Alphabetical order within item groups


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Post Wednesday, 3rd June 2015, 21:01

Alphabetical order within item groups

This is how items are seen right now, using wands as an example. The items are listed in alphabetical order by hotkey.

  Code:
Magical devices
 h - a wand of confusion {zapped: 7}
 l - a wand of lightning
 w - a wand of fire
 A - a wand of draining
 K - a wand of fire {zapped: 12}
 M - a wand of slowing
 X - a wand of confusion {zapped: 1}


Note that it can be hard to miss that there are two wands of fire and two wands of confusion. If you want to check is you have a particular wand, such as digging, you have to check every line. These two issues can be solved by sorting the items by name first, and only then, by hotkey:

  Code:
Magical devices
 h - a wand of confusion {zapped: 7}
 X - a wand of confusion {zapped: 1}
 A - a wand of draining
 w - a wand of fire
 K - a wand of fire {zapped: 12}
 l - a wand of lightning
 M - a wand of slowing


Now it's much easier to get an idea your wand inventory. People tend not to memorize the hotkey assigned to consumables, but they do remember that 'digging' starts with a 'd', so they could look somewhere between cold and enslavement to find it, and press the corresponding hotkey. The same principle can be applied to scrolls and potions, if not other items.

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Arrhythmia

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Post Wednesday, 3rd June 2015, 21:09

Re: Alphabetical order within item groups


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Post Sunday, 7th June 2015, 09:49

Re: Alphabetical order within item groups

I tried it out, MarvinPA, and it is *much* better that way. Why is it not the default?
It's quite important to have the default setup be as universally good as possible.
When somebody adds an option that is better, such as that toggable option you linked to,
anybody preferring the old option should be forced to change it back by configuring their files,
rather than getting new players to browse their various UI options, most of which they don't care about.
I imagine most players don't change any options at all, at least until they've played many games.
Last edited by Pollen_Golem on Sunday, 7th June 2015, 18:51, edited 1 time in total.

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Sandman25

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Post Sunday, 7th June 2015, 10:02

Re: Alphabetical order within item groups

Pollem_Golem is right: we have a tendency to add cool options, but shy away from changing the default (because that always requires discussion, something that adding an option does not). I never used alphabetical inventory ordering, since I always use defaults. So I am in favour of changing the default -- we can always turn back.
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Barkeep

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Post Sunday, 7th June 2015, 15:22

Re: Alphabetical order within item groups

IMO, one of the issues is that these cool options are in the somewhat puzzling .rc interface. Admittedly, rc files are a great way to offer unparalleled flexibility, like the lua-based bots that can actually win games and stuff, but it would be kind of nice if that flexibility were paired with a good UI solution, like a section with buttons and drop-down menus and the other junk that's written in a way for people to understand instead of computers.

This is obviously the kind of low-priority thing that a dev will respond to with "patches welcome!" but I thought I'd mention it. Crawl's UI isn't as bad as some people make it out to be, but its options menu is definitely pretty unfriendly.

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Post Sunday, 7th June 2015, 18:18

Re: Alphabetical order within item groups

The thing that would contribute the most usability to RC files for me would be if control-F worked in the options help screen (really all the help screens, but that one is really long, and reading through the whole thing looking for the option I want sucks.)
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Post Sunday, 7th June 2015, 19:21

Re: Alphabetical order within item groups

archaeo wrote:IMO, one of the issues is that these cool options are in the somewhat puzzling .rc interface. Admittedly, rc files are a great way to offer unparalleled flexibility, like the lua-based bots that can actually win games and stuff, but it would be kind of nice if that flexibility were paired with a good UI solution, like a section with buttons and drop-down menus and the other junk that's written in a way for people to understand instead of computers.

This is obviously the kind of low-priority thing that a dev will respond to with "patches welcome!" but I thought I'd mention it. Crawl's UI isn't as bad as some people make it out to be, but its options menu is definitely pretty unfriendly.

I actually started working on this a few months ago, but I gave up when I was unable to add a new option to the main menu without causing segfaults.

it has a loop-goto :(

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Post Sunday, 7th June 2015, 23:39

Re: Alphabetical order within item groups

The obvious solution is to create a sprint map called The Perilous Journey Through Rcfile Options, that allows you to toggle specifics by opening/closing doors and

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Post Wednesday, 10th June 2015, 15:09

Re: Alphabetical order within item groups

roctavian wrote:The obvious solution is to create a sprint map called The Perilous Journey Through Rcfile Options, that allows you to toggle specifics by opening/closing doors and


ESR once implemented a text adventure front-end to Linux kernel configuration (source code: look in cmladvent.py).

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