Proposal: distinguish actions in message list

[Hurkyl]

It can be annoying trying to read the messages to see what happened since your last action, particularly in a busy environment, because you have to scan the history to work out exactly where those messages begin.

I propose some sort of visual indicator to separate the message history to group the messages that happen between player actions... or at least to highlight the messages since the previous action.

Two ways of doing this are:

• Draw a horizontal rule between adjacent groups. Ideally (in tiles) this could be done without adding additional space between the two lines of text, but a row of dashes would suffice as well.
• Vary the background color of the text between black and dark gray, so that each group of messages has the same background color, but that color is different from the adjacent groups.

[Sandman25]

You can customize messages: remove those you don't want to see or change colors for different messages or message channels.

[Hurkyl]

You can customize messages: remove those you don't want to see or change colors for different messages or message channels.

This doesn't help with the problem I described.

I could sort of hack the thing I want if I could find a way to color only the messages that relate to me doing something, so I could use those messages to act as the divider in message history... but at first blush there is no easy way to do that. And, of course, it can't help at all if my previous action leaves no message (e.g. if it was a movement).

_

.... And beyond all reason, this even got thanked....

[nicolae]

_

.... And beyond all reason, this even got thanked....

That's because the _ at the beginning of message lines is precisely intended to do what you ask.

[Hurkyl]

_

.... And beyond all reason, this even got thanked....

That's because the _ at the beginning of message lines is precisely intended to do what you ask.

I could understand (and agree) if we were talking about a post that said that the _ at the beginning of message lines is precisely intended to do what I ask....

Anyways, it's not a very striking indicator given that I had not noticed it; the ones I suggested would be much clearer. I have to defer judgment on whether the current method is adequate until the next time I get myself in a big mess I want to pay attention to.

[dpeg]

hurkyl: Everyone who's been around for a while knows that minmay revels in curtness. As so often, his reply was spot on, but lacked any context. Get used to it

What he indicated, though, was that your topic already came up a while ago, and the _ indicator was the result. It is true that it's not a very obvious indicator, but in console (with its 24 lines standard) it's out of the question to expend full lines to distinguish between turns. In tiles, this can (and should!) certainly be done much better, but tiles folks should come up with a concept for this. Colouring was discussed back then, but dismissed for reasons that escape me right now.

[Hurkyl]

hurkyl: Everyone who's been around for a while knows that minmay revels in curtness. As so often, his reply was spot on, but lacked any context. Get used to it

It was clear he had some secret knowledge that he wanted to show off that he knew, without actually conveying that knowledge to the person who didn't know. It's getting thanked for it that boggles me!

(and by poking at it, I got the bonus result of him actually saying something informative, so it still worked out for me)

[BlackSheep]

show_newturn_mark = true
When set to false, this option disable the underscore (_) displayed in
front of the first line of a turn.

Maybe familiarize yourself with the game as it exists before deciding how it should be changed? There are tons of things that crawl does or lets you do that aren't immediately obvious. There are too many things to learn all at once, and once a player has the basics down, I strongly recommend exploring what else is there.

[galehar]

I agree with the OP. The underscore isn't very helpful when the message area is very busy. I'd like an option to have all messages older than last turn in dark grey. Or maybe I should try playing with clear_messages.

[njvack]

Turning old messages dark grey would be much better than clearing them.

[Hurkyl]

I understand at least part of the problem with the current solution: the line with the _ scrolls up out of the message buffer. (at least, it does with the default setup in the tiles client)

[rebthor]

I understand at least part of the problem with the current solution: the line with the _ scrolls up out of the message buffer. (at least, it does with the default setup in the tiles client)

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