A horrific noob's commentated 'band adventures

[smbhax]

https://youtu.be/uBepmRS_iTw

0:00 - start - town
2:20 - L32
8:20 - an olog and gang
29:21 - L33
31:21 - troll chieftain (L40)

Oh shoot I guess I never did find Draebor the Imp. : P And I forgot to drink that dexterity potion I put in my bag! And I forgot I need to save that Scroll of Enchant Weapon to Hit for my new Main Gauche!

Maybe I was distracted by having to hit "B" (the move-down-left key) with my other hand on this new split keyboard. I sort of got used to that by the end but at the expense of slowing down a bit, and losing the lovely feeling of command you have with a roguelike, where you feel like everything is right at your fingertips.

I think next time I'll go back to my old keyboard for the game; after all, I switched it out because it was too narrow for typing comfortably, but you aren't really typing while playing, so I could move the keyboard slightly to the right so I wouldn't have to stretch my right hand over to reach the keys--that was straining my shoulder while typing, see. I tend to keep my left hovering out wide over the Tab key anyway, so that should be fine.

Oh, I stopped with just 71 XP left for hitting character level 32! ^ _^

[smbhax]

https://youtu.be/ZtBo7GXm-lA

0:00 - L33
10:03 - didn't even notice this L38 "abyss spider" 'p'
18:15 - town
25:05 - I need +$4K for that Potion of Dexterity!
28:15 - lich (on L34)
42:22 - the potion is gone ;_;
45:37 - squint-eyed rogue steals my Rod of Recall 'p'

I looked it up after recording, and it's "litch." : P

Also after recording, I finally realized that I can solve my split keyboard problem simply by using the game's Keymap option menu to move the roguelike keyset's movement key maps to the right by one key each, so the traditional roguelike HJKL becomes JKL: -- and since the diagonal movement keys radiate from the left-most of that set of four, that puts down-left movement on the N key which, unlike the former key, B, IS on the right-hand side of the split keyboard along with all the other movement keys, enabling moving @ around the map with just the right hand, as it should.

It also means my right hand now has the same resting position for playing Angband as it does for typing--so it'll no longer be confused for a while when I try going back to doing other stuff on the computer after I've been playing Angband. ; )

Sweet! Why in heck didn't I think of this like a year ago. : P

When I found the Rod of Recall a few episodes back I'd hemmed and hawed about switching to it from the cumbersome ol' Word of Recall scrolls, concerned that it could be stolen and then I'd be down on the dungeon without a scroll, as it were--but then I couldn't think of any actual incident of someone stealing an item like that in the dungeon, so I went with it. Now it HAS been stolen--in town. And I was able to get it back very quickly. ARE there dungeon monsters who steal such things? There were back in the Moria days (@ROGUElove was always having his paladin's spell book stolen), but I don't know that that happens in modern Angband. Well...possibly some day I'll be in for a long trudge back to town. 'o'

[backwardsEric]

Originally Posted by smbhax

ARE there dungeon monsters who steal such things? There were back in the Moria days (@ROGUElove was always having his paladin's spell book stolen), but I don't know that that happens in modern Angband. Well...possibly some day I'll be in for a long trudge back to town. 'o'

Yes, there are, though there aren't many. Rogues and brigands are the ones that you'll find first. High dexterity reduces the chance of something being stolen (a dexterity of 18 protects against 10% of thefts; 18/150 or above is the cutoff for complete protection).

[smbhax]

Originally Posted by backwardsEric

Yes, there are, though there aren't many. Rogues and brigands are the ones that you'll find first. High dexterity reduces the chance of something being stolen (a dexterity of 18 protects against 10% of thefts; 18/150 or above is the cutoff for complete protection).

That's good to know. = oo I guess. ;_; Dangit, I guess I have to go back to scrolls. Maybe I'd better keep my eye out for a second rod and just carry two around, and run back to town as soon as one gets swiped.

(Oh hm and googling is telling me the stat max is 18/220, which was something else I'd been wondering about (but stat potions alone only raise it as high as 18/100, which actually is noted in the online manual).)

Thanks for the info! = D

[smbhax]

Originally Posted by smbhax

I finally realized that I can solve my split keyboard problem simply by using the game's Keymap option menu to move the roguelike keyset's movement key maps to the right by one key each, so the traditional roguelike HJKL becomes JKL: -- and since the diagonal movement keys radiate from the left-most of that set of four, that puts down-left movement on the N key which, unlike the former key, B, IS on the right-hand side of the split keyboard along with all the other movement keys, enabling moving @ around the map with just the right hand, as it should.

Still had to set up my Shift and CTRL keymaps for that one-to-the-right change to fit the roguelike movement keys on the right side of the split keyboard (it's a Microsoft "Sculpt" keyboard), and ran into a couple CTRL key conflicts there--and implemented some really hacky keymap workarounds that are probably going to end up messing with me in practice 'p':

- Some CTRL keys functioned like Tab (^i--Angband hard-coded command), Enter (^m--Angband hard-coded command), or Backspace (^h--Cygwin terminal option, needed for Backspace to work correctly in Angband's text fields)
- tunnel up-right should be ^i but ^i is Tab in Angband and if I try keymapping something to ^i it kills my auto-shot key, so I put tunnel up-right on the key next to it instead, ^o; that kills the default "show previous message" button but I don't use that command 'p'
- tunnel right would be ^; but there is no such input, I guess--nothing at all happens when I press that, anyway--so I put it on the other side: ^h 'p'
- Enter is now functioning like tunnel down-right and Backspace like tunnel right but I haven't been using those keys outside of text entry, which still seems to work okay, so I guess it's all right 'p'
- moved I (Inspect) and i (inventory--had managed to forget about that one...) to Y and y
- killed the "Take notes" key (:, now my move east key), but I don't use that one

So yeah kinda messy, eesh. Fortunately--maybe--I don't currently do much tunneling; mostly just clearing the occasional rubble patch.

Why *are* ^i and ^m hard-coded to Tab and Enter, anyway?

[backwardsEric]

Originally Posted by smbhax

Why *are* ^i and ^m hard-coded to Tab and Enter, anyway?

It's tied to the layout of ASCII encoding and (I'm guessing here) the way teletypes (and the terminals and terminal emulators that followed them) work. To get one of the control codes (0 to 31 in ASCII) which didn't have a dedicated key on the keyboard, one would hit ctrl + key. Behind the scenes, that would take the code for key and blank out the most significant 3 bits (equivalent to a bitwise-and with 0x1f or subtracting 64 from the code for an uppercase letter or 96 from the code for a lowercase letter) to get the control code. So,

I (0x49 hexadecimal or 73 decimal in ASCII) or i (0x69 hexadecimal or 105 decimal in ASCII) -> horizontal tab (0x09 hexadecimal or 9 decimal in ASCII)

M (0x4d hexadecimal or 77 decimal in ASCII) or m (0x6d hexadecimal or 109 decimal in ASCII) -> carriage return (0x0d hexadecimal or 13 decimal in ASCII)

G (0x47 hexadecimal or 71 decimal in ASCII) or g (0x67 hexadecimal or 103 decimal in ASCII) -> audible bell (0x07 hexadecimal or 7 decimal in ASCII)

[smbhax]

Man! It's interesting that the old VI keys, which became the "roguelike" keys, fit right between G, I, and M! Did they need to avoid those CTRL key clashes for text editing? That would explain why the key position is shifted one over from the standard right-hand typing position, I suppose.

Update: I tried looking this up, and as far as I can tell from VI editor key reference guides like https://www.atmos.albany.edu/daes/at...heat_sheet.pdf , they did use ^h for backing up one character in "input" mode, so I suppose there's some correspondence there, but maybe that could have just as well have been on ^j if things had been shifted over one to match standard typing hand position. Nothing assigned to ^j or ^k. ^l redraws the screen, which maybe didn't necessarily need to line up with the right navigation key, I wouldn't have thought.

So it doesn't seem like our roguelike keys neatly fit in between those ASCII CTRL mappings in VI for that particular purpose--and oh I guess it wouldn't have mattered there for I and M anyhow, since VI didn't use diagonal movement keys. Oh well so much for that theory. ; _)

And there's a ^g! ("Display current line number and file information.")

[Pete Mack]

Vi commands are* hjkl for local movement. (It is bimodal between edit mode and command modes.) Caps and control are rogue (and later) generalizations. And yeah, they are still useful for touch-typists who eschew the numpad.

* no 'were' anout it--vi is still widely used--it's even an Android and OSX app. They actually go back to some mid-to-late-70s era glass screen terminal, currently in use only at Unix museums.

[smbhax]

Great, let's get more VI users into Angband. = D

[Julian]

Originally Posted by smbhax

Great, let's get more VI users into Angband. = D

It’s compatible with Nethack, which is perhaps more useful.