NPPAngband/Moria QT Port (Windows) Beta-1 released
 

For anyone willing to playtest tor try out the new QT port beta, here is a link to a windows binary:
http://download.nppangband.org/NPPQT-BETA1.zip

This beta is for people who are willing to play around with it, and give feedback on how well it works on various machines.

The zip file is about 43 MEGS. It includes a deployment package with all the .dlls and other dependencies necessary to play the game. To play, you just have to unzip the game in a folder of your choice, and click on "NPPGAMES.exe". This is assuming QT added all of the necessary .dlls and plug ins for all of the different versions of windows. Please let me know if any are missing.

The game should be stable and not too buggy at this point. You can play a complete game of either NPPAngband or NPPMoria, however still to come are several vital features for an enjoyable game (macros, multiple windows).

I need to create deployment packages for the MAC and LINUX as well. Although anyone who downloads QT can just download the source, compile and play on any platform.

It will be interesting to see how well QT handles the large variety of screensizes out there.

For any display bugs, e-mailing me a screenshot is probably the best way to let me know what is wrong.

Thanks, and I look forward to seeing any constructive feedback.

Congrats on the first beta release---2015 on a fine track in the land of *BAND!

Loving the interface and the effects so much!

My only complaint so far is that the @ character looks a bit... squished? cramped? dunno, I don't like it for some reason.

EDIT: There is a space missing in "amountto drop" line when you drop eg. ammo.

EDIT 2: A 'click to move' functionality would be brilliant.

This is really impressive, Jeff.

It took me a bit to realise many commands have changed, and I couldn't get mouse movement to work, but the overall effect is amazing.

Thank you, I want to deflect much of the credit to Diego. He has always been the much better coder, and this never would have gotten off the ground without him.


I guess I could have mentioned the new keymapping. {OOPS} Under the help menu, you can pull up the command list.

With the ALT and CTRL keys opened up a whole bunch of options. I centered the movement around the "h" key (for 'H'old). You can use any object with 'e', and handle everything in your inventory with 'I'. All the spellcasting commands are under 'm'. ('m' to cast, 'M' to learn spells, and CTRL-M to browse). All the various rest commands are under "r". Simply pressing 'r' will rest the player until fully healed. All movement options use some form of modifier key and the direction. shift+direction looks around, ctrl+direction runs, alt+direction is the alter command, etc...

Mouse movement isn't programmed yet. It is very high up on the list. Along with the start of a macro interface that will allow the player to cast spells or use an object. Inscribing objects don't help with macros any more. A macro will simply have the instruction to to quaff a potion of cure critical wounds, and the game will figure it out from there.

Is that with the default font? You can select any font on your system, or change the font size as well.

Fixed, thanks.

Soon, very soon. The arrangement will probably be left-click to move one square, double-click left to run to a square, and right click to see all the dungeon square information. I think right now any click just brings up the square info.

Default font. Haven't found the option to change it in the 20 mins I spent playing (and I went "damn you muscle memory" a few times lol due to all the changed keybindings).

Will poke around the options to see what to do to change the font and size.

EDIT: Changed the font and it looks much better.

Also, there should be a log message on searching and hopefully a bar for search like the one for stealth or disarming because I don't really understand *band searching even though I've played a lot of variants and vanilla.

EDIT 2: Please bind ? to command list.

There are two Search fields on the player screen. One is search frequency. This is the one in X chance the player will search that turn. The other is the % chance, when searching, of finding something. If you mouse hover over the fields on the player screen, an explanation comes up.

Good suggestion. Done.

Wow, this is nice. REALLY nice! Somewhat difficult to play with 20+ years of rogue-like keyset in my palms though, but if an old dog can be trained maybe I can too.

OK. I've been lured back in. If you don't hear from me in three days call the authorities.

Minor point on birth options. If an option such as ironman is selected, then incompatible options such as connected stairs should be greyed out.

Name your save file kinda comes out of nowhere. Can't NPP handle this for us based on character name, providing there is no conflict.

YOU DIE. Seems like a bit more could be done with this. Can we get a nice tombstone graphic a dry description of the event and perhaps an irreverent comment on one's banding skills.

After death and choosing to continue, you're presented with a mostly blank screen (as when the game is launched). Select an item from the menu or something to that effect would be nice.

Capitalization: It should be (according to me) "Giant Yellow Centipede" or "giant yellow centipede", not "Giant yellow centipede".

Re inscriptions (on the wall): Please discard use the qualifier "try" when I'm successful.

Center screen continuously is still described as "(very slow)" but it's not, hasn't been in ages.

When I restart REMEMBER my birth options from character creation from the last game (replicating name and starting stats) and offer a reset to defaults option.

Maybe offer to save save/load different birth option profiles.

THE TILE MULTIPLIER: some crazy settings there, 16:16= about 2 grids per screen. Some smaller settings might be nice instead, .75:.75 or .50:.50.

My first real issue. You seem to have co-opted the Fn key(s) that I use to simulate the keypad on my laptop (sans-keypad). That means I can't move diagonally (Fn+7, Fn+9, Fn+j and Fn+l and my diagonal movement keys).

I don't see where I can alter the movement delay. I like my @'s to walk, perhaps leisurely, not teleport.

I can resize the status bar, but I can't resize the messages area. Also, seems like a lot more could be done with use of colors and styles, maybe even font sizes in the message area.

Changing fonts doesn't seem to work unless it only affects the main window. I'm playing with tiles and wanted larger status bar text.

Ctrl-m, trying to bring up a map, produced repeating popup, "Lookup_kind could not find object (0,8)". Was blind at the moment if that matters.

The current keyset definitely isn't an optimum setup at present. When I play I am having trouble entering the correct commands too.

The main thing I want, though to have one keyset for all directional commands, making use of the modifier keys (shift, ctr, alt) to specify the commands. I am just trying to get out of having to separately enter a command and then a direction, as well as having a second roguelike keyset.

When I step back and look at it objectively, the improvements I like are: 1) the 'i' command, where I can handle all of my inventory management in one dialog, 2)being able to rest by simply pressing 'r'. 3) Tunneling with the windows key-{direction}

My end goals are to make it convenient to play with either the keyboard or the mouse (with an eye to towards the upcoming touchscreen for tablets) but also to greatly reduce the learning curve for new players. Balancing those 3 will be interesting. Suggestions are welcome.

The ironman options have always been separate. Either they should be named a little differently, or combined into a single option. But I suppose if the stores are closed, the NPP ironman options of no services and no quests don't make much sense.

It should at least offer to use the character name so all you have to do is click enter. Is that no working?

Much more to come. I want to have three splashscreens: 1 for the game start, one for being killed, and one for retirement. I was going to reach out to Shockbolt and see if I can compensate him to draw them, along with a rounding out his amazing tiles for NPP. Also, eventually some quality sound effects for various things, death being one of them.



Is it fast on other machines? I play on an ultrabook and I occasionally notice small delays. I agree that note was probably written 20 years ago and needs to go.


Your stats and options from the previous game should come up automatically, unless you are starting a new savefile. Please let me know if this is broken.

On the to-do list.

LOL. good point. 16x16 is for playing on a TV. It is also relative to font size. You can reduce your font to get the 75:75 and 50:50 effect.

For keyboards without a numpad, movement keys are centered around the 'h' key (for hold). You should be able to move with
TYU
GHJ
VBN

For the function keys, I had in mind reserving those for macros.

LOL. It is currently under the options screen, final tab. It is going to be moved to under the options section of the top toolbar. However it doesn't currently yet tie to anything, so changing it won't help you.

Thanks for the feedback, everybody. The UI definitely needs optimizing, but I wanted to see how it worked on everybody's screen before fine-tuning things. I am stunned the only true bug reported so far is spacing on the one dialog screen.

I am aware of a couple other issues:
*On the knowledge screens, numbers are not sorted as true numbers. So the score of 1150 is considered less than 999.

*At least on my screen, when the inventory or equipment/quiver is full, the equipment dialogs go off the bottom of the screen. I haven't found a good scroll-window setup yet.

* When casting detect traps, the green circles showing edge ends don't seem to update on the outermost squares of the screen.

No. Win7.

I'm playing with tiles on an older laptop and movement is almost instantaneous.

It's broken.

Noop. Changing fonts and/or sizes has no effect on anything AFAICT.


Ugh.

I may have added a few more points to my original post (including some genuine bugginess). Post #10.

Double Ugh! H-key movement is really awkward. I'm sure it's just a matter of getting used to it, but I don't know if I want to. The problem is the shiftiness of the keypad.

M is for magic or map or whatever, I get it. I just don't know if that (ugh) is gonna cut it. It's so unintuitive that I at first suspected a key mapping mistake before I realized it was WAD.

On the constructive side, doing that thing where pressing two arrow keys at once will move @ diagonally would be a great alternative (IMO). Pressing two opposite directions at once could "hold".

Player information screen (previously character screen, ugh) presents as wider than my screen. The horizontal bar chart seem excessively long and thus a likely fix. I'm able be grab and move it to the left to see all the rest of the info, but still. Playing on a standard aspect ratio laptop, 13" or 15" screen (not sure).

As long as we're here, on many info screens hovering-over will bring up useful tool-tip info, but only if you hover over the title. Hovering over the info itself, which is what I find myself repeatedly doing, presents nothing. Can't it be both?

Phrasing: "One of y rations of food was eaten."

That should be all from me for the day. I actually have stuff I need to do.

Nope. Win7.

Slightly wider here, too. 1280x1024, default screen size.

Really fast here, and this is NOT a gaming laptop - Dell Vostro 3450.

I'd like it, too :D

Soon. Actually, those are all going to be separate undockable widgets, so the player can move them anywhere andresize them however they want.

And definitely more could be done with colors and sizes. We are only scratching the surface in what QT can do.

My plan is for Nick and the devteam to be impressed by the QT port, port Angband to QT, and then make all these improvements so I just have to copy their work. :D

I have made it so the current player name comes up by default. You should just have to hit enter at that point.

I confirmed. Changing font size changes tile size. I agree some work could be done on the ratios.

We have not incorporated the map command yet. CTRL-m is now the browse spellbook command.

I do see that the new keymapping is getting a lot of negative feedback. I am resisting using the old keymap because I want to reduce the learning curve for new players, and the ultimate goal is to create a tablet interface using only icons and swipes. But if there is a consensus on where the direction keys should be located on the keyboard, I can work around that.

I am also considering creating a dialog that allows the player to customize the key for every command in the game, just to end the debate once and for all. Although first somebody might have to tell me why nobody complained to the maintainers of Sil when they changed the keyset. :):):):confused::confused:

That would be indeed great. Especially for the Android port (keys covering half the screen :( )

So I think there are two steps in this:

1. Take the Qt bits from NPP and rewrite them as a complete alternative interface for V and
2. Edit the current V core so it becomes NPP.

The first would be more work, and would chiefly benefit V. The second would be not too hard, and kind of fun - in fact I was planning to do it for FA before releasing the new V version, before the devteam talked some sense into me :)

I just realized what that is. The width of the horizontal bar, as well as the monster health/mana bars on the sidebar, is based on the size of the font or tile size. It was supposed to factor in the screen size when sizing the bar. But when you make the dungeon squares bigger, that bar gets much wider. That will be an interesting fix to figure out.

Much of the QT code is written in c++, so it either way it would require a commitment to compile in C++. Which really is no big deal. With only a few exceptions, all C code is a subset of C++.

I have a ways to go before it is a complete port. It still needs multiple windows, macros/hotkeys, character dumps, screenshots, and a bunch of fine tuning. So you all have some time to think about it.

I tried to recreate this bug. Rolling characters and killing them. The same race/class/stats/options came up consistently. The only exception is if the roll character option is set, because it rolls a new character it brings it up. It even automatically adds

What steps did you follow? Was the same savefile used?

Thanks to all for your feedback. I will put the old keymap back in BETA-2. The dislike of the new keys was unanimous.

IIRC, started a new new game, tinkered with many birth options. Only one I know i set for sure was ironman. Selected class and race, and went with the roller rather than point based. Promptly died on level 1. Started a new game (from the menu I was presented with, not from a save file) and IIRC all options were reser to standard defaults.

unrelated, it shows both living snd deceased scores if you view high scores upon death.

In high scores upon death, it shows depth in feet where you'd expect dlvl (eg. I died on dlvl 3 but it showed 150 under the level heading)

For the upcoming BETA-2, there is the option to use the "angband" keyset, as well as the roguelike keyset. I also made some changes to the new NPP keyset to it isn't quite as different from the Angband keyset.

I am also working on mouse commands. A person with a 5 button mouse should be able to play the game quicker than using with a keyboard.

BETA-2 will also add some basic macros and hopefully some multiple windows.

Thanks again for the great feedback!

I have fixed most of the issues pointed out in this thread. Thanks again for the great feedback!

For the upcoming BETA-2, there is the option to use the "Angband" keyset, as well as the roguelike keyset. I also made some changes to the new NPP keyset to it isn't quite so different from the Angband keyset.

I am also trying to get the most out of mouse commands. Soon a person with a 5 button mouse should be able to play the game extremely quickly and access most of the commands without touching the keyboard.

BETA-2 will also add some basic macros and hopefully some multiple windows.

Is the Qt branch available somewhere public? I looked around a bit on Github, but couldn't find anything.