Discussing / suggesting some small UI changes

Game Talk The Drawing Board
1

Disclaimer: this is my first post on the forums, I apologize in advance for posting in the wrong section or suggesting stuff that was already suggested before; I figured writing a comment on the 175-page-long small-suggestion thread would be ignored so I decided to create a separate thread instead.

I’ve been playing C:DDA for a while and wanted to make a list of UI-specific changes that could be made to make dealing with certain situations much easier, and avoiding other ones entirely. I might update this if I find any more problems, but here it goes:

[ul][li]Weapon-wielding Notification for the Log
A message such as “You wield your [weapon]” or “You take your [weapon] out” could be used to notify users they wielded a different weapon (or an item) instead of simply changing the weapon-slot in the UI without any notice. This will (hopefully) prevent players from accidentally using the wrong item in combat because they were ambushed while looting or managing their inventory. I may or may not have almost died to a zombie because I wielded a pot instead of my makeshift crowbar, and while it was my own fault I think adding that extra UI element would help me and other players quite a lot. I mean, we have one for every action (apart from moving and opening internal menus), why not this too?[/li][/ul]

[ul][li]Go-to / Move-to Option in the E(x)amine Menu
The ability to move to the certain item or monster your cursor is currently on; useful for when its far away and you don’t feel like moving there manually. Because moving exactly 63 units to the North just to get that one rock is inconvenient. This action will calculate the fastest route and notify you of monsters nearby (if Safemode is on), as if you’ve walked to the item / mob by yourself.[/li][/ul]

[ul][li]uind Option for Construction Menu and the Extended N.Log §[/u]
I’d like to be able to find specific words (recipes in the construction menu) inside both of these; kinda self explanatory.[/li][/ul]

[ul][li]Optional UI Slot for Time-in-moves / Turns, Replacing [hh:mm:ss]
What I’m talking about is a system similar to the one used in DCSS, where the time is counted in turns, and every action you take (without moving) / your speed are counted and shown inside brackets along the actual real-time counter. For example:
Let’s say I start a fresh game. Each move costs (1) turn. Eating meat takes (5) turns. I move 7 times, then eat meat. It would look like this:
T:0 (1.0) [starting the game]
T:7 (1.0)[after finishing moving]
T:12 (5.0) [finishing eating meat after moving]
Here’s a visual representation:

Instead of the exact number before the bracket part, you can have that little picture thing that shows you an approximate time of the day, because not knowing the exact time is the whole point of not having a watch. Although I do think this way is better when it comes to taking actions, as the second/minute/hour system is a bit confusing, especially for new players. I still haven’t figured it out completely myself; I understand that every 6 turns = 1 in-game minute, but how do I know at which point my cooking/crafting process was stopped without having a watch? How do I know how long picking an item up takes? How do I know how long wielding or dropping items takes? Do I just have to guess like I guess the time in the day? Because if the player knows how long cooking/crafting something will take, or how long dropping/wielding an item is, why can I not know when that process stopped or finished exactly (or at least an estimate by counting turns)?[/li][/ul]

[ul][li]“The sunlight’s glare makes it hard to see”

This isn’t necessary. I realize it’s “realistic”, the sun glare being inconsistent and all (because of clouds), but there’s really no need to clutter the message log with those notifications every 2 turns. You could’ve at least made the color white instead of light-red so I wouldn’t worry about any other notifications under the same color. You could make the effect permanent as long as you’re outside (with the perception debuff, and as long as the weather stays the same), instead of applying it every other turn and spam the log.[/li][/ul]

[ul][li]Better (Extended) Mob Descriptions
The option to expand the short description of a monster or an animal in the e(x)amine menu to a more in-depth, perhaps even more lore-specific description on a different screen (could be (I) while examining a creature). The “long description” will expand the more you kill that type of creature, eventually providing you with info about exact (or approximate) health, weaknesses, armor rating, difficulty, items it may drop etc etc.
Angband did an extremely good job at creating such a menu, and it looks something like that:

TcGUU8k.png828×226
[/li][/ul]

2

I believe this has been implemented.

I just finished implementing this, soon you’ll be able to hit ‘t’ in either the look around ‘;’ or view item ‘V’ menus and your avater will scoot themselves over to that target location. It will refuse to move if there’s anything dangerous nearby though.

Reasonable thing to do, but a little tricky, someone will probably implement it at some point.

What DDA currently does is display the number of “move points” spent by an action next to “Spd XX” on the sidebar. It has several shortcomings, foremost of which are that it isn’t labelled due to lack of space, so probably not that many people even know it’s there, it is only transiently displayed, so it’s very hard to keep track of how long different actions take and it doesn’t display moves spent by a multi-turn action. Something that might be handy is to print out an optional/toggleable message to the message log that lists each action you take, along with some estimate of how long it took (to the second with a watch or similar, some fuzzy estimate otherwise), something like:

[ul][a few seconds] You take a few steps to the North.
[a fraction of a second] You swing your knife at the zombie.
[a few minutes] You boil some water.[/ul]

The problem with having an absolute number-of-turns readout is that it’s either going to be imprecise to the point of uselessness for the things you’re asking about (how long do arbitrary actions take?), or it’s going to look precise, but actually be wrong, or it’s going to be a totally unrealsticly accurate timekeeping interface.

Yea this is pretty broken, we keep going back and tweaking it, but it’s kind of a pain to get it to display somewhat reasonably without risking it not displaying at all. We could maybe make glare a multi-tiered effect, with a higher tier giving penalties, and lower tiers just being there to suppress message spam, that might work.
Better (Extended) Mob Descriptions
[/quote]
You’ve wandered pretty far afield from a UI-specific change :slight_smile:
Doing something similar to Angband’s system (which I’m a big fan of) is going to require a whole lot of state tracking per monster to make it happen, as well as a bunch of code and data to emit the descriptions in the first place. More importantly though, we just don’t have enough monsters and monster traits that building such a description would be worthwhile. Angband’s combat and creature systems are intricate behemoths that absolutely require you to keep track of all this information about monsters so that you can take the right actions to defend yourself from them or take advantage of their weaknesses, DDA doesn’t have anything of the sort, monsters don’t have significantly different weaknesses, and there aren’t too many of them to reasonably keep track of yourself.

3

I believe this has been implemented.

I just finished implementing this […][/quote] I noticed lots of useful additions to the game in the experimental builds, making the stable build fall behind a little bit; excluding acid zombies, it seems like playing the stable build is less convenient than using the latest experimental. Perhaps you should consider releasing a new stable version soon?

[quote=“Kevin Granade, post:2, topic:10709”][a few seconds] You take a few steps to the North.
[a fraction of a second] You swing your knife at the zombie.
[a few minutes] You boil some water.
The problem with having an absolute number-of-turns readout is that it’s either going to be imprecise to the point of uselessness for the things you’re asking about (how long do arbitrary actions take?), or it’s going to look precise, but actually be wrong, or it’s going to be a totally unrealistically accurate timekeeping interface.[/quote] Yeah, this sounds like a good idea. I do think the whole turn system is a bit too complex though, turn-points basically being spent anywhere from 10 points a turn to hundreds. Wouldn’t (1.0) / (0.5) / (2.4) be more simple? Say, 0.2 to wield a weapon, then 0.2 to load it, then 0.5 to shoot it? I believe the player needs to know this information so they can plan their moves accordingly, because as it is right now I’m just guessing and hoping my character’s actions will be faster than his enemy’s.

[quote=“Kevin Granade, post:2, topic:10709”][…] DDA doesn’t have anything of the sort, monsters don’t have significantly different weaknesses, and there aren’t too many of them to reasonably keep track of yourself.[/quote] You’re right, but I think these descriptions will just be a decent substitute for the Wiki new players will almost undoubtedly use; practically adding stuff you can take from the Wiki itself already.

For example, an extended description for the Bear:

=============================================================================================
[i]“The American black bear. A large omnivorous scavenger, it has powerful claws and jaws, and is an effective ambush hunter.
It can pose a considerable threat, although most individuals are shy around humans.”

The bear is a cow-sized wild animal (affected by Animal Empathy). It’s faster than you, agile, and particularly vulnerable to cutting damage.
It’s mostly peaceful, but can be angered by you getting too close to it or hurting it.
It can see you, smell you, hear you and is warm blooded (appears in infra-red).

Its attacks can make you bleed. It’s afraid of being hurt, fires, and approximate death of creatures of the same type.
Butchering it will produce around X chunks of meat, X chunks of fat, X chunks of fur, X bones and X sinews.[/i]

You can make it so anything under the (—) is learnt from “experience”, only unlocking the info after fighting/butchering the mob earlier. Or making EVERYTHING added after fighting that specific mob, depends on how new-player-friendly you want the interface to be. You could also add more lore beneath the quote, or add more info that I didn’t mention from the Wiki (exact speed, exact HP, morale, difficulty etc.)

4

You seem to be approaching DDA like it’s a highly tactical game like DCSS or Angband, it’s not. If you’re counting turns or similar in combat, you’re taking advantage of parts of the game implementation that are not part of the game interface, and are subject to change in the future, such as by shortening how long a turn is without changing anything else, which is going to wreck any sub-turn timing strategies you’ve developed.
From a broader perspective, the concept of having one action even roughly equal one turn is enormously restrictive and unrealistic, so I’m not interested in moving in that direction.