Change levelup stat choice interface


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Ziggurat Zagger

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Post Wednesday, 17th January 2018, 18:46

Change levelup stat choice interface

The keys for increasing strength, intelligence, and dexterity on levelup are:
s - same key used for waiting and saving by default
i - same key used for showing inventory or spells by default
d - same key used for dropping items by default

This means that players often accidentally raise the wrong stat because they leveled up right before trying to do one of those actions.
There are not enough comfortably reachable unused keys to simply change the keys used for stat choice - every letter and number is already used, although lowercase p is not, and so are ,<.>/?;:'"[{]}=!@#$%^&*()\|, Tab, Space, Enter, PgUp, PgDn...
So it would be best to change the interface for this altogether (or possibly the mechanic itself). Make the player confirm their choice with Y, perhaps.

Failing all that, strength is the worst offender because of mashing 's' and enter/space while monsters die to your allies or clouds. So at least require the player to press the uppercase letter, instead of accepting lowercase s/i/d.

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Ziggurat Zagger

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Post Wednesday, 17th January 2018, 19:43

Re: Change levelup stat choice interface

Yes, please. Even just requiring uppercase letters would be fine imo. (And really easy to implement.)
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Ziggurat Zagger

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Post Wednesday, 17th January 2018, 21:48

Re: Change levelup stat choice interface

duvessa wrote:Failing all that, strength is the worst offender because of mashing 's' and enter/space while monsters die to your allies or clouds. So at least require the player to press the uppercase letter, instead of accepting lowercase s/i/d.

Interesting, I've never used 's' for 'wait'. I'd always used '.' I can imagine that that'd be pretty annoying (selecting strength when you didn't want to), 'i' and 'd' are at least actions that you wouldn't regularly take while there's critters you are trying to kill, but waiting is somewhat often a way to kill things, probably why this never comes up for me, personally.
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Tartarus Sorceror

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Post Thursday, 18th January 2018, 03:12

Re: Change levelup stat choice interface

d is an action I use a lot because it's my move right key

always gotta account for different control schemes, which IMO is a point for using uppercase symbols for stat levelup

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Majang

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Post Thursday, 18th January 2018, 10:44

Re: Change levelup stat choice interface

My control scheme happens to be : (s)trife left, (l)unge right, (i)nto the frozen north, (x)-files went to antarctica which is south, (d)own to the next level, (D)on't go down go up you are gonna die dude.

So maybe get a popup screen that pauses the game, and makes the player type "str" or "int" or "dex". I would also like a pop-up screen for god-gifts :"Okwarau dropped some crap, do you want to pick it up or do you want to go another three levels before realizing and coming back to check it out?".

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bel

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Post Thursday, 18th January 2018, 11:02

Re: Change levelup stat choice interface

I don't remember the last time I took the wrong stat (though it has definitely happened to me). The logical way to fix it would be to have a confirmation: "are you sure? (yes/no)".

Uppercase letters could also work, though they theoretically have the same problem (I type "I" a lot, for example). If one really wants to fix it, no need for halfway measures.

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Tartarus Sorceror

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Post Thursday, 18th January 2018, 16:52

Re: Change levelup stat choice interface

How about F1 F2 F3? Are they used for anything?
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Post Thursday, 18th January 2018, 18:18

Re: Change levelup stat choice interface

Shtopit wrote:How about F1 F2 F3? Are they used for anything?
Not a web dev, but I think it would interfere with browser commands in webtiles ( like Ctrl+W)
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Slime Squisher

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Post Thursday, 18th January 2018, 19:35

Re: Change levelup stat choice interface

Not to mention that many modern laptop keyboards make those keys pretty inconvenient to access.

Also, there's no obvious way to access them on a Chromebook. While that particular case is a non-issue at the moment as anyone playing DCSS on a Chromebook is either a) playing it on webtiles which already needs another solution or b) tech-savvy enough to get back the F-keys, it does point to a definite trend away from those keys. Binding an essential game function to them is not good future-proofing.

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