}

Note that it can be hard to miss that there are two wands of fire and two wands of confusion. If you want to check is you have a particular wand, such as digging, you have to check every line. These two issues can be solved by sorting the items by name first, and only then, by hotkey:

Code:: Magical devices h - a wand of confusion {zapped: 7} X - a wand of confusion {zapped: 1} A - a wand of draining w - a wand of fire K - a wand of fire {zapped: 12} l - a wand of lightning M - a wand of slowing

Now it's much easier to get an idea your wand inventory. People tend not to memorize the hotkey assigned to consumables, but they do remember that 'digging' starts with a 'd', so they could look somewhere between cold and enslavement to find it, and press the corresponding hotkey. The same principle can be applied to scrolls and potions, if not other items.

This exists: https://github.com/crawl/crawl/blob/mas ... e.txt#L997

I tried it out, MarvinPA, and it is *much* better that way. Why is it not the default?
It's quite important to have the default setup be as universally good as possible.
When somebody adds an option that is better, such as that toggable option you linked to,
anybody preferring the old option should be forced to change it back by configuring their files,
rather than getting new players to browse their various UI options, most of which they don't care about.
I imagine most players don't change any options at all, at least until they've played many games.

Pollem_Golem is right: we have a tendency to add cool options, but shy away from changing the default (because that always requires discussion, something that adding an option does not). I never used alphabetical inventory ordering, since I always use defaults. So I am in favour of changing the default -- we can always turn back.

IMO, one of the issues is that these cool options are in the somewhat puzzling .rc interface. Admittedly, rc files are a great way to offer unparalleled flexibility, like the lua-based bots that can actually win games and stuff, but it would be kind of nice if that flexibility were paired with a good UI solution, like a section with buttons and drop-down menus and the other junk that's written in a way for people to understand instead of computers.

This is obviously the kind of low-priority thing that a dev will respond to with "patches welcome!" but I thought I'd mention it. Crawl's UI isn't as bad as some people make it out to be, but its options menu is definitely pretty unfriendly.

The thing that would contribute the most usability to RC files for me would be if control-F worked in the options help screen (really all the help screens, but that one is really long, and reading through the whole thing looking for the option I want sucks.)

archaeo wrote:IMO, one of the issues is that these cool options are in the somewhat puzzling .rc interface. Admittedly, rc files are a great way to offer unparalleled flexibility, like the lua-based bots that can actually win games and stuff, but it would be kind of nice if that flexibility were paired with a good UI solution, like a section with buttons and drop-down menus and the other junk that's written in a way for people to understand instead of computers.

This is obviously the kind of low-priority thing that a dev will respond to with "patches welcome!" but I thought I'd mention it. Crawl's UI isn't as bad as some people make it out to be, but its options menu is definitely pretty unfriendly.

I actually started working on this a few months ago, but I gave up when I was unable to add a new option to the main menu without causing segfaults.

it has a loop-goto

The obvious solution is to create a sprint map called The Perilous Journey Through Rcfile Options, that allows you to toggle specifics by opening/closing doors and

roctavian wrote:The obvious solution is to create a sprint map called The Perilous Journey Through Rcfile Options, that allows you to toggle specifics by opening/closing doors and

ESR once implemented a text adventure front-end to Linux kernel configuration (source code: look in cmladvent.py).

The Tavern

Alphabetical order within item groups

Alphabetical order within item groups

Re: Alphabetical order within item groups

Re: Alphabetical order within item groups

Re: Alphabetical order within item groups

Re: Alphabetical order within item groups

Re: Alphabetical order within item groups

Re: Alphabetical order within item groups

Re: Alphabetical order within item groups

Re: Alphabetical order within item groups