stop Angband from stacking commands

[Sky]

ok, i got to post this knowing what world of hurt will come out of it.

we need to stop the game from stacking / queuing commands; or in other words, when i take the finger off a button, it can not perform any other commands.

let's say i'm a Mage cleaning up a room of hounds - nothing even worth mentioning, just waltz in and hold whatever button is your Acid Bolt spell.

i kill the last hound, stop casting, and there's another dozen or so spells queued up that are cast to nothing.

(i was just doing a bit of flair there, it's not targeted spells that do this, only directional spells)

However, this applies to just about anything else, i really want only one command to be stored at any time.

double taps / holding a button for too long can too many times result in unjustified deaths. I don't think the UI should punish the player for the ergonomics he uses in game, but rather for his ingame decisions. If anything, the UI should help the player play the game, not set traps for him.

[Derakon]

Holding buttons down is going to get you killed, even if the game doesn't queue up commands, simply because something is going to come storming in while you're holding that button down, and kill you before you release it.

So basically, from my perspective what you're saying is equivalent to "I use a blender with the lid off to make my smoothies, but it makes an awful mess. It shouldn't make that mess." The solution is to put the lid on the blender, not to make a smarter blender.

[Sky]

but i am specifically speaking about commands that happen AFTER you have released a button. i have a setting for delay, i can tweak that. no need to patronize me when there is an aspect of the game that should clearly not be happening.

also, i'm kind of tired of hearing "holding buttons down" when the game is built in a way where it's begging you to hold buttons down.

[AnonymousHero]

Originally Posted by Sky

but i am specifically speaking about commands that happen AFTER you have released a button. i have a setting for delay, i can tweak that. no need to patronize me when there is an aspect of the game that should clearly not be happening.

FWIW, I didn't see anything patronizing in Derakon's comment. I think you may be taking thinks a little too personally.

Originally Posted by Sky

also, i'm kind of tired of hearing "holding buttons down" when the game is built in a way where it's begging you to hold buttons down.

You can use Shift+Arrow (aka "running") to avoid a lot of that. If you're already using running, then I may not be understanding what you want -- the later levels will kill you if you hold buttons down -- even if you configure a 5 second delay between 'actions'.

[Huqhox]

I think there are two issues here.

Firstly holding down a button being a good way to get killed. I don't think anyone is disputing that (although I learnt it the hard way). I use run to avoid the problem on movement and make attacks discrete button presses, which is just how I have always done it.

The second issue is that holding down a command key in Angband puts multiple commands into the input buffer; this is really a side effect of the way the input handling has been written and is a legacy of C input handling. Angband isn't the only game that suffers from this. I think what Sky is trying to say is that maybe when a key is reased the input buffer should be purged. Obviously this might have a bearing on how macros are handled and might not be easy to do. But I think there is a valid point that the game shouldn't continue to process actions if the key is not currently being pressed.

[PowerWyrm]

If you macro your Acid Bolt spell with [Escape]m3h', you can interrupt the extra castings with any key.

[Sky]

i have my keyboard set up with fast repeats; i need this otherwise in work and other games (Quake, mostly) so i'm not going to build a .bat to change it every time. other people who type a lot would probably have the same, i'm not talking about some ridiculous regedit with millisecond repeats, just set on Fast rather than Medium. keeping a key down has a very broad definition, and while in some cases i might do that (clearing a slime pit with MM) in other instances it's simply being too slow on releasing a key.

there is no good reason why the game needs to queue commands - it would work identically without it. it's just old coding from the 80s that could easily* go away.

[kandrc]

Originally Posted by Sky

there is no good reason why the game needs to queue commands - it would work identically without it. it's just old coding from the 80s that could easily* go away.

The game does not queue commands. The keyboard driver queues keys so that the input is not lost if the system can't process the interrupts quickly enough. What you call "old coding from the 80s" is actually a very complicated problem. You can build a keyboard driver with unbuffered input, but then, when a cron job kicks off (or whatever the hell equivalent things happens in Windows land), you lose keys that you actually wanted buffered because you hit them correctly! Or you can configure your I/O library to discard buffered input when it pulls a single key code; this, in fact, leads to exactly the same problem. This type of "solution" can easily kill characters when the player literally did nothing wrong. And here you are, spouting nonsense about things you clearly don't understand, and claiming that fixing them is "easy", so that you can live through undisciplined fuck-ups of your own making.

Don't mash buttons. It's that easy.

[Sky]

you are telling me that

10 execute command
20 purge commands
30 goto 10

is too hard ?

[Pondlife]

Could you flush the keyboard buffer before accepting command input with:

fseek(stdin,0,SEEK_END)