autoinscribe at item creation

[fizzix]

Originally Posted by buzzkill

I believe empty chests are auto-squelched. Do you want do squelch chest before you open them?

I do. Chests are useless, never worth the trouble.

[Derakon]

Each chest type is briefly worthwhile when it first shows up, but given the hardcoded depth of the chest's contents, they very rapidly obsolesce.

I'd much rather see chests generate items based on the chest's own level (which in turn depends on dungeon level and monster level) with a modifier based on the chest's material. E.g. wood => -5, iron => current, steel => +5. So a wooden chest found on the floor on dungeon level 60 would generate items with level 55. Determine the number of items by the size of the chest -- small 1d2, large 2d2.

Hooray, off-topic again!

[Magnate]

Originally Posted by PowerDiver

I'm not asking how any of you view using squelch or autoinscriptions. To each his own. My question is whether anyone cares about changing the dynamic to autoinscribe at item creation instead of at pickup.

There will also have to be autoinscription when learning a flavor, but that is a separate issue.

I am not worried about when autoinscriptions are applied, but about where they are stored and how they are retrieved - part of savefile, settings file, separate pref file etc. etc. Thus it matters how people view them. The conclusions of the previous discussion still seem valid, but I'm just double checking the mood in the room.

[PowerDiver]

Originally Posted by Magnate

I am not worried about when autoinscriptions are applied, but about where they are stored and how they are retrieved - part of savefile, settings file, separate pref file etc. etc. Thus it matters how people view them. The conclusions of the previous discussion still seem valid, but I'm just double checking the mood in the room.

I wanted an answer to how to approach a bugfix, but I guess I have my answer so I don't mind the thread hijacking. Also, I didn't want to press the issue, but inscribe at creation also allows an additional benefit to people playing no-artifact games.

To me, autoinscriptions are a per-user UI thing. I inscribe all of my ?id with @r1. It would never occur to me to inscribe the same flavor @r1 with a fighter and @r2 with a priest. That way guarantees mistakes. If I am playing a mage, I don't care if the priest books are inscribe @p1. Why would I care? The only overlap that comes to mind is @b1, but given that your preferred book type comes first, that is never an issue.

Squelch is completely different. There are certain items that a person might want to squelch in every game for every class, but those are few and people who care might set squelch_worthless anyway. There are some more items that are useless to particular classes, but those are pretty rare too given the selling mechanic. I even collect iron spikes on my first trip until I am slowed or run out of slots. For the most part, items are useful for a little while and then become useless. Squelch-as-you-go seems to me like the natural way to play, but perhaps that's just personal bias.

The only real issue I see is about changing autoinscriptions. If I autoinscribe something one way at the beginning of my game, and later change or remove the autoinscription, how do I want the next game to start? I think for the most part people generally update autoinscription stuff gradually over many games, so I think it would be a mistake to set things up so that changes you make in one game are discarded before the next game. I suppose you could add extra prompting to ask the player whether to make changes permanent, but that might be clunky and might be overly confusing to new players.

[Derakon]

My autoinscriptions generally consist of putting !* on items I don't want to use without confirmation (e.g. WoR, Teleport, Destruction, Life) and !k on items I want to protect from squelching (e.g. DSM, SoS, BoC, MoD). Most of my macros vary depending on character -- for example, a mage's ! macro would be "target nearest and fire magic missile" while for a warrior it would probably be "zap rod of trap detection". I tend to fill these out as I find the relevant items, choosing the next inscription depending on how many others of the type I've found (thus my first rod is @z1 regardless of if it's trap detection or treasure detection or whatever). Thus I don't put @ inscriptions in the auto-inscription set.

I guess I could auto-inscribe the spellbooks, since those tend to show up in a reliable order.