Flashlight improvement

So, my idea is that when you have an active flashlight and use “look” command a spot of light moves along with the cursor, becoming dimmer as you move it away.

Good idea… This way you can quickly check around you with just pressing x + direction, while keeping light around you in playing mode, so no Unreal World limitation of sight. I like it.

Really, the way of how the flashlight illuminates is kind of odd to me. It uses the circle of light thing, which I imagine is because directions hasn’t been coded in. It seems currently to be that you character is very paranoid and looks everywhere at the same time, or its like a lantern of some form.

Turns last six seconds of in game time. The character is assumed to look 360 degrees around in those six seconds.

Also it’s the apocalypse and every single possible horror/end of the world movie has come to pass.

Paranoia implies it’s not the sane thing to do.

There has been some other thread about having 60 degree vision, or at least not 360 degree.

They concluded that there was a rational behind the 260 degree (but I dont remember it)

Interesting idea hooking it up to the look command. If nothing else it’d be a neat effect, but it does have the down side of making you manually scan around all the time if you want to be on the lookout for enemies. (since you’re lit by the flashlight, they can see you no matter what you do with it)
I considered doing something similar with the “view shift” feature (hooked up to HJKL by default), but again, it seems like a neat effect at the cost of making the player micromanage a lot of stuff.

If I can come up with a way to do something like this that wasn’t super irritating, or if it fell out of some other change that was worth the more complicated interface, I’d love to do something like this.

Something that crosses my mind is having the entire area “dimly” lit, which provides fully functional vision, but having a brightly lit flashlight beam swinging around within it based on player actions as a special effect. The problem with this approach is players thinking there is an in-game effect, with the result that they do the micromanagement I’m trying to avoid, but they don’t even get anything out of it.

Well, a possible way to make it a bit more bearable would be tying the look command to a mouse (or at least granting the option to use the mouse for it.) I think it would make using the light (and ranged actions) a bit quicker.

Well, the first thing to do maybe, would be to enable the “look” scale. Since it is still bound to the console, internal clock speeds a nice thing would be to have a PGUP/PGDWN sort of thing, if you catch my drift.
Zooming in and out can still be outta grasp, since it would seem fit only with graphics layout.

I’ve been playing a bit of brogue recently, and using the mouse to look around IS rather nice, but again, there’s still the problem of tying something we can’t always support (mouse input) to a core feature (pointing your flashlight). It’s totally fine to allow you to e.g. examine squares with the mouse cursor, but using it to direct a flashlight is problematic at best, because if directing a flashlight at things becomes essential, then keyboard users have to do it too, and they have no good way to do it.

what if instead of mooving the cursor around, if you are looking north you could press 7, 8, or 9 and it would move a beam of light in directions respectively, less micro and move realistic [size=4pt] i think .-. [/size].