Any variant have "auto explore"

[bergmark]

I'm fairly new to Angband, but coming from having played a bit of crawl recently. Do any of the variants support crawl-style ctrl-0 autoexplore or moving the nearest stars from the overview map (X >). I find myself missing these conveniences quite a bit.

[Nick]

Originally Posted by bergmark

I'm fairly new to Angband, but coming from having played a bit of crawl recently. Do any of the variants support crawl-style ctrl-0 autoexplore or moving the nearest stars from the overview map (X >). I find myself missing these conveniences quite a bit.

I think the closest thing in *bands is mouse exploration, where you click where you want to go and the game will try to find you a path there (it's just like running, except with a destination instead of a starting direction). This was introduced in UnAngband, and is also possible in Vanilla and FA. I haven't played enough crawl to compare, but I understand from previous discussions that it's a, um, less impressive feature than auto-explore.

[Narvius]

I don't like auto-explore (I played DC).
At the moment there's nothing that makes the game "automated", except the near infinite ways to create shortcuts.
But if someone really wants to have Auto-Explore; it can be stolen from the borg, I guess.

[bergmark]

Originally Posted by Narvius

I don't like auto-explore (I played DC).
At the moment there's nothing that makes the game "automated", except the near infinite ways to create shortcuts.
But if someone really wants to have Auto-Explore; it can be stolen from the borg, I guess.

I guess I have to be careful to explain what I mean by Auto-Explore. It doesn't play for you by any means. It just walks around revealing the map until something interesting happens (you see a monster, you see an item on the floor, anything that involves making a decision other than where to step next). It prevents you from doing stuff like walking around too fast and moving once or twice after a monster has shown on the screen because you weren't careful enough.

The other functionality of going to the nearest stair is also just a convenience to speed up play.

Thanks to both of you for the information though. At least I know I'm not missing anything obvious.

[zaimoni]

Originally Posted by bergmark

I guess I have to be careful to explain what I mean by Auto-Explore. It doesn't play for you by any means. It just walks around revealing the map until something interesting happens (you see a monster, you see an item on the floor, anything that involves making a decision other than where to step next). It prevents you from doing stuff like walking around too fast and moving once or twice after a monster has shown on the screen because you weren't careful enough.

The other functionality of going to the nearest stair is also just a convenience to speed up play.

It took me a while to learn how not to commit suicide with auto-explore. (When I play SSCrawl, I still use it in a very restrained fashion; the number of 1-square danger zones that have to be marked to prevent suicide-by-autoexplore is usually prohibitive.)

The *bands do not implement the "Bugblatter Beast of Traal" principle, as their line-of-sight and projectability algorithms are much simpler than any Crawl's. As such, porting auto-explore to a *band, while simultaneously fixing it and making it take proper account of asymmetric projectability, is a daunting task.

Also, the easy way to port Crawl autoexplore to a *band would automatically make monsters use cover properly when moving; this would noticeably change the required strategy and tactics for that variant.

[Narvius]

I know what it does, I said I played crawl.
But that's still automizing the game.

[takkaria]

Originally Posted by bergmark

I guess I have to be careful to explain what I mean by Auto-Explore. It doesn't play for you by any means. It just walks around revealing the map until something interesting happens (you see a monster, you see an item on the floor, anything that involves making a decision other than where to step next). It prevents you from doing stuff like walking around too fast and moving once or twice after a monster has shown on the screen because you weren't careful enough.

Try using the "run" command. It's activated by the . key and allows you to run around the dungeon fast without holding down keys.

[PowerDiver]

Originally Posted by bergmark

It just walks around revealing the map until something interesting happens (you see a monster, you see an item on the floor, anything that involves making a decision other than where to step next). It prevents you from doing stuff like walking around too fast and moving once or twice after a monster has shown on the screen because you weren't careful enough..

By the time you see a monster, it may be too late. Choosing when to use
detection, be it spells scrolls staves or rods, is a major element of the game.

Rooms have attributes that you learn to recognize. Some places are more
dangerous than others. Some are pretty much guaranteed to have traps.

If the level is trivial enough that some version of auto-explore would be safe,
you should go deeper until it is not.

[Bandobras]

Good points. Not to mention aggro.

[Djabanete]

Originally Posted by PowerDiver

By the time you see a monster, it may be too late. Choosing when to use
detection, be it spells scrolls staves or rods, is a major element of the game.

Rooms have attributes that you learn to recognize. Some places are more
dangerous than others. Some are pretty much guaranteed to have traps.

If the level is trivial enough that some version of auto-explore would be safe,
you should go deeper until it is not.

I'd agree with this for the most part, but auto-explore would speed up the diving process for classes that don't do much detection until they find detection items (e.g. warriors). An autoexplore option would be great for early game warriors IMO.

EDIT: Not that it would necessarily be worthwhile to implement something complex like autoexplore just for that, but I thought I'd mention it.