Unified inventory usability/color schemes?


Although the central place for design discussion is ##crawl-dev on freenode, some may find it helpful to discuss requests and suggestions here first.

Tomb Titivator

Posts: 808

Joined: Sunday, 23rd June 2013, 15:20

Post Wednesday, 21st December 2022, 16:36

Unified inventory usability/color schemes?

Currently some items in inventory change color and indicate usability randomly by emergent design. Can we either not do that, or use a unified scheme at least? This is all linux console.

Identify greys out when nothing left to identify, but also greys out if there is nothing in my inventory left to identify, but still unknown items. That second usecase got added recently and is notably different from the first. Perhaps we could add a third color here? Or just add autodrop for ID scrolls with a message after everything is ID'd?

I've been seeing confused users on reddit over no-message unusable ID scrolls. We do currently get a message "last potion/scroll" but not "You'll never need ID scrolls again." and if we get one, we should get the other.

Some potions are not consumable when they'd be useless. Cancellation for example, its greyed out! Nice. Useless Magic is not though.

Curing can always be quaffed, even if at full HP/no curable status.

Lastly torment/poison scrolls. Torment gets 2 different colors, depending on tormentablity, its the oldest I think and does violet (potentially dangerous!) and cyan (you have torment immunity).

Poison is violet - or normal grey if you have rPois.


All of this is very hard on readability and also usability - the different cases are not distinguished, can't look it up. Perhaps in the future an eye could go toward not introducing more cases?

Zot Zealot

Posts: 1004

Joined: Thursday, 16th August 2018, 21:19

Post Friday, 23rd December 2022, 09:21

Re: Unified inventory usability/color schemes?

Having a colour/behaviour for 'not usable now, potentially useful in the future' would be nice.
There's a lot of special cases, like Teleport in the gauntlet.
Not being able to quaff useless curing etc would also be nice.

But for me it's not a priority.

Dungeon Master

Posts: 388

Joined: Monday, 18th August 2014, 20:04

Post Friday, 23rd December 2022, 15:13

Re: Unified inventory usability/color schemes?

Currently some items in inventory change color and indicate usability randomly by emergent design.


I'm not really going to engage with the rudeness here, but a suggestion based on this and past interactions: have you considered not playing trunk?

Tomb Titivator

Posts: 808

Joined: Sunday, 23rd June 2013, 15:20

Post Saturday, 24th December 2022, 10:40

Re: Unified inventory usability/color schemes?

Its fixed, thanks for the patch, Advil. I apologize for repeated rudeness and shall filter myself more on that. I like many of the trunk changes like EV-cap removed, dex long blades, and so there is no static version that does all of what I want.

Return to Game Design Discussion

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 26 guests

cron
Powered by phpBB © 2000, 2002, 2005, 2007 phpBB Group.
Designed by ST Software for PTF.