Transparent bolt bouncing

[dolphin]

I like it. Could you use different colors to differentiate different bounces? (So original beam = yellow, 1st bounce = green, 2nd bounce = blue) This is primarily because at first glance it wasn't apparent to me which point ended it. I imagine that with multiple bounces it could get pretty confusing, especially in a tight spot. Another possibility would be to show an animation of targeting highlights for the bounce path after waiting a second or two, like a tooltip.

[szanth]

If this was in the game I might consider trying an AE.

[mageykun]

The order does matter. It lets you see which squares get hit multiple times, which is usually what you're most interested in setting up.

[mageykun]

Oh. Sorry, I somehow spaced that you were using shading to show that. My bad.

I like this idea. It continues Crawl's long standing tradition of doing something tedious for you to save time. No longer will you have to count out the squares yourself.

[Stormfox]

The angles are also far from intuitive. Nethack beams are restricted to the 8 cardinal/halfway directions, so it's enough to simply know that bolts bounce off walls at all and you can work out the rest. Crawl's omnidirectional targeting, not so much.

[zasvid]

Well, this is a great idea, though a bit harder to visualise in ASCII.

[Stormfox]

How is it harder in ASCII? You already get a tracer path for your initial targeting, so get a different color to fill in the rest of the beam path.

[Stormfox]

I just reprocessed some of the earlier posts and now I'm getting it a bit better when it comes to the increased challenge of doing this for ASCII. Still not impossible, though, at least from a conceptual standpoint, but definitely more challenging than tiles.

But here's an idea anyhow.

Currently, the standard tracer path for targeting is magenta. Targets in line of fire get highlighted in magenta. There's no distinction if a bouncing bolt would hit a square more than once.

I would change the color of the tracer/highlight on a square depending on how many times it would be hit on the shot. You would also need to extend the tracer out to the full range of the shot, rather than having it stop at the aim point as it does now.

Aim point - magenta (same as it is now)
1-blue
2-cyan
3-yellow
4-white

Not quite an ascending scale of brightness/intensity, and not necessarily the most intuitive thing (some reading of the docs would almost be mandatory), but it's a solution.

[coyo7e]

ASCII would be harder for a lot of reasons: server play can't animate the path properly, there are only a few colors, etc.

I can't see it being that much tougher. ASCII already has a better map - there are just tradeoffs you get for playing one version rather than the other. I can't see this being a valid reason to not explore adding this auto-calculating bolt stuff to Tiles.

[Zedd]

Actually, if you have only two colors available (relevant in the ASCII case), you can use the 'normal' color for "hit once" and the 'brighter color' for "hit twice-or-more". Experimenting with different possible targets before shooting will give the player a good enough idea of how the thing is going to reflect, even if he can't tell obviously which (if any) of the tiles are going to be covered more than twice.

I'm not sure I made my point clear.