Why no non-keyboard characters?

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Archived from groups: rec.games.roguelike.development (More info?)

On 17 May 2005 12:22:37 -0700, "jasonnorthrup@yahoo.com"
<jasonnorthrup@yahoo.com> wrote:

>Twisted One wrote:
>>The major issue that remains is that using untypable characters
>>for monsters will make looking them up in monster memory nontrivial.
>
>How hard is it to design the cursor or map directed lookup, as in
>crawl,
>NH (rather than relying on ability to type the same symbol displayed as
>the creature)?

Angband already has that, as well, but sometimes you want to look
something up when it isn't in sight. But there are variants that take
care of that, as well, offering a scrollable list of monster types.

So, what it really means, is a little more UI work that some people
would be glad to see anyway.

--
R. Dan Henry = danhenry@inreach.com
Dance, Puppet, dance!
But why are there *humans* dancing for the puppet?

 

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Archived from groups: rec.games.roguelike.development (More info?)

jasonnorthrup@yahoo.com wrote:
> How hard is it to design the cursor or map directed lookup, as in
> crawl,
> NH (rather than relying on ability to type the same symbol displayed as
> the creature)?

That works until you want to look up information on a creature when
there isn't an example handy to aim at.

In Angband, at least, killing a monster for the first time with a char
adds to your knowledge of it but also removes it from the display. If
there isn't another one around you need to type its symbol to look it up
and find out, say, how much XP it just netted you.

Crawl, OTOH, has no monster memory feature that I could discover.

Anyway I provided two suggestions for lookup of monsters given untypable
symbols (or symbols untypable in some geographic regions):

1. Visual lookup when there's an example in view to target, of course;
2. Each creature has a plain-ASCII symbol as well, which is used for its
"genociding race" if applicable and for its lookup category. (Or the
lookup can be made to accept full monster names and substrings
thereof, ADOM style.) In the case of an accented letter the obvious
symbol to use for this is the unaccented version. For "weird things",
a catch-all letter not otherwise used, say 'x', can be the
plain-ASCII alternative symbol. An alternative symbol also provides
portability to platforms where you for whatever reason can't support
full Unicode. You can gracefully degrade by showing the plain ASCII
symbol instead of the fancy symbol. (This is similar to how having
both ASCII and tile support tends to be handled, and how genocide and
lookup are handled with tile support, in *bands anyway. Think of the
unicode chars as a tile set.)

--
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
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"One ring to rule them all, one ring to find them
One ring to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them."