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#11 | |
Swordsman
Join Date: May 2016
Posts: 330
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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
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#12 | |
Prophet
Join Date: Aug 2009
Location: Madison, Wisconsin, US
Posts: 3,002
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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. |
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#13 | |||
Veteran
Join Date: Jun 2007
Posts: 1,367
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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: Code:
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 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. Quote:
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 Code:
... X is stunned! You miss X. You hit X. X recovers from stun. You miss X. (player turn ends) X hits you! .. 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. Yes, indeed. Last edited by AnonymousHero; July 26, 2016 at 20:19. |
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#14 |
Prophet
Join Date: Apr 2007
Location: Seattle, WA
Posts: 5,423
Donated: $40
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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 Last edited by Pete Mack; July 26, 2016 at 21:19. |
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#15 |
Angband Devteam member
Join Date: Aug 2008
Location: Philadelphia, PA, USA
Age: 39
Posts: 1,516
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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.) |
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