watertreatmentRL wrote:Siegurt wrote:duvessa wrote:Because crawl can't display more than one item on the same square.
That is a pretty dumb reason "the interface isnt robust enough" is a bad reason to create gameplay rules, interface should flow from gameplay, not define it. If you follow that logic, then creatures shouldn't drop items either.
"You should be able to easily see all items" is a good idea generally, unrestricted to corpses/chunks/hides/skeletons.
If you solve the interface problem of "items being in stacks" in any way (by spreading them out, so items aren't in stacks any more, or by eating part of the screen real estate with a list or whatever the solution is) that solution is just as applicable to hides/corpses/chunks/skeletons as it is to anything else.
There is an interface problem, but this has nothing to do with a solution to it.
That is completely backwards. Limitations of the interface are exactly the sort of thing to design rules around.
If some gameplay rules are bad, they are bad gameplay no matter what the interface looks like, and vise versa, the only time a game's interface limitations should force game rules to be created around it is when they don't fall into the domain of the game designer's choice (for example, if we add the constraint "must be played on a 2d screen" then obviously game rules that require a 3d interface aren't going to work) ; In other words, game rules need to cede to interface limitations when the interface limitations are inherent to the type of interface provided.
However it's not common to address inherent interface limtations as "part of the game". As a game writer, you don't design your display hardware, or whether a mobile device has a keyboard or not. When I talk about "the game's interface" I'm specifically talking about *the part of your game you write to interface with the game player*
The problem of "crawl can't easily display more than one item in a square" isn't an inherent limitation of the interface(s) used for crawl, it's part of the programming choices that have been made when implementing the interface for stacks of items. If it's true that it's bad game play to not be able to see more than one item per square, and it's further true that it's good game play to *have* more than one item per square, then it's logically optimal to rewrite the interface for stacks of items to support being able to easily see more than one item per square.
If it was in fact true that the best possible game was one where you could have stacks of items in a single square, and that you could easily see them all, but the interface *as it was presently written* didn't support easily seeing all the contents of a stack, it would be pretty odd indeed to declare that one should change the game rules to make a "worse" game, so you didn't have to change the implementation of the interface.