The Tavern

A follow up to this little thread: https://crawl.develz.org/tavern/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=21614&p=294651

I did some digging, and it seems like the demon tier icons (tile_show_demon_tier = true) were created to help users identify the threat level of all the various demons you can encounter. (Source: https://crawl.develz.org/wiki/doku.php?id=dcss:brainstorm:tiles:tiles_interface#indicate_demon_difficulty )

That's all well and good, but it seems oddly specific to have such an option just for demons. Why not broaden this to all monsters? This would give a much needed visible threat level to offline tiles. Currently there's no indication other than xv'ing every monster. Online tiles has the color-coded monster list, but I could see some peoples using this option as well for better situational awareness.

Proposal: new option - tile_show_threat_level (default: false)


I based these on Ash's sensed monster tiles. Feel free to use if this idea gets support.

Edit: Tweaked the icons a bit for better clarity.

demon tier is there because it determines which spells can summon the demon and which monsters the demon will try to polymorph to first. of course there's no way for an unspoiled player to know this...

Ah, that makes a bit more sense. I don't really care either way about the demon icons, if that's something people want to keep. It just seems like a good system to copy for a broader threat level system.

This would actually be great. I would go as far as to say it should be default: true

I'd say it isn't necessary to show icons for normal/weak enemies - they're the most common enemies you'll run into and most of the time they don't require any extra thought. It would just add visual clutter to show the same icon for the vast majority of enemies in the game.

It's the dangerous / very dangerous ones that you want to have your attention drawn to, so I think adding icons for those two threat levels is a good idea.

I think this proposal is great and would go a long way to making this game slightly more accessible to newcomers. +1 on default

I don't think the visual clutter is too great, and actually Bodrick I think most monsters you meet in Crawl are probably in the dangerous/very dangerous grouping rather than in weak/normal if one were to run the actual numbers. At least, every time I x->v it's at least dangerous.

If I were to suggest one thing it would be to place the indicators on the top right rather than on the bottom right, to not interfere with the health bar or status effects, and maybe change them to plain coloured circles without smiley faces, as faces might get tiring to look at, no matter how cute.

The icons could also be toggleable in game, like autopickup is currently, we even have a free key avaliable since 'p'ray was removed. That way, you could chose to have it on all the time, or to just turn it on in specific situations, such as when encountering a new monster.

Made a comparison for the ideas being floated here.



Edit: Looking at this for a while, I think I prefer C myself.

Oops, forgot to attach the smaller version of the icons.

the problem with C is that when I look at it I just see an ogre playing with a red ball, not some kind of indicator of threat level

this is what i think about program languages too

OK, yeah, fair.



Included the easier two for completeness, but those still feel unnecessary to me.

This is a good idea!

I prefer D the most.