watertreatmentRL wrote:Siegurt wrote:So when multiple things are visible on the screen at once (In the slime, or elf vaults, for example) you think it's better to walk to each item (or navigate to them with x) than it is to see them all at once with control-X (or Control-F,. if you want to see the whole level instead of just LOS)
I am saying that you should not need to enter an ancillary menu or pop-up display, like ctrl-x or ctrl-f or g on piled tiles, to determine what useful items are in line of sight. It should be clear from looking at the map. With squelching, splashing, and graphical improvements, this is totally achievable.
I haven't played larn in a long time, but I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that the real issue there is overabundance of useless items with lack of automation, not limitations on number of items per tile.
It isn't achievable, partially because you can't make sufficient improvements to the graphics.
For one thing, a significant amount of the users use console, there is limited amount of information you can convey (you are limited to exactly one symbol, which can't overlap with a monster symbol, a background and a foreground color, and have a limited set of choices for those)
For another you have a *lot* of information that needs to be conveyed, think about how many attributes a randart has, trying to convey all of that in a single glyph would result in a horrible unreadable mess.
Plus new players would have to learn a whole system of graphical information to understand before they could take advantage of the whole "know what the items are at a glance" thing and would have to revert to walking (or moving a cursor) over to things to see what they were, instead of, you know, being able to read it in plain English all at once. Communication is only effective if it can be understood, and there simply aren't enough ways to inuitively convey the required information, and adding more barriers to the learning curve to just interpret the interface makes crawl less appealing, not more.
Crawl items are too complicated to ever have all of the possible attributes about them be displayed on screen, particularly in console.
Item squelching does reduce the number of cases where there are multiple items in the first place, but all that means is if items are squelched, there are less cases where there are multiple items to display, it has no bearing on whether "stacks" or "splashed" is the better way to go when there are multiple items, and "splashing" obviously doesn't, since that is the very mechanism we are taking about.
I don't particularly like the idea of squelching to begin with (having the items that drop be dependant on what you already have is awkward, spoilery, and non inuitive, and i personally have zero problems ignoring things i don't want, plus the game deciding for me what i do and do not need isn't appealing) but even if a mechanism like that were added, it doesn't contribute to the discussion of what to do when multiple things dropped, it only lessens its impact.
Also i have played a number of games in more than one genre where items dont stack, and having to go to travel to pick them up annoys the crap out of me every single damn time. Far and away more than looking at a list or menu has ever felt like it took me out of the game itself, picking up items isn't "playing the game", and isn't tactical. Why should we want to represent it in our tactical display?
I also suggest to a mod that this thread regarding multiple items per square be moved to its own thread, it is a separate discussion, and not dependant on the original discussion of squelching redundant items, and seems like it might be slightly overwhelming that discussion.