The Tavern

I would like to see some improvments with the highscore table:

- option to view highscores from main menu
- ability to scroll list and selecting characters to view statistics
- some extra list with champions/best statistics in different categorys (most gold found, most turns played, most deadly monster killed, most points in different skills reached, best item found, best score for particular species/background/god etc.)

+1 to this. Creating a disposable wizmode character to view your incomplete high scores list is just not satisfactory, and the complete scores file is a mess to read with a text editor. A complete, scrollable in game high scores list has been on my wishlist for a while.

Yes, that would be very nice.

Actual statistics might be a bit ambitious, but a scrollable highscore list would be sorta nice. I don't think any of the devs have this on their table, but a patch would be welcome! *hinthint*

That said, the non-death statistics aren't currently stored in the highscore, so that information would only be available for games newer than the patch.

I agree. The one time I loaded up the scores file in textedit, I went crosseyed. The ability to view it offline would be outstanding, or even just to scroll up and down after you suffer another YASD...

One more idea:

If the char get selected in the table there should be a sentence in the death statistics about ghost status:

"His poor soul still haunts the dungeon..." "...and took the lives of ABC, EFG and JKL"/ "His soul was laid to rest by XYZ."

Wouldn't that be a bit of a spoiler? If we want to give away whether you left a ghost or not, there should be a special in-game message, too.

Umm. Did not know that. I thought that every dead char has the chance to spawn as a ghost until killed a second time.

I don't think it's much of a spoiler. The bones file in the saves folder pretty much wrecks any chance that the ghost is going to be a surprise.

So don't look at the bones files

That said, I've been wanting a good way to view your highscores since .5.2, and even something simple would be greatly appreciated.

The dead characters information is kept at distinct files at the morgue folder, corret?
There must be one aggregating file, though, so that the score screen is displayed easily. My question is: which file is that? What information of each character does it contain? It might be difficult to do generic rank listings such as 'which of my characters killed the most Megabats" if this one aggregating file does not contain that information.

If that information is not there, all the files need to be read every time such rankings are required... I mean, I can program myself a simple application that will open each character file, parse and read the information and then categorize it by a defined attribute... but opening, reading and closing multiple files (thousands even) is going to make it run forever before answering.

I'd think that the easiest way of offering different rankings is keeping these predefined rankings from the start. Keep the normal score ranking as it is now and add new rankings for gold, kills, etc.

If it weren't for the fact that crawl doesn't quite want to compile for me, I'd probably do it myself. It's pretty much a matter of swiping or reusing the high scores code (look at hiscores_print_all() and hiscores_print_list() in hiscores.cc), throwing in the page up/page down mechanics from the help menu, and throwing in the option at startup (or possibly even in with the help menu).