Show monster weapon in console

[galehar]

perhaps allow a player to define a highlight colour/brand/whatever you want to call it based on the weapon an enemy is wielding, like the current sleeping/unaware/ally/neutral highlights.

Wouldn't the overlap be a problem? I don't play console much, but hopefully someone who does can come up with a real proposal instead of vague ideas.

I suppose as long as it's something I can mess with in my rcfile I don't care too much because I'll just change my settings for the things I care about.

I think it would be much better to come up with a solution that works with default settings, since it's what the vast majority of users are using.

Non-Unicode console makes up an enormous portion of your audience, possibly a larger one than Unicode console. Disregarding it is silly.

Why? Isn't unicode the default now? Is there any reason not to use unicode?
If so many players aren't using unicode, maybe it can be adressed, instead of dismissing it as an efficient solution. Unicode is widely used and supported by all platforms. The only issue I can think of is that no font have all symbols, and windows ones are especially lacking. But this isn't a deal breaker, we just have to be careful about our symbol selection.

Another solution I've been considering is to show it in the monster list. But it's not easy and I'm not sure it would be really helpful. If you know one of the gnoll has a polearm but not which one, you still have to examine each one.

[Roderic]

Toggle (a single key) between two color modes:

a)the normal console view which uses color to identify the monster and adds flavour to the dungeon

b)the "weapon wielder" or "potential menace" view, which distinguishes the monsters by the weapon and/or potential damage they can do.

For this second mode I would make the environment plain grey or dark grey, colorizing only the monsters. The non threatening (like asleep or unaware can be decolorized also)

A quick toggle between the two modes allows oneself to position quickly the "hot spots" in a bunch of monsters. For example, you can locate all polearms users or identify axe-wielders to be potential target for confusion + cleaving...

[njvack]

@minmay: are you actually using a non-unicode terminal? AFAIK, every system (linux, osx, windows) has had a unicode-capable terminal for the last essentially ever.

Some monospace fonts are rather short on glyph support, though -- it might be useful to choose a free "official" monospace font and limit crawl's (default) glyph usage to that:

http://omarrr.com/top-7-open-source-mon ... evelopers/

[eeviac]

As of .11, unicode is not console's default. It's on my shortlist of rc changes whenever I update the game.

[palin]

Why? Isn't unicode the default now? Is there any reason not to use unicode?

No. Having recently started to play online console I met the basic ascii interface in 0.11. I had to tweak my rcfile to obtain unicode. I was used to use command-line options to get the same effect so it was new to me.

If you read higher in the thread you'll see that there are reasons to not use unicode, and I'll add another: on default terminals, on OSX unicode doesn't work, at least not before Lion (I use linux now so I don't know what happens on Lion or Mountain Lion).

That said, I think that knowing which monster wields which weapon is not going to be very useful unless we add very powerful effects to weapon, playing now against polearm-using monsters is not going to be more difficult in console even if you don't know which weapon everyone is using. But if we want to show what weapon every monster is using, my best bet is to show it in the monster list as the glyph you show when the weapon is on the ground:

eg.

  Code:

_ goblin )
_ orc warlord )


Of course since every weapon has ) as the glyph except rods and staves, the glyphs should be coloured accordingly.

[galehar]

As of .11, unicode is not console's default. It's on my shortlist of rc changes whenever I update the game.

Actually, I think it is but the doc is bad. What is called "default" is unicode and what is called "unicode" is the old unicode (CSET_OLD_UNICODE). I'll ask kilobyte about it.

[njvack]

  Code:

_ goblin )
_ orc warlord )


Of course since every weapon has ) as the glyph except rods and staves, the glyphs should be coloured accordingly.

I like this basic idea... also, this is a convincing reason to make different weapon types have different glyphs. Knowing someone has a polearm is really important, as minmay suggests. Axes, now, too -- though less so.

It might be neat if color indicated brand, if known -- maybe:

blue: glowing (brand unknown, maybe vorpal|slay foo also)
yellow: flame
cyan: ice
brightwhite: elec
red: drain
purple: distortion
green: venom
brightblue/brightcyan: holy
changing: chaos

[Roderic]

Not sure about the list, because you cannot tell which position have each monster at each moment unless you x them, only know that there is a polearm wielder, which is a probable fact in a band of gnolls or orcs.

[galehar]

It turns out the default setting does have some unicode glyph (shops, trees, clouds). Setting char_set to unicode just use more (like walls). Obsolete platform (and users) can set char_set to ascii.
Using unicode is indeed a possible solution, however combining characters are poorly supported on most (all?) terminals.

[Roderic]

Aren't the tree, wall and fog symbols among others part of an ASCII extended? I think unicode allows *a lot* more than this set...





Indeed, unicode weird symbols from other alphabets I don't think they can represent each monster glyph with either a spear, axe or a sword consistently. I.e, o's have umlauts, d's or q's haven't.

[palin]

Ascii extended is not a standard and it's pretty much a windows-only legacy stuff nowadays (some fonts are in the linux console but I think only me and other nostalgic know that). You have ascii or a nice representation of unicode, if you discount the DEC terminal standard (which worked nicely for me in the macosx console)

[palin]

blue: glowing (brand unknown, maybe vorpal|slay foo also)
yellow: flame
cyan: ice
brightwhite: elec
red: drain
purple: distortion
green: venom
brightblue/brightcyan: holy
changing: chaos

I'd rather not mess with other representations of colours right now, it should be both simple and straighforward. If I see a dark grey ) it's probably an axe, a red ) is a polearm, a white ) a blowgun and so on...

[crate]

Like I said in the other thread if you are on Windows there is a good reason to not use unicode: the only ttyrec player I know about on Windows (termplay) does not handle unicode properly, so if you use unicode you are completely giving up your ability to watch your own ttyrecs. I have spent a bit of time looking for other players but have found nothing.

Unicode is also wonky on footv. Unicode footvs don't tend to begin with the screen drawn properly (the viewport is fine but the information at the top-right is not spaced properly) and require the player to do something to refresh the entire screen to fix it. This is not a big problem but is annoying.

Re: my suggestion of highlighting enemies based on weapon type: as I hinted, highlighting enemies based on which weapon they have equipped is not going to be useful if you try to do so for every weapon type. It would be a feature I would take advantage of to show which enemies have polearms currently, because reaching is a very important effect when enemies have it ... but no other weapon type has an effect I care about on enemies (cleaving is entirely meaningless unless I have allies, other weapons have no effects currently).

Displaying weapons in the monster list sounds good.

[Roderic]

It might be neat if color indicated brand, if known -- maybe:

blue: glowing (brand unknown, maybe vorpal|slay foo also)
yellow: flame
cyan: ice
brightwhite: elec
red: drain
purple: distortion
green: venom
brightblue/brightcyan: holy
changing: chaos

I have checked yesterday that Ctrl+V toggles a screen view with the health color of monsters. I think this can be applied also to brands/weapon type to clearly identify in the map the spatial position of every identified brand, with another Ctrl+key. That way, with the list you can read that there is some polearm but if you want you can see in the screen at every turn.