The -more- prompt

[t4nk]

What I think would be good if the player could force pause on certain types of messages (there are over 100 types in list-message.h), and perhaps "squelch" some of them? The important messages could also be highlighted by color. BTW, I really like Poschengband's Clown Vomit, but that would require stealing its z-doc.c Probably a good idea anyway, but that's for later

The problem with a multi-line display in the main window is that the minimum window size is only 24 rows high, which accommodates a single message line and just enough room to display the full inventory a-w without needing to introduce scrolling.

We can ask Nick to reduce the inventory to compensate

[fizzix]

Originally Posted by AnonymousHero

Just curious: ToME 2.x? I'd probably agree, but that's mostly because of the absurd balancing which means that any melee-oriented character will have to have at least 20-30 attacks per round to make much progress in the Angband dungeon . It's pretty silly and I'm thinking on-and-off about how this could be rebalanced to avoid the ridiculousness of the necessity for "+10 attacks" rings. (Don't hold your breath. There are so many interactions between various systems in T2 that it's... non-trivial to rebalance.)

I was talking about tome 4.0, or tales of maj'eyal. tome 2.0 is more similar to angband.

Combat is going to be rebalanced at some point. when that happens, how we handle messages should be considered.

Also - I'm pretty sure clown vomit is Darren Grey's description of Brogue's color pallette. I've seen many games where damage you do is green, and damage the enemies do is red. I've never found it distracting and it was always an easy way to distinguish positive from negative.

I do agree that sparing use should be important. It's really important to know that you're confused, but perhaps there are better graphical ways to distinguish this, and we shouldn't worry about the messages. Coloring the @ sign to display damage is far superior to the low hitpoint message even though it is colored. So maybe it's better to turn @ green or blue if there's a status effect.

Basically the design challenge is figuring out what pieces of information the player needs to know and making that info prominent.

[AnonymousHero]

Originally Posted by fizzix

Also - I'm pretty sure clown vomit is Darren Grey's description of Brogue's color pallette.

Yup! I find it quite evocative of the feeling I get when I see "too much color".

Originally Posted by fizzix

I've seen many games where damage you do is green, and damage the enemies do is red. I've never found it distracting and it was always an easy way to distinguish positive from negative.

I'm moderately certain it can be done subtly enough, but I have a hard time coming up with many examples where it hasn't been incredibly distracting. I think color use basically also needs some sort of supporting spatial component or to be very subtle in terms of contrast. (The go to example would be tables where rows/columns have alternating colors.)

One game which does this reasonably well is Baldur's Gate, IMO. (However, it is multi-line which helps a lot.) You don't get coloration of the actual damage amounts, but what you do get is coloration of the actor -- in certain cases. Here's an example:

    Indra~ Attacks Thug
    Indra did 7 damage to Thug
    Thug~Attacks Indra
    Indra did 3 damage to Thug
    Indra did 7 damage to Thug
    Thug~Death
    The Party Has Gained Experience: 445

A thing to note here is that the damage amount isn't actually highlighted -- since it rarely matters exactly how much damage you did. You can always Mouse-over (+Tab) to see the general health status of the enemy. Neither is the "direction" of the damage subject to color -- other than through the "Who did it" (first) portion of any given message. However, BG has an advantage here since you can both get sound cues and graphical cues (little blood spatter) -- I think T4 does something similar to blood spatter in the graphical UIs at least? That seems eminently sensible to me and avoids clown vomit in the message text.

Another thing to note is that the colors are extremely subtle and always confined to the left hand side of the message. Interestingly "Thug" is not highlighted when it appears one the RHS. Nor is "Indra" highlighted on the left in the damage message.

I think the general principle here is: Don't intermingle color with sentence text. Anything else is clown vomit (to me). Actually, just speculating, but perhaps using boldface for e.g. damage amounts would be a lot more readable.

Originally Posted by fizzix

I do agree that sparing use should be important. It's really important to know that you're confused, but perhaps there are better graphical ways to distinguish this, and we shouldn't worry about the messages. Coloring the @ sign to display damage is far superior to the low hitpoint message even though it is colored. So maybe it's better to turn @ green or blue if there's a status effect.

Agreed on the general principle, but I'm not sure coloring '@' is necessarily the answer. Unfortunately
text is *REALLY* limiting here. I wonder if some sort of "cycle though accents on the @" would work, so you'd see the "@" with a cycle through the characters `, ¨, ' above it. (Real-time, that is the cycling would happen regardless of whether game time passes. This is just to make it glaringly obvious.) Hope that description makes sense. Anyway...

I can't recall if this already happens in current Angband, but one obvious optimization I've though about in T2 would be to coalesce messages such that you actually just get a summary of what happened rather than a blow-by-blow account. For example, it often happens that if you apply a status effect, stun say, you'll often get messages like

   ...
   X is stunned!
   You miss X.
   You hit X.
   X recovers from stun.
   You miss X.
   (player turn ends)
   X hits you!
   ..

Did you really need to know that you temporarily stunned X? I don't think so. What matters is whether X changed status from turn-to-turn.

This is of course a lot harder than it looks because all the "output a message" code is utterly intermingled with the combat code, etc.

Originally Posted by fizzix

Basically the design challenge is figuring out what pieces of information the player needs to know and making that info prominent.

Yes, indeed.

[Pete Mack]

I feel that way about PosChengband character dumps. Resist lightning in dark blue on black text? Really? The very first thing I did when I got poschengband running was to make a preference file for the horrid dark blue color, and get rid of the pure white tiles. I literally could not see the entrance to the Alchemist's shop, with the two in contrast on black background. Dark blue text on a dark background is hard to read.

http://webdesign.about.com/od/color/...rast_table.htm

[d_m]

I just want to jump in and say that I agree with Nomad.

I currently value -more- (and don't auto-clear) because either I have no messages subwindow, or it's so small that I will still miss things. I would like for Angband to be playable with large fonts / small screens, so I don't want to move toward a solution that makes the experience there strictly worse.

(I'm mostly in GCU, fwiw.)