Facing

[sneakyfreaky]

I think it’s a very interesting improvement, but to exploit this feature would require increasing the size of the game screen so you can see more terrain, or not?

I believe the idea is to un-center the view, so that you see further in a direction of your choice (but not the others, obviously.)

[nadia911]

The character will remain in the center of the screen?

[kevin.granade]

sneakyfreaky has it, you move the view independently of the character.

It doesn’t interfere with anything else, so I implemented and pushed to dda repo. If you build grab a copy and give it a spin. I set the default hotkeys to HJKL, the cardinal move keys + Shift. You’ll need to either nuke your data/keymap.txt and have the game make a new one or add the keys yourself since they’re new.

Let me know what you think, it’s great for driving.

[The_Darkling_Wolf]

Played with this a bit and it’s bloody fantastic in general.

It’s nice for more than just driving, being able to keep an eye on a horde that’s chasing you, or watching your pit line while crafting/reading is sweet.

[kevin.granade]

I’m pretty damn happy with the feature as it is, my main problem is the keybindings. I’d really like for it to either steal B and U along with Y and N, which would probably make some people understandably unhappy, or move the view shifting commands to Alt- or Ctrl- hjklyubn, anybody particularly familiar with the keybinding code and know if that’s supported?

[Tad30s]

Why not alt-numpad numbers?

[kevin.granade]

no problem having those also, but I use hjkl and I’m not sure how to have it recognize Alt-

[n9103]

also makes anyone on a laptop without a numpad (which is almost all of them) to either remap the keys, or skip the view-shifting altogether.

[Binky]

Fantastic - definitely will make driving easier and getting a better look around. One idea for ‘realism’ (and I realise this is a bit debatable) but being able to look backwards (and keep running) seems a bit strange.

More than for realism though, I think it reduces the ‘tension’ of being chased by a horde. One of the main things which is worrying about a horde is not knowing how many are behind you, whereas with the facing backwards you get a bit more of a ‘tactical’ overview.

Perhaps facing behind you could have a slight movement cost/pause as you look around?

[kevin.granade]

Good point, if we make the transition from this being a pure UI thing to being actual facing, I’d probably want to add a movement penalty for various scenarios, such as moving in the direction opposite where you are looking (running backwards), or watching something in the distance while moving.

In combination with a run mode, this could give you a chance to trip… ooh I’m liking this a lot

[n9103]

Considering the look commands have always been available, and take no actual time (they never should in a roguelike) this hardly seems an issue of realism, and more one of convenience.
Since you need a handicap to go with the advantage, consider that if you’re offset behind to see the horde, you’ll never see the Hulk ahead of you until it’s too late.

[kevin.granade]

That’s what I meant by:

if we make the transition from this being a pure UI thing to being actual facing,

What I’m pondering is making facing and attention a very real and game-impacting facet of the game. If I go that direction, “looking around” may* no longer be a free action (though it’d be VERY cheap), and the direction you are looking when performing actions will impact your ability to perform those actions.

For example, movement penalties for “not looking where you’re going”, melee penalties for looking away from combat, and restricting ranged attacks to enemies in the current view. The default would be no penalties because the view is centered on your character.

*I’m on the fence whether “look around” should have a cost, you make a good argument FOR it having a cost in that otherwise there is no penalty other than convenience for keeping track of any and all enemies within your field of view. That’s definitely bad design because it makes the optimal way of playing really irritating and time-consuming. On the other hand free “look around” has a valuable realism use in that we’re representing a very high-bandwith stream of visual information with a very low-bandwidth representation. “You should be able to glance at a room and see what’s in it”, but just the ASCII or tiles are often insufficient, so roguleikes use “look around” to get information that “should” be available.

An alternative would be to use facing to restrict your field of view even when in “look around” mode, so when in neutral facing you are aware of things within a certain (smaller than it is now) radius , and when facing a certain direction your perception extends further in that direction, but at the cost of developing a blind spot in the opposite direction, and possibly reducing the radius of lateral perception. It would be WAY easier to just add a small cost to looking around instead of messing with rendering, but I’m not sure which is the superior UI.

[GalenEvil]

Since with the current look-around you can see the ‘a’ slot item in a stack but just get ‘and others’ for any additional items maybe another application of a focused (non-charactercentric) view could be seeing more than just that top item, partially based on your perception attribute. Say, something is close but more than 1 tile away in a stack. You should realistically be able to determine how many and at least a general composition of the items that are in the stack other than being able to identify only the thing on top.

[kevin.granade]

There’s a “display nearby stuff I can see” command in the works, we found a dev that’s not allergic to the wacky menu hackery Cataclysm uses for menus.

[n9103]

Sadly, I have to say that if full-facing becomes implemented, I’m going to have to say goodbye; Just like I did to UrW.
It’s a much increased tedium with minimally increased realism, and much impacted gameplay.
It’s a novelty that wears off as soon as you stop being excited about it.
If someone wants a stumble-in-the-dark game, they can play things like Resident Evil, or go old-school with Alone in the dark.

And the option of modding out facing is a handicapped one at best, should it stay in for long, because the rest of the official dev will be done with facing being a thing to work with.

[Jack_Slinger]

I also really don’t want this to become a feature, either the cost of facing is too high and ruins it that way or its so cheap it just makes me press 5+ buttons to move one square for no god reason.

[Binky]

Sadly, I have to say that if full-facing becomes implemented, I’m going to have to say goodbye; Just like I did to UrW.

Although I hate it when people say that, as if the devs are going to say ‘OH GOD COME BACK PLEASE, I BEG YOU!’, I do hate the mechanic in UrW and it does make it an awkward mess to play.

However, I think that UrW’s problem is mainly to do with the control system (turning and then forward) and how it’s implemented rather than looking being a horrible mechanic - I believe it would add a lot of realism and more importantly tension if used correctly.

To reiterate, my suggestion would be to keep track of the direction you’re walking and shift the view that way slightly - possibly a few squares (just like real walking/looking), with the option of fixing your view in one direction (or on an object/point) which would give you the full view (with only one square in the opposite direction perhaps. Fixing your view could have a small cost, as could returning to ‘walking view’. This could do away with the ‘central’ view and mean that for the most part you’re not doing too much shifting of perspective.

This coupled with running/tripping/actions (as Kevin says) would be fantastic on tension and I really doubt the extra one or two keystrokes would really make it a such a chore.

[The_Darkling_Wolf]

We have no plans to implement a system like UnReal World’s. It’d be exactly the same as our current system, except if you have your view shifted in a direction, then you gain some debuffs to doing stuff such as sprinting or fighting in the opposite direction. You can always just centre the view again and have things be normal.

[kevin.granade]

I’m not familiar with UrW’s system, but from what I gather it’s totally different from what I’m proposing. Please don’t judge my proposal based on some other system. In particular, there’s very little impact if you just leave your view centered, whereas it sounds like UrW’s system required you to manage facing constantly, which is something I’m very focused on avoiding.

I think the idea of having facing slide in the direction of movement a square at a time by default (leaving the character in frame of course) is a good one, I’ll take a look at implementing it and see how it goes. Probably apply the same in vehicles where the view slews around with you as you turn. With both of these it’d be a switchable mode, so if you don’t want your view shifting around it won’t happen.

Finally, I’m being very careful with this. I’m prototyping implementation ideas, and thinking really hard about providing a better interface for you without causing additional overhead, and I’m not tying it to game mechanics until I’m totally happy with the interface AND I get feedback that it works well from users. if it breaks the game I’m not going to leave it in because it’s my idea, sometimes you have to kill your darlings in programming too.

[deadmerits]

I found UrW’s facing just fine, but I wasn’t running from zombie hoards on there. That being said I understand its not going to be like that. What I was first reading I was concerned about how constant our attention will have to be focused on which direction your facing, I was originally excited at the driving aspect. But reading more and as its being discussed and elaborated I’m more and more excited. And I would never threaten to quit playing because of the design from here on out (as if you care anyways), I’m following development in the first place because I enjoy what you guys have done so far. Thanks and keep up the good work.