The recently "taken over" Nethack project (aka 4) - when will any of these variants have a "proper" tile mode?

[Rob Cypher]

Well, I guess after 6 years of silence someone had to take the wheel.
But is there a build of this (or any of these newer variants) that
uses tiles in the same manner as 3.4.3? Unnethack doesn't really use
graphical monster tiles in its tile mode (among other things) and the
Wizard's Eye version is a little awkward to use (and it's outdated
too, I think). None of the other variants bother to use tiles except
Slash'Em, and that hasn't been updated in a while either.

I think keeping the program strictly as colored letters limits the
appeal to newbies, and frankly you need them to keep interest
alive in these programs in the long run.

[ais523]

There is a Vulture port of UnNetHack; I also had tiles (supporting both
vanilla-style tilesets and the 3D-ish ones that Slash'EM could use)
mostly working in AceHack, and will get them working in NetHack 4 some
time. Tiles lovers, even though you're generally too scared to admit it
anywhere near RGRN, I haven't forgotten about you. There are some more
urgent things to do first, though (for instance, producing useful non-
source distributions), so it could be a while before you see working
tiles support.

I believe stenno is also working on a webclient, which would presumably
eventually support tiles, but I'm not sure how much progress that's made.

--
ais523

[Patric Mueller]

Rob Cypher <bal...@aol.com> wrote:
> Well, I guess after 6 years of silence someone had to take the wheel.
> But is there a build of this (or any of these newer variants) that
> uses tiles in the same manner as 3.4.3? Unnethack doesn't really use
> graphical monster tiles in its tile mode (among other things) and the

UnNetHack has a slightly modified Vanilla tiles file bundled with its
releases in addition to the Abigaba derived default tiles file.

For the last release (4.0.0) I haven't had time to update that but I
wouldn't mind if some tiles fan would update it before I can get to
it.

http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/unnethack/browser/trunk/tilesets
https://github.com/bhaak/nethack-tileset-composer

> Wizard's Eye version is a little awkward to use (and it's outdated
> too, I think). None of the other variants bother to use tiles except
> Slash'Em, and that hasn't been updated in a while either.
>
> I think keeping the program strictly as colored letters limits the
> appeal to newbies, and frankly you need them to keep interest
> alive in these programs in the long run.

Do you really need to appeal to newbies? NetHack being hard and
unforgiving to beginners is one of its main strength and I often see
NetHack mentioned on Twitter and G+ that also its UI is part of that.

And do you really appeal to newbies by adding some static images
onto a terminal program that constantly leaks its terminal heritage
through to the player?

There are a lot of roguelikes out there now that have much better
graphical interfaces than NetHack (e.g. Crawl or Brogue) and it's
probably hard to impossible to compete with these on the grounds of
the UI with vanilla's UI abstraction.

NitroHack laid the ground for a new UI standard (part of Daniel's
motivation was being annoyed by the limitations of vanilla's UI
interface) but we haven't yet a new graphical UI that is inherently
better or even on par with concurrent RLs. (okay, I'm polemic here, we
only have the reference ncurses UI at the moment, so we have no real
graphical UI to compare against other modern UIs).

Bye
Patric

--
NetHack-De: NetHack auf Deutsch - http://nethack-de.sf.net/

UnNetHack: http://apps.sf.net/trac/unnethack/

[Rob Cypher]

On Wed, 02 May 2012 10:08:06 +0200, Patric Mueller <bh...@bigfoot.com>
wrote:

>Rob Cypher <bal...@aol.com> wrote:
>> Well, I guess after 6 years of silence someone had to take the wheel.
>> But is there a build of this (or any of these newer variants) that
>> uses tiles in the same manner as 3.4.3? Unnethack doesn't really use
>> graphical monster tiles in its tile mode (among other things) and the
>
>UnNetHack has a slightly modified Vanilla tiles file bundled with its
>releases in addition to the Abigaba derived default tiles file.
>
>For the last release (4.0.0) I haven't had time to update that but I
>wouldn't mind if some tiles fan would update it before I can get to
>it.
>
>http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/unnethack/browser/trunk/tilesets
>https://github.com/bhaak/nethack-tileset-composer
>
>> Wizard's Eye version is a little awkward to use (and it's outdated
>> too, I think). None of the other variants bother to use tiles except
>> Slash'Em, and that hasn't been updated in a while either.
>>
>> I think keeping the program strictly as colored letters limits the
>> appeal to newbies, and frankly you need them to keep interest
>> alive in these programs in the long run.
>
>Do you really need to appeal to newbies?

Yes...because otherwise your fanbase shrivels up and dies, sooner or
later.

> NetHack being hard and unforgiving to beginners is one of its main strength and I often see
>NetHack mentioned on Twitter and G+ that also its UI is part of that.

I don't see the difficulty being the issue re: newbies. It's more of
the dependance on using ASCII characters in place of images.

>And do you really appeal to newbies by adding some static images
>onto a terminal program that constantly leaks its terminal heritage
>through to the player?

Well, it's a bit better than memorizing what each letter means, or
having to hit ";" to figure out what you're looking at.

>There are a lot of roguelikes out there now that have much better
>graphical interfaces than NetHack (e.g. Crawl or Brogue) and it's
>probably hard to impossible to compete with these on the grounds of
>the UI with vanilla's UI abstraction.
>
>NitroHack laid the ground for a new UI standard (part of Daniel's
>motivation was being annoyed by the limitations of vanilla's UI
>interface) but we haven't yet a new graphical UI that is inherently
>better or even on par with concurrent RLs. (okay, I'm polemic here, we
>only have the reference ncurses UI at the moment, so we have no real
>graphical UI to compare against other modern UIs).

I'm not really asking for a "better" graphical version of the Nethack
graphical interface (although I like the "colors" patch for hunger and
low health, among other things). I would just like one of the new
varients to accurately reproduce them in Vanilla-style graphic
tile formate, that's all.

I have noted your links and will review them. Perhaps I will be able
to do something with them (even though I'm shoddy when it comes
to art). Thank you.

[Capt. Cave Man]

Well, you're just noe gnud at any of it then. ;-)

[Capt. Cave Man]

On Wed, 02 May 2012 05:08:27 -0400, Rob Cypher <bal...@aol.com> wrote:

>
>Yes...because otherwise your fanbase shrivels up and dies, sooner or
>later.

Nethack endures... tiles, "advances", or not. The two are separate.
The Nethack core will *never* "shrivel and die". It will come out on
watches next, or some dude will be playing it on his refrigerator...
in ASCII mode.

[Rob Cypher]

Nethack has to evolve past the ASCII phase! Or at least make tiles
mandatory! I can play tiles to the point of almost winning, but I
always lose at ASCII by level 5 or so because I get frustrated about
trying to remember what symbol means what and get rather lazy
about hitting the ";" key every time. :/

I'm not advocating that you turn it into "Diablo" or something. But
holding onto a very outdated look like the ASCII thing loses its
charm after a while when you don't include any tiled alternatives
(Vulture's Eye throws me off).

[Jonadab the Unsightly One]

On May 1, 11:41 pm, Rob Cypher <bals...@aol.com> wrote:

> I think keeping the program strictly as colored letters
> limits the appeal to newbies,

I agree. I started with the Qt build myself. It makes the
learning curve more manageable, by allowing you to focus on
memorizing strategically important things that help you keep
your character alive long enough to find your way to DL2.

With tiles, it's relatively easy for a newbie to keep straight
which monsters are mundane ones you've been seeing and killing
all along and which ones are something new that you'd probably
better look up on the wiki. It speeds up the learning process.

Not needing to memorize keyboard inputs, like l for east and k
for north and u for northeast (what cretin picked those keys,
anyway?) and q for drink and is wear W or w anyhow..., not
needing to memorize all that before you can even get started
would help even more. The menus in the Qt build of 3.4.3 ought
in theory to help with this a little, but in practice they really
don't much because you can't use them half the time (like,
whenever the game asks you a question) and because the menus
are poorly organized (e.g., the : and ; commands are NOT under
the same menu as taking inventory) and because none of the extended
commands are even mentioned on the menus and, above all, because
using the menus, or even just pulling them down to look at them
(e.g., to remind yourself what the keyboard shortcuts are) has a
tendency to put the game in a state where it stops accepting input.

The other thing that would appeal to newbies is reworking the
difficulty level so that the first few levels are much easier
and the subsequent ones increasingly difficult as you go. Almost
all other computer games have their difficulty rigged in this way,
so that a player who has advanced his skill to a certain point can
relatively easily reach approximately the point in the game where
he was before. Going too far with that in NetHack would be bad,
because it would compromise replayability, but I do think it would
be nice if newbies could learn, after a few dozen hours of play,
to consistently make it as far as Delphi or so. This, however,
would require a HUGE amount of rebalancing and playtesting and
rebalancing again and playtesting some more and rebalancing yet
again, et cetera, ad infinitum, ad bedlam. A tiled interface
is almost certainly lower-hanging fruit.

With that said, these are very early days for NetHack 4. We're
barely a third of the way through the 3.4.3 bug list, and there
are very few significant gameplay changes compared to the lightly
patched 3.4.3 builds on the public servers (especially NAO). In
time, doing a new tile version will be important, but right now I
am not convinced that it is urgent.

[SM]

2012-05-02, Jonadab the Unsightly One wrote:
> Not needing to memorize keyboard inputs, like l for east and k
> for north and u for northeast (what cretin picked those keys,
> anyway?)

One of the great innovations of the Seventies. [1][2] (Along with
"Funhouse" and "Raw Power" by Iggy And The Stooges.) And there's always
the numpad option for a newbie anyway.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vi
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow_keys#HJKL_keys

--
:wq

[MainiacJoe]

The only tiles I'd be interested in would be larger versions of the
colored ASCII letters. One of the things I like best about Nethack is
that it can provoke a little shiver of fear with just a little yellow
c. There is no way whatever cartoony cockatrice you can squeeze onto
24x24 is going to do a better job than my imagination.

[SM]

One huge +1 for this.

--
:wq

[Benjamin A. Schmit]

At least the X11 interface can (and does, by default) use a font for the
“tiles”, i.e. the coloured letters. You can change it in a
configuration file.

When using the text interface on a halfway modern computer, I'd just
change the size of the font used within the terminal.

Benjamin


--
Seek freedom and become captive of your desires.
Seek discipline and find your liberty.
-- Frank Herbert, Dune Chronicles

[Aardvark Joe]

Patric Mueller wrote:
> Rob Cypher <bal...@aol.com> wrote:

>> Wizard's Eye version is a little awkward to use (and it's outdated
>> too, I think). None of the other variants bother to use tiles except
>> Slash'Em, and that hasn't been updated in a while either.
>>
>> I think keeping the program strictly as colored letters limits the
>> appeal to newbies, and frankly you need them to keep interest
>> alive in these programs in the long run.
>
> Do you really need to appeal to newbies? NetHack being hard and
> unforgiving to beginners is one of its main strength and I often see
> NetHack mentioned on Twitter and G+ that also its UI is part of that.
>
> And do you really appeal to newbies by adding some static images
> onto a terminal program that constantly leaks its terminal heritage
> through to the player?

While I'm not sure whether you can say that it's really driven by
"newbies," the evidence is that the tiles ports used to get quite
bit of use. In particular, enough people were playing the tiles
ports to justify maintaining them, which was non-trivial due to the
fact that they were mostly system-dependent. I would tend to
agree that if the maintainers of any of the variants would like it
to be viewed as a successor to Nethack, then they will need tiles
support.

These days, I would think that using a browser-based client as the
base for the tiles support, like has been mentioned, would probably
be the best approach.

-- aardvark

[Jonadab the Unsightly One]

On May 2, 7:52 am, SM <kas...@ne-spamon.gmail.com> wrote:

> > Not needing to memorize keyboard inputs, like l for east and k
> > for north and u for northeast (what cretin picked those keys,
> > anyway?)
>
> One of the great innovations of the Seventies. [1][2]

They got the NetHack keys from vi? Seriously?

Wow, vi is even more horrible than I realized.
(On my systems, vi is always a symlink to Emacs...)

> And there's always
> the numpad option for a newbie anyway.

The numpad option causes various problems, some
of which are especially troublesome for newbies. It
also doesn't really solve the "need to memorize a
bunch of keys" problem; it just subtracts 8 keys
(admittedly, 8 important keys) from the list. Having
menus, which list the keyboard shortcut next to each
command, helps a lot more.

Once you learn the game, of course, ASCII mode
is great. Especially if your goal is to mystify anyone
who happens to see you playing. Although, for that
purpose, it could really stand to have the words
"Network Activity Graph" printed across the top,
nice and bold, right above the map, and maybe an
extra couple of lines added to the bottom, something
like this:
218 active network nodes, 12 switches, 3 routers
Avg. 147 packets per second, 3 collisions, 0 fail.

[Jonadab the Unsightly One]

On May 2, 8:51 am, MainiacJoe <mainiac...@gmail.com> wrote:
> The only tiles I'd be interested in would be larger
> versions of the colored ASCII letters.

For size you could just change the font settings
in your terminal window, but I wouldn't mind
seeing a tileset that uses colored letters but
makes each monster's color unique (at least
for that letter, if not absolutely), by using more
than the 16 different colors seen in the tty builds.

[MainiacJoe]

On May 2, 11:11 am, Jonadab the Unsightly One

I do regularly use large fonts in my terminal window. I like your
idea of slightly different colors for each unique monster.

[SM]

2012-05-02, Jonadab the Unsightly One wrote:

> On May 2, 7:52 am, SM <kas...@ne-spamon.gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> > Not needing to memorize keyboard inputs, like l for east and k
>> > for north and u for northeast (what cretin picked those keys,
>> > anyway?)
>>
>> One of the great innovations of the Seventies. [1][2]
>
> They got the NetHack keys from vi? Seriously?
>
> Wow, vi is even more horrible than I realized.
> (On my systems, vi is always a symlink to Emacs...)

Let's not turn this into the $EDITOR war. The thing with Vi-like
navigation keys is that they allow user to stay on the home row.
In practice this means that you don't have to move your hands from the
basic position. And that makes playing NetHack a breeze (unlike editing
in Emacs ;)).

>> And there's always
>> the numpad option for a newbie anyway.
>
> The numpad option causes various problems, some
> of which are especially troublesome for newbies.

At least, it makes moving around "more logical" for them initially.
However, I also think that NetHack is a hard-core game, and hard-core
apps traditionally involve a learning curve. More or less a steep one.
If a newbie in question is not up to the task, maybe he/she should take
on another task instead...

--
:wq

[deltopia]

On Wednesday, May 2, 2012 3:01:24 PM UTC-4, SM wrote:
> At least, it makes moving around "more logical" for them initially.
> However, I also think that NetHack is a hard-core game, and hard-core
> apps traditionally involve a learning curve. More or less a steep one.
> If a newbie in question is not up to the task, maybe he/she should take
> on another task instead...
>
> --
> :wq

Using a 70's texteditor's interface and using a 70's graphics
display (the use of ASCII letters wasn't a design choice in
Rogue; tiles were impossible) are great and add flavor to a lot
of NetHack's existing audience. They absolutely chase off anyone
new who wants to play, though.

One of the things I really admire about NetHack4 is its willingness
to embrace the present -- by ignoring traditions that were in place
to limit save file sizes, by abandoning ancient and obscure
platform and OS compatibilities. Removing (or at least providing
alternatives to) the legacy obstacles that don't need to be there
anymore, the vi keys and the ASCII interface, is another good step
in that direction.

Of course, without a Windows port or a web interface, it's sort of
bootless. I read earlier today that Windows platforms are something
>85% of traffic on the interwebs. Sure, a lot of the people reading
this don't use Windows -- hell, we're using Usenet fer gossake; we
are relics ourselves. But without a Windows or webclient entry
point to the game, it's probably hard even to beta test.

I'm not a programmer or a smart computer guy (not in this company,
anyway), but may I make a suggestion to the NetHack4 team? Rather
than kill yourselves trying to beat a Windows port out of your
limited resources (both programmer and hardware resources), why
not focus on getting an internet server of some sort up? Ideally
web (a la the amuletofyendor.com site), because most people have
that, but at least something telnet-capable? Because, as Jonadab
pointed out, Windows doesn't come with anything useful to a
programmer, but it does come with a browser.

An increasing number of people out there are getting computers and
using them practically as thin-clients--no real local software,
just web browsers and applications on the internet. I don't know,
but I almost think it'd be easier to make a NetHack4 that ran well
on a web server than several NetHack4's that run well on XP, Vista,
Win7, ios, Mac, Android, Unix, etc....
--
Del

[SM]

2012-05-02, deltopia wrote:
>
> One of the things I really admire about NetHack4 is its willingness
> to embrace the present -- by ignoring traditions that were in place
> to limit save file sizes, by abandoning ancient and obscure
> platform and OS compatibilities. Removing (or at least providing
> alternatives to) the legacy obstacles that don't need to be there
> anymore, the vi keys and the ASCII interface, is another good step
> in that direction.

Not surprisingly, I can't agree with the "removing" part. Removing vi keys
and ASCII UI would definitely make NH4 a non-NH for me (and for
countless others as well). They really should be provided as an option.

However, about ditching obsolete ports and concentrating on a working
web interface. Sounds good.

--
:wq

[Janis Papanagnou]

On 02.05.2012 11:52, Rob Cypher wrote:
>
> I'm not advocating that you turn it into "Diablo" or something. But
> holding onto a very outdated look like the ASCII thing loses its
> charm after a while when you don't include any tiled alternatives
> (Vulture's Eye throws me off).

Interesting; that "after a while" is 20 years for me, still counting.
I've never found the tiles any appealing, but certainly taste differs
amongst people.

Janis

[Janis Papanagnou]

On 02.05.2012 16:56, Aardvark Joe wrote:
>
> These days, I would think that using a browser-based client as the
> base for the tiles support, like has been mentioned, would probably
> be the best approach.

Umm... - A - *Browser* - Based - Client - ... - Please, no!!!

(FlashHack, Web2.0Hack, GoogleHack, iHack, ... - to be continued.)

Janis

[Janis Papanagnou]

On 02.05.2012 17:09, Jonadab the Unsightly One wrote:
[ HJKL movement keys ]

> Wow, vi is even more horrible than I realized.

You don't seem to know vi, since you don't even know
the basics. (No defence required; I know the steep
learning curve of vi, and I understand if folks don't
want to go that way.)

> (On my systems, vi is always a symlink to Emacs...)

This makes no sense, if emacs will not be started in
some vi emulation mode. Does it? Otherwise just type
'emacs' if you want emacs. And keep 'vi' for vi. (If
you just want to save keystrokes why not use 'e'?)

Janis

[Janis Papanagnou]

On 02.05.2012 21:01, SM wrote:
>
> Let's not turn this into the $EDITOR war. The thing with Vi-like
> navigation keys is that they allow user to stay on the home row.

Let me add...
The vi commands are designed to edit fast, really fast. The Nethack
commands are designed to play fast. Imagine how boring it would be
to use the mouse... - hmm... - well, someone who already experienced
the difference will find it boring at least.

>>> And there's always
>>> the numpad option for a newbie anyway.
>>
>> The numpad option causes various problems, some
>> of which are especially troublesome for newbies.

Which sort of troubles? Which various problems? Curious.

> At least, it makes moving around "more logical" for them initially.

I use numberpad. I'd even use those "horrible" vi keys if I wouldn't
have a QWERTZ keyboard layout that makes moving north-west horrible.

Janis

[Jonadab the Unsightly One]

On May 2, 4:35 pm, Janis Papanagnou <janis_papanag...@hotmail.com>
wrote:

> > (On my systems, vi is always a symlink to Emacs...)
>
> This makes no sense, if emacs will not be started in
> some vi emulation mode. Does it? Otherwise just type
> 'emacs' if you want emacs. And keep 'vi' for vi. (If
> you just want to save keystrokes why not use 'e'?)

It effectively prevents misguided things like visudo from
calling an editor I can't use. (Yes, I know about the
$EDITOR environment variable. Not everything obeys it.)

Note too that I don't use Emacs with the default key bindings.
The defaults are admittedly horrible, but I've got some fifty
megabytes of custom lisp that make things very good. I'm not
interested in concocting a similarly large quantity of
customizations for a second text editor as well.

Making vi a symlink to Emacs is all part of my evil diabolical
plan to make my computer behave the way *I* want it to behave,
not the way some other cretin thinks it should.

[ais523]

On Wed, 02 May 2012 12:38:23 -0700, deltopia wrote:
> I'm not a programmer or a smart computer guy (not in this company,
> anyway), but may I make a suggestion to the NetHack4 team? Rather than
> kill yourselves trying to beat a Windows port out of your limited
> resources (both programmer and hardware resources), why not focus on
> getting an internet server of some sort up? Ideally web (a la the
> amuletofyendor.com site), because most people have that, but at least
> something telnet-capable? Because, as Jonadab pointed out, Windows
> doesn't come with anything useful to a programmer, but it does come with
> a browser.

I haven't officially announced it yet, because it's missing a lot of
features you'd expect (such as an accompanying website, for one), but
have you tried telnetting to nethack4.org? (I'm surprised that people
haven't tried that just from observing my new email address.)

--
ais523

[Janis Papanagnou]

On 03.05.2012 08:02, Jonadab the Unsightly One wrote:
>
> Making vi a symlink to Emacs is all part of my evil diabolical
> plan to make my computer behave the way *I* want it to behave,
> not the way some other cretin thinks it should.

LOL, yeah! It seems, though, that (metaphorically speaking) you're
using a cursed +13 bullwhip for that purpose. ;-)

Janis

[Martin Read]

Jonadab the Unsightly One <jonadab.the...@gmail.com> wrote:
>It effectively prevents misguided things like visudo from
>calling an editor I can't use. (Yes, I know about the
>$EDITOR environment variable. Not everything obeys it.)

Anything that spawns an external editor but doesn't check the appropriate
environment variables should have a bug report filed against it.
--
\_\/_/ turbulence is certainty turbulence is friction between you and me
\ / every time we try to impose order we create chaos
\/ -- Killing Joke, "Mathematics of Chaos"

[SM]

2012-05-03, Martin Read wrote:
> Jonadab the Unsightly One <jonadab.the...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> (Yes, I know about the $EDITOR environment variable. Not everything
>> obeys it.)
>
> Anything that spawns an external editor but doesn't check the appropriate
> environment variables should have a bug report filed against it.

Absolutely. I've never had such problems with using $EDITOR (obviously
configured by both $USER and root).

--
:wq

[Javier Novoa C.]

On 2012-05-02, deltopia <delt...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Using a 70's texteditor's interface and using a 70's graphics
> display (the use of ASCII letters wasn't a design choice in
> Rogue; tiles were impossible) are great and add flavor to a lot
> of NetHack's existing audience. They absolutely chase off anyone
> new who wants to play, though.
>
> One of the things I really admire about NetHack4 is its willingness
> to embrace the present -- by ignoring traditions that were in place
> to limit save file sizes, by abandoning ancient and obscure
> platform and OS compatibilities. Removing (or at least providing
> alternatives to) the legacy obstacles that don't need to be there
> anymore, the vi keys and the ASCII interface, is another good step
> in that direction.

You can't be serious on removing the vi keys... I play NetHack on a
laptop, I don't want to buy an annoying numberpad and I would like to
still play it with the vi keys... Like it or not, there are still
people who find it convenient (not just cool) for some features to
remain. Some of us use laptops and want the vi keys, some of us
connect to a remote server with NetHack installed and play there, so
ASCII is the only way...

Please be serious on the 'removal' part...


--
Javier Novoa C.

--- Posted via news://freenews.netfront.net/ - Complaints to ne...@netfront.net ---

[deltopia]

Heh, I didn't even realize that I could find your email address
from looking at your newsgroup postings. I keep telling y'all; I'm
an *idiot*. I'll find a copy of putty and try it out tonight. (I'm
one of those lamentable Windows users whose computer doesn't come with
useful software, like telnet clients.)

Whether it has all the features yet or not, I do want to thank you
with all sincerety -- NetHack moving forward really means a lot to
me personally, and I know you've put countless hours of largely unseen
effort into it. I really appreciate your work -- and can't wait to
take it for a spin.

--
del

[deltopia]

On Thursday, May 3, 2012 9:49:11 AM UTC-4, Javier Novoa C. wrote:
>
> You can't be serious on removing the vi keys...

The way which I, personally, would choose to remove that as
a learning barrier is simply to add a keybinding interface as
part of the in-game option menu. Don't want to use vi keys?
Cool; the default should probably be either arrows or wasd
anyway (if that's what kids use nowadays). Want to use vi
keys? Hit the "Options" button (by default, shift-O or
#options) and go to town. (Maybe a #Keybindings. Something
easy.)

I don't think hjkl is nearly the learning barrier that seven
different colors of q is. That's what I'd really like to see
removed. And, with tiles, backwards compatability on that is
pretty easy, too -- after the release of a NetHack4 with
user-alterable tilesets, I'd put the over-under at 45 minutes
before someone creates and uploads a tileset making the
cockatrice a lower-case yellow "c" again.

But this is me brainstorming recklessly without any idea of
how great the programming challenges are... so please, as
always, realize that I'm an ignorant fool in this discussion.
:)

--
del

[Javier Novoa C.]

On 2012-05-03, deltopia <delt...@gmail.com> wrote:
> The way which I, personally, would choose to remove that as
> a learning barrier is simply to add a keybinding interface as
> part of the in-game option menu. Don't want to use vi keys?
> Cool; the default should probably be either arrows or wasd
> anyway (if that's what kids use nowadays). Want to use vi
> keys? Hit the "Options" button (by default, shift-O or
> #options) and go to town. (Maybe a #Keybindings. Something
> easy.)
>
> I don't think hjkl is nearly the learning barrier that seven
> different colors of q is. That's what I'd really like to see
> removed. And, with tiles, backwards compatability on that is
> pretty easy, too -- after the release of a NetHack4 with
> user-alterable tilesets, I'd put the over-under at 45 minutes
> before someone creates and uploads a tileset making the
> cockatrice a lower-case yellow "c" again.
>
> But this is me brainstorming recklessly without any idea of
> how great the programming challenges are... so please, as
> always, realize that I'm an ignorant fool in this discussion.
>:)
>

well, perhaps 'removal' is not the right word to use here ;)

I see NetHack as a kind of... towel... and as every towel, it should
be used any way you like it, so... not limiting, just openning the
options is great

[Janis Papanagnou]

Am 03.05.2012 16:28, schrieb Jukka Lahtinen:

> Janis Papanagnou <janis_pa...@hotmail.com> writes:
>
>> I use numberpad. I'd even use those "horrible" vi keys if I wouldn't
>> have a QWERTZ keyboard layout that makes moving north-west horrible.
>

> If you are able to compile the game yourself, look at
> http://bilious.alt.org/?72

Thanks. But I am playing on NAO.

I guess if I'd play on my local box I could also just switch the
keyboard mapping temporarily.

Janis

[ais523]

On Thu, 03 May 2012 07:39:26 -0700, deltopia wrote:
> On Thursday, May 3, 2012 9:49:11 AM UTC-4, Javier Novoa C. wrote:
>> You can't be serious on removing the vi keys...
>
> The way which I, personally, would choose to remove that as a learning
> barrier is simply to add a keybinding interface as part of the in-game
> option menu. Don't want to use vi keys? Cool; the default should
> probably be either arrows or wasd anyway (if that's what kids use
> nowadays). Want to use vi keys? Hit the "Options" button (by default,
> shift-O or #options) and go to town. (Maybe a #Keybindings. Something
> easy.)

You'll love the way NH4 keybindings work, then. Not only are they
configurable from the options menu (and persist between games if you do
that), but by default, numpad works, and vikeys also works, and (contrary
to AceHack) you also can use the main keyboard numbers for command
repeat; daniel_t did some trickery with curses. (I've heard about some
bugs with the enter key, but they seem to be terminal-emulator-specific;
nontheless, working around them would be useful.)

> I don't think hjkl is nearly the learning barrier that seven different
> colors of q is. That's what I'd really like to see removed. And, with
> tiles, backwards compatability on that is pretty easy, too -- after the
> release of a NetHack4 with user-alterable tilesets, I'd put the
> over-under at 45 minutes before someone creates and uploads a tileset
> making the cockatrice a lower-case yellow "c" again.

Part of the issue with vanilla tiles is that they're too small to be
recognisable, and thus are worse than the colored letters. At least seven
different colors of q are visually easy to tell apart, even if they're
hard to memorise; vanilla tiles gives you things that are vague enough
that they're just as hard to memorise, with the added difficulty of
trying merely to describe them (look up, say, the grid bug tile and
you'll see what I mean). One fix to this problem is simply to use larger
tiles, although it lets you see less of the map; I think I'll default
NetHack 4's tiles to something very large and detailed (luckily, some
nicely detailed tiles already exist in Slash'EM, and it has a strict
superset of the objects in vanilla, missing only a couple from NetHack
4). Configurability, of course, is a good idea for tiles, and although
it's nontrivial to code I think it's worth the effort.

> But this is me brainstorming recklessly without any idea of how great
> the programming challenges are... so please, as always, realize that I'm
> an ignorant fool in this discussion.
> :)

The nice thing about these suggestions is, even if they're hard to code,
someone may code it just because they like a challenge (or to get one up
on the devteam); and if it's a popular suggestion, it may have been coded
already. And if they're too hard or impossible to code, someone will
probably just tell you. YANIs are a proud NetHack tradition, and I
wouldn't want to let something like coding difficulty get in the way of
suggestions.

--
ais523

[geoduck]

On May 2, 5:51 am, MainiacJoe <mainiac...@gmail.com> wrote:
> The only tiles I'd be interested in would be larger versions of the

> colored ASCII letters.  One of the things I like best about Nethack is
> that it can provoke a little shiver of fear with just a little yellow
> c.  There is no way whatever cartoony cockatrice you can squeeze onto
> 24x24 is going to do a better job than my imagination.

May as well promote my tile set; it's sort of an "enhanced ASCII" that
still uses the original letters, but adds enough details that every
creature is unique.

See it here: http://cook.web.eschelon.com/nhack.html

[Rob Cypher]

On Wed, 2 May 2012 04:23:34 -0700 (PDT), Jonadab the Unsightly One
<jonadab.the...@gmail.com> wrote:

>On May 1, 11:41 pm, Rob Cypher <bals...@aol.com> wrote:
>
>> I think keeping the program strictly as colored letters
>> limits the appeal to newbies,
>

>I agree. I started with the Qt build myself. It makes the
>learning curve more manageable, by allowing you to focus on
>memorizing strategically important things that help you keep
>your character alive long enough to find your way to DL2.
>
>With tiles, it's relatively easy for a newbie to keep straight
>which monsters are mundane ones you've been seeing and killing
>all along and which ones are something new that you'd probably
>better look up on the wiki. It speeds up the learning process.

Exactly.

>Not needing to memorize keyboard inputs, like l for east and k
>for north and u for northeast (what cretin picked those keys,

>anyway?) and q for drink and is wear W or w anyhow..., not
>needing to memorize all that before you can even get started
>would help even more. The menus in the Qt build of 3.4.3 ought
>in theory to help with this a little, but in practice they really
>don't much because you can't use them half the time (like,
>whenever the game asks you a question) and because the menus
>are poorly organized (e.g., the : and ; commands are NOT under
>the same menu as taking inventory) and because none of the extended
>commands are even mentioned on the menus and, above all, because
>using the menus, or even just pulling them down to look at them
>(e.g., to remind yourself what the keyboard shortcuts are) has a
>tendency to put the game in a state where it stops accepting input.

I would keep that particular input as an option for players used to
it. Maybe not the default option, but *an* option, anyway.

>The other thing that would appeal to newbies is reworking the
>difficulty level so that the first few levels are much easier
>and the subsequent ones increasingly difficult as you go. Almost
>all other computer games have their difficulty rigged in this way,
>so that a player who has advanced his skill to a certain point can
>relatively easily reach approximately the point in the game where
>he was before. Going too far with that in NetHack would be bad,
>because it would compromise replayability, but I do think it would
>be nice if newbies could learn, after a few dozen hours of play,
>to consistently make it as far as Delphi or so. This, however,
>would require a HUGE amount of rebalancing and playtesting and
>rebalancing again and playtesting some more and rebalancing yet
>again, et cetera, ad infinitum, ad bedlam. A tiled interface
>is almost certainly lower-hanging fruit.

I dunno about reworking the difficulty. It seems fine to me right now.
If you're concerned that's a problem, you could always set an option
to implement an "easy mode" that has several things enabled (ie a
"y/n" option before hitting a floating eye, eating questionable food,
etc) along with a "normal (ie default)" difficulty mode. (If you're
going to do so, I suggest having the game keep "normal mode" scores
and "easy mode" scores on two seperate top score tables.)

[Rob Cypher]

On Wed, 2 May 2012 05:51:59 -0700 (PDT), MainiacJoe
<maini...@gmail.com> wrote:

>The only tiles I'd be interested in would be larger versions of the
>colored ASCII letters. One of the things I like best about Nethack is
>that it can provoke a little shiver of fear with just a little yellow
>c. There is no way whatever cartoony cockatrice you can squeeze onto
>24x24 is going to do a better job than my imagination.

Having nothing but an ASCII graphics option is probably a big
hinderance to anyone under the age of 25 who wants to get
into this game. Remember, that generation considers "Diablo" to be
"old-school" now - they'll look at Nethack's ASCII interface and run
the other way. Tiles won't scare them as much - quite a few
cell phone/tablet PC games use a similar type of interface.

Nethack fandom needs new blood - and ASCII isn't attracting it. :/

[Jonadab the Unsightly One]

On May 3, 5:22 pm, Rob Cypher <bals...@aol.com> wrote:
> >Not needing to memorize keyboard inputs,

> I would keep that particular input as an option for players used to
> it. Maybe not the default option, but *an* option, anyway.

I'll go you one better: the compass rose that you click on to move
and also to choose directions (e.g., when zapping a wand) should
also have the traditional letters visible on it. Display of the
letters could be turned off in the options if someone is determined
to keep playing in newbie mouse mode forever. Display of the whole
compass rose could also be turned off in the options, once you learn
the keys.

The idea would be to make learning the game easier.

[Janis Papanagnou]

On 03.05.2012 23:28, Rob Cypher wrote:
>
> Having nothing but an ASCII graphics option is probably a big
> hinderance to anyone under the age of 25 who wants to get
> into this game.

When I introduced my children to the game many years ago - they
were something around 10 years old then - they had no problems at
all with the ASCII interface. They were also not scared, rather
the opposite was the case, they were interested.

> Remember, that generation considers "Diablo" to be
> "old-school" now - they'll look at Nethack's ASCII interface and run
> the other way.

There's likely that psychological issue that you describe, yes.

Do we need some flash movie as intro to the game? ;-}

> Tiles won't scare them as much - quite a few
> cell phone/tablet PC games use a similar type of interface.

I wonder, though, whether that "generation of players" has an
attention span long enough to handle Nethack at all over a longer
period (more than a day) of time.

> Nethack fandom needs new blood - and ASCII isn't attracting it. :/

Probably even Nethack isn't attractive enough for those players
due to its difficulty.

Janis

[Capt. Cave Man]

On Wed, 2 May 2012 13:05:39 +0000 (UTC), SM <kas...@ne-spamon.gmail.com>
wrote:

>2012-05-02, MainiacJoe wrote:
>> The only tiles I'd be interested in would be larger versions of the
>> colored ASCII letters. One of the things I like best about Nethack is
>> that it can provoke a little shiver of fear with just a little yellow
>> c. There is no way whatever cartoony cockatrice you can squeeze onto
>> 24x24 is going to do a better job than my imagination.
>

>One huge +1 for this.

And the first thought when it appears is always "Oh, shit!"

[Capt. Cave Man]

Wouldn't that then be a "+3 Wonder Woman's Truth Lanyard"?

[David Melik]

On 05/01/2012 08:41 PM, Rob Cypher wrote:
> Well, I guess after 6 years of silence someone had to take the wheel.
> But is there a build of this (or any of these newer variants) that
> uses tiles in the same manner as 3.4.3? Unnethack doesn't really use
> graphical monster tiles in its tile mode (among other things) and the
> Wizard's Eye version is a little awkward to use (and it's outdated
> too, I think). None of the other variants bother to use tiles except
> Slash'Em, and that hasn't been updated in a while either.

>
> I think keeping the program strictly as colored letters limits the

> appeal to newbies, and frankly you need them to keep interest
> alive in these programs in the long run.

I do not believe this is a real new version of Nethack. I will wait for
a release by the development team.

[Capt. Cave Man]

On Thu, 3 May 2012 07:39:26 -0700 (PDT), deltopia <delt...@gmail.com>
wrote:

I cannot understand why a paradigm like that used by MAME or MAMEUI
uses would not be implemented. Encapsulate the game engine itself in a
front end. Within that front end, settings are chosen, including tiles
or not, etc. Oh wait... they already almost have these, no?

I know this is not an emulated CPU environment, but there are
methodologies used in MAME that fit this game's control set/HID needs..





On a different note:

I hate the iPad interface, btw. It sucks more if you have an iPad stand
with a keyboard. Now I have to research putting the key bindings back
and then do the work.

[Capt. Cave Man]

Well then,stop wiping your ass with our seriously fanatic woven towel.
.. ;-)

We like the stink to come from years of hard, mine digging sweat.

[Capt. Cave Man]

On Thu, 03 May 2012 17:28:02 -0400, Rob Cypher <bal...@aol.com> wrote:

>On Wed, 2 May 2012 05:51:59 -0700 (PDT), MainiacJoe
><maini...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>The only tiles I'd be interested in would be larger versions of the
>>colored ASCII letters. One of the things I like best about Nethack is
>>that it can provoke a little shiver of fear with just a little yellow
>>c. There is no way whatever cartoony cockatrice you can squeeze onto
>>24x24 is going to do a better job than my imagination.
>
>Having nothing but an ASCII graphics option is probably a big
>hinderance to anyone under the age of 25 who wants to get
>into this game.

Then he or she is NOT dweeby enough to be on our bandwagon of folks who
like this great game.

You are not worthy. :-)

> Remember, that generation considers "Diablo" to be
>"old-school" now - they'll look at Nethack's ASCII interface and run
>the other way.

With my foot in their ass.

> Tiles won't scare them as much - quite a few
>cell phone/tablet PC games use a similar type of interface.

Bloody interlopers.

>
>Nethack fandom needs new blood - and ASCII isn't attracting it. :/

You can eat cake too then. ;-P

[Capt. Cave Man]

On Thu, 03 May 2012 22:53:46 -0700, David Melik <dchm...@hipplanet.com>
wrote:

I was waiting to see one of "these" posts.

Perhaps you should email them and get them to send you an official
timeline.

[Jochen Spieker]

* Capt Cave Man:

I still remember my anxiety when entering a graveyard level for the
first time between midnight and 1am ("Run away! Run away!"). And how I
didn't dare to enter Gehennom for the first time, because I didn't know
whether I could return or not. That "Are you sure?" question made me
really nervous.

J.
--
I wish I was gay.
[Agree] [Disagree]
<http://www.slowlydownward.com/NODATA/data_enter2.html>

[bcode]

David Melik <dchm...@hipplanet.com> wrote:
> On 05/01/2012 08:41 PM, Rob Cypher wrote:
>> Well, I guess after 6 years of silence someone had to take the wheel.

[...]

> I do not believe this is a real new version of Nethack. I will wait for
> a release by the development team.

Please define "real new version".

Why do you see a need for waiting for a release by the old NetHack
DevTeam? Is it because you don't agree with the new development model?
Is it because you think forks can't be a worthy successor to a forked
piece of software? Is it for some other reason I didn't think of when I
was writing this?

I have to say that I doubt there will be a release by the old NetHack
development team anytime soon, though - and assuming a hypothetical
NetHack 3.5.0 or 4.0.0 by the DevTeam, would it be better than the
NetHack 4 by the NetHack 4 DevTeam? If so, new-NetHack 4 could in
theory take what would be causing old-NetHack 4 to be "better" and
create (old+new)-NetHack 4. Isn't that already the development model
of some projects?[1] Multiple branches maintained by different people,
and the "official" branch is the one which is considered the "best"
by the community?[2]

Assuming such a development model, the community most likely wouldn't
wait for an outdated branch to be updated - they would continue
developing and probably consider the outdated branch to be obsolete.
Why should we wait for old-NetHack 4 and let that massive delay
impede development on quite possibly more advanced branches
(new-NetHack 4, but possibly other variants too)?

[1]: At least inofficially it probably is.
[2]: This assumes the developers share their code - NetHack 4
already used bugfixes from GruntHack and GruntHack used
bugfixes from NetHack 4, for example. Also, I think I
recall (parts of) the intelligent pet code being shared
(but I'm not sure exactly how much is shared).

[Javier Novoa C.]

why should I stop? that's another use for towels...

>
> We like the stink to come from years of hard, mine digging sweat.

oh yeah!

[Patric Mueller]

David Melik <dchm...@hipplanet.com> wrote:
>
> I do not believe this is a real new version of Nethack. I will wait
> for a release by the development team.

Which devteam?

This: http://slashem.sourceforge.net/

Or this one: http://sporkhack.com/

This one has a really handsome main programmer, although I don't think
that influences the gameplay, but you never know:
http://unnethack.wordpress.com/

This one has been quite active as well recently: http://grunthack.org/

Maybe it just comes down to this:
http://img691.imageshack.us/img691/7425/msgermanad.jpg

Evolution only works when something is evolving. That doesn't mean
that stagnation can't be successful. The coelacanth has survived
unchanged for millions of years. I'm certain that NetHack will also
survive a long time as a living fossil. But I like progress.

Bye
Patric

--
NetHack-De: NetHack auf Deutsch - http://nethack-de.sf.net/

UnNetHack: http://apps.sf.net/trac/unnethack/

[Raisse the Thaumaturge]

Rob Cypher wrote:

> Nethack has to evolve past the ASCII phase! Or at least make tiles
> mandatory! I can play tiles to the point of almost winning, but I
> always lose at ASCII by level 5 or so because I get frustrated about
> trying to remember what symbol means what and get rather lazy
> about hitting the ";" key every time. :/

So because *you* are too stupid to get your brain round the ASCII interface,
*everybody else* should play the dumbed-down way? Sheesh.

Raisse, killed by a troll, while helpless

--
Status of Raisse (piously neutral): Level 8 HP 63(67) AC -3, fast.
LegoHack: http://www.valdyas.org/irina/stuff/legohack/

[Jonadab the Unsightly One]

Janis Papanagnou <janis_pa...@hotmail.com> writes:

> The vi commands are designed to edit fast, really fast. The Nethack
> commands are designed to play fast.

That's all well and good, for someone who has already learned
the game. (Even then, though, having the diagonal keys not
be physically arranged on the same area as the horizontal and
vertical ones is a completely gratuitous measure that cannot
possibly have been intended for any purpose other than
deliberately making it harder to keep them straight.)

>>> The numpad option causes various problems, some
>>> of which are especially troublesome for newbies.
>
> Which sort of troubles? Which various problems? Curious.

I no longer remember all the details (the problems led me to
write the non-numpad movement keys on a scrap of paper, tape that
to my monitor, and stop using numpad mode), but I do remember
that you couldn't always safely use them (e.g., at a "what
direction?" prompt), and forgetting this and pressing one of the
numpad arrows at the wrong time (when attempting to use a wand)
got my character killed at least once. I was, at the time, using
the Qt build, so it's possible that the bugs in question were
port-specific and wouldn't occur in the tty interface.

--

v4sw5Phw5ln5pr5FPO/ck2ma9u7FLw2/5l6/7i6e6t2b7/en4a3Xr5g5T
http://hackerkey.com/decrypt.php?hackerkey=v4sw5PprFPOck2ma9uFw2l6i6e6t2b7en4g5T

[Janis Papanagnou]

On 06.05.2012 00:41, Jonadab the Unsightly One wrote:
> Janis Papanagnou <janis_pa...@hotmail.com> writes:
>
>> The vi commands are designed to edit fast, really fast. The Nethack
>> commands are designed to play fast.
>
> That's all well and good, for someone who has already learned
> the game. (Even then, though, having the diagonal keys not
> be physically arranged on the same area as the horizontal and
> vertical ones is a completely gratuitous measure that cannot
> possibly have been intended for any purpose other than
> deliberately making it harder to keep them straight.)

What do you mean by that? The keys are arranged

Y U top-left top-right
H J K L left down up right
B N bottom-left bottom-right

fairly "on the same area as the horizontal and vertical ones",
if you ask me. The down/J and up/K are less intuitive, IMO.
(BTW, if you need to memorize which of j and k is down and up,
a mnemonic that helped me was; j has the vertical bar downward,
and k has it upward.)

When I started playing Nethack another detail bothered me a bit;
I used (and still use) the number pad, and I would have found
it helpful if the central key '5' would have been be mapped to
the 'rest' (don't move) command.

Janis

[Jonadab the Unsightly One]

On May 5, 9:23 pm, Janis Papanagnou <janis_papanag...@hotmail.com>
wrote:

> > That's all well and good, for someone who has already learned
> > the game. (Even then, though, having the diagonal keys not
> > be physically arranged on the same area as the horizontal and
> > vertical ones is a completely gratuitous measure that cannot
> > possibly have been intended for any purpose other than
> > deliberately making it harder to keep them straight.)
>
> What do you mean by that? The keys are arranged
>
> Y U top-left top-right
> H J K L left down up right
> B N bottom-left bottom-right

So, did you notice how U, which takes you up and to the *right*,
and N, which takes you down and to the *right*, are both well to
the *left* of the keys that take you up and down?

With games that use ASDW for left/down/right/up, the diagonals
are invariably Q, E, Z, and either X or C. Not ERCV or some jazz
like that.

(There is, of course, also the small matter of what happens when
the user's keyboard is not QWERTY. Currently I'm using a QWERTY
layout, but there've been times in the past when the key between
J and L on my keyboard was A, and K was to the left of Z. I
might go back to that in the future, if I ever get around to
cleaning up my old Avant keyboard.)

> fairly "on the same area as the horizontal and vertical ones",
> if you ask me. The down/J and up/K are less intuitive, IMO.
> (BTW, if you need to memorize which of j and k is down and up,
> a mnemonic that helped me was; j has the vertical bar downward,
> and k has it upward.)

I just memorized that K is up.

> When I started playing Nethack another detail bothered me a
> bit; I used (and still use) the number pad, and I would have
> found it helpful if the central key '5' would have been be
> mapped to the 'rest' (don't move) command.

Fortunately, NetHack4 lets you remap keys arbitrarily.
This, IMO, is a pretty big step forward. It brings us
to where Descent was in 1995 (except for the part about
being a 3D shooter, which would NOT be an improvement
for NetHack, and IPX/SPX network support, which would
not benefit any game now that TCP/IP has totally taken
over pretty much all networking).

[Capt. Cave Man]

On Sun, 06 May 2012 08:24:11 +0300, Jukka Lahtinen
<jtfj...@hotmail.com.invalid> wrote:

>Janis Papanagnou <janis_pa...@hotmail.com> writes:
>
>> (BTW, if you need to memorize which of j and k is down and up,
>> a mnemonic that helped me was; j has the vertical bar downward,
>> and k has it upward.)
>

>Back when I learned Hack, it helped me to know that the ASCII code 10,
>ctrl-j, is linefeed which moves cursor down.

And to think that after my argument about ASCII I couldn't possibly
consider calling you weird for this.

But I used to write databases back when border codes were part of the
regimen of creating screen forms.

Thank God those days are gone (mostly).

[Jonadab the Unsightly One]

On May 6, 4:24 am, Capt. Cave Man

<ItIsSoEasyACaveManCanD...@upyers.org> wrote:

> >Back when I learned Hack, it helped me to know that the ASCII
> >code 10, ctrl-j, is linefeed which moves cursor down.
>
> And to think that after my argument about ASCII I couldn't
> possibly consider calling you weird for this.

Note that he said "hack", not "NetHack". Assuming he learned
hack before NetHack came out, that was well back into the era
when memorizing ASCII control codes was a fairly normal activity
for computer users. Also note that back then the linefeed was
sometimes used independently of carriage return and as something
other than a text-file line ending character. People actually
used the control characters as *control* characters back then.
For example, you could make a terminal emit a beep by sending
the ASCII BEL character (decimal 007), and you could cause it
to move the cursor down a line by sending LF.

[Rob Cypher]

On Sat, 05 May 2012 23:43:58 +0200, Raisse the Thaumaturge
<rai...@valdyas.org> wrote:

>Rob Cypher wrote:
>
>> Nethack has to evolve past the ASCII phase! Or at least make tiles
>> mandatory! I can play tiles to the point of almost winning, but I
>> always lose at ASCII by level 5 or so because I get frustrated about
>> trying to remember what symbol means what and get rather lazy
>> about hitting the ";" key every time. :/
>
>So because *you* are too stupid to get your brain round the ASCII interface,
>*everybody else* should play the dumbed-down way? Sheesh.
>
> Raisse, killed by a troll, while helpless

Seems dumb to me to keep holding on to an outdated interface like
ASCII. Graphics have been part of the normal package for 20 years
now, not sure why you guys keep spurning them. As I said, you will
not encourage new blood (which includes developers) by being so
obtuse on this matter.

[Janis Papanagnou]

On 06.05.2012 10:20, Jonadab the Unsightly One wrote:
> On May 5, 9:23 pm, Janis Papanagnou <janis_papanag...@hotmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>>> That's all well and good, for someone who has already learned
>>> the game. (Even then, though, having the diagonal keys not
>>> be physically arranged on the same area as the horizontal and
>>> vertical ones is a completely gratuitous measure that cannot
>>> possibly have been intended for any purpose other than
>>> deliberately making it harder to keep them straight.)
>>
>> What do you mean by that? The keys are arranged
>>
>> Y U top-left top-right
>> H J K L left down up right
>> B N bottom-left bottom-right
>
> So, did you notice how U, which takes you up and to the *right*,
> and N, which takes you down and to the *right*, are both well to
> the *left* of the keys that take you up and down?

Of course I "noticed"; I even wanted to make it clear for discussion
purpose, by deliberately indenting it to reflect the keyboard layout
at bit better.

When Nethack was written (derived from hack) the developers have to
consider the options and preconditions. Off the top of my head, e.g.,
1. shall users of predecessor (hack) have a smooth UI transition
2. is fast UI interaction a requirement
3. are keyboards of platforms without number pad to be supported
4. are there any standards (vi HJKL) to consider (vs. ad-hoc hacks)
5. how can the movement keys best be integrated in a game where
you have practically every key on the keyboard already used
(without sacrificing mnemonics for other keys)

That all said, I think the movement mapping for QWERTY keyboards had
been chosen very well in Nethack.

(We can still argue about whether it had been a crucial omission to
not allow [completely] freely configurable keyboard commands.)

>
> With games that use ASDW for left/down/right/up, the diagonals
> are invariably Q, E, Z, and either X or C. Not ERCV or some jazz
> like that.

That I consider a good decision for games that are solely movement
oriented and do not have dozens of other commands to support. I have
to ask you how you would have arranged the Apply, Search, Drop, Wear,
Quaff (arguable, but D for Drink is also as unavailable in your list)
and Eat commands?

Optimizing the movement keys a bit by relocating those keys to keys
that are better used for memorable mnemonics of many basic commands
would have been a bad decision, I think.

(You can argue with a dozen people about the best layout and you'll
likely get more than a dozen opinions.)

>
> (There is, of course, also the small matter of what happens when
> the user's keyboard is not QWERTY. Currently I'm using a QWERTY
> layout, but there've been times in the past when the key between
> J and L on my keyboard was A, and K was to the left of Z. I
> might go back to that in the future, if I ever get around to
> cleaning up my old Avant keyboard.)

I don't think it would pay to support many fundamentally different
keyboard types. The reason is; for the commands like Eat, Search,
Drop, etc. mnemonics are preferable, while for the movement keys
some compass rose layout (number pad, or your suggestion above, or
HJKL extension compromise) is best. How do you think shall those be
supported? - The single answer that comes to my mind is to let the
user configure the whole command set for their [exotic] keyboards,
and a handful of pre-defined keyboard configurations could be
provided with the game. (That's a possible improvement I see. Not
that I think it's crucial, though.)

Janis

[Janis Papanagnou]

And do you also remember those line printers that interpreted
the first *text* character as a _control character_ to control
the printing?
</dinosaur alert>

Janis

[SM]

2012-05-06, Rob Cypher wrote:
> Seems dumb to me to keep holding on to an outdated interface like
> ASCII.

There are a lot of users who spend most of their "computer time" inside
various terminal emulators and virtual consoles (i.e. absolutely without
graphical desktop) even nowadays, believe it or not. In fact, I'm
writing this post in a terminal emulator right now, and from this
very instance of urxvt I can telnet into a NH server and be playing in a
matter of seconds. Not only that, but I'd be playing in ASCII mode,
which sparkles up my imagination in a way not even the fanciest of
tilesets ever could.

> Graphics have been part of the normal package for 20 years now, not
> sure why you guys keep spurning them.

I have no problem with graphics being part of the package. Some people
do like them. The problem is the "be gone with the ASCII interface" and
the "be gone with the vi-style keybindings" attitudes. Let there be
choice.

> As I said, you will not encourage new blood (which includes
> developers) by being so obtuse on this matter.

A free software developer should code primarily to make the software as
great as possible. Not to make it appeal to "new blood". Especially if
that means ditching the tried and true features that made the software
great to begin with.

--
:wq

[Janis Papanagnou]

(This posting had been influenced by the NH UI discussion but
is [OT]. Just want to share...)

Amazing what folks do with ASCII; e.g. animated pictures like
http://tinyurl.com/6vkl969

Or the guys who fed a *live* video stream of the football
world cup 2006 converted to ASCII and accessible through a
(like NAO etc.) telnet interface! http://www.ascii-wm.net
(Unfortunately the mentioned random replay seems defunct.)

Janis

[ais523]

I once accidentally installed a non-GUI version of VLC. Apparently the
other libraries (notably aalib) on my system were sufficient for it to
attempt to replay videos using ASCII art, and foreground and background
colors; and in a full-screen terminal, I could sort-of make out what was
going on. (Perhaps I should have decreased my font size.)

--
ais523

[Jonadab the Unsightly One]

On May 6, 7:11 am, Janis Papanagnou <janis_papanag...@hotmail.com>
wrote:

> 5. how can the movement keys best be integrated in a game where
> you have practically every key on the keyboard already used
> (without sacrificing mnemonics for other keys)

The mnemonics for other actions are not as important as the
direction keys, because there isn't any other action you do
anywhere near as often as moving. Also, and more importantly IMO,
other keys can have their mnemonics chosen on an individual basis,
rather than needing to be chosen as a group. If the keys are
picked over already, individual commands can still be chosen by
flipping through synonyms, but finding a place where there's a
group of keys together would be rather harder, perhaps impossible.

Just for example, using u for northwest, i for northeast, m for
southeast, and n for southwest, with the hjkl, would have been
MUCH better than the present setup. Yes, that would've meant
p for checking your _p_ack contents instead of i for _i_nventory,
g for _go_ instead of m for _move_, #pay instead of p for
_p_ay, an action that is not used very frequently anyhow, and
so on and so forth. Making these changes now would be mostly
pointless, because now everybody has a GUI and newbies can just
play that way until they learn the keys. And once you learn
the keys, the arrangement no longer matters nearly as much (as
long as it's not completely terrible, like having to type
#GO_WEST to move west or some jazz like that). It's mainly
only a problem insofar as it slows down learning for newbies,
and like I said these days they can just use the GUI until they
learn the keys, so it's not that big a deal.

> (We can still argue about whether it had been a crucial omission
> to not allow [completely] freely configurable keyboard commands.)

In 1983, or even 1987, I don't think that was a particularly
crucial omission. However, by the time the 3.4 series rolled
around in the twenty-first century it was rather glaring.
Fortunately that's going to be moot now, as NetHack4 does have
it. (I say "going to be" because NetHack4 is still missing
a couple of things to be really finished enough for most newbies,
tiles and MS Windows support being rather obvious examples. I
may have another look at trying to compile under Windows some
time this week. I do not guarantee results, but we'll see.
Tiles will be a little more work to do, but I'm confident it
will happen eventually.)

> > With games that use ASDW for left/down/right/up, the diagonals
> > are invariably Q, E, Z, and either X or C. Not ERCV or some jazz
> > like that.
>
> That I consider a good decision for games that are solely movement
> oriented and do not have dozens of other commands to support. I have
> to ask you how you would have arranged the Apply, Search, Drop, Wear,
> Quaff (arguable, but D for Drink is also as unavailable in your list)
> and Eat commands?

Apply is actually a rather awkward substitute for Use; I assume
it's what they came up with after U was taken for diagonal movement.
The fact that you didn't pick up on this proves my point: as long
as you make up a mnemonic for them, the various other commands will
be easy enough to learn and feel fairly natural. Movement is what
should have first choice. Search could just as easily be Look.
Wear would be harder (Don and Equip being taken for movement), until
you realize that Wear and PutOn are only separate because the devs
were deliberately trying to make the interface confusing and hard.
PutOn could just be used for armor as well as rings and such, with
absolutely no negative impact on anything. (In fact, NetHack4 lets
you use PutOn and Wear interchangeably. Nobody has yet complained
about it, to my knowledge.)

Quaff is such an obscure verb, it only really works as a mnemonic
for the kind of people who paid attention when the lit teacher was
explaining Poe. I assume the process whereby they came up with it
went something like this:

Dev One: "Okay, D for Drink..."
Dev Two: "Wait, D is already Drop."
Dev One: "Fine, so shift-D for Drink."
Dev Three: "No, dude, I've got this idea for a really great
time-saving feature where you Drop a whole bunch
of things at once, by selecting them from an inventory
list. I want shift-D for that."
Dev Two: "That does sound useful..."
Dev One: "Are you sure that's more important than Drink?"
Dev Three: "Dude, can't Drink be another letter? There've gotta
be synonyms, right"
Dev One: "Yeah? Name one."
Dev Three: "Okay, umm..."
[gets thesaurus out]
"Oh, yeah, Quaff. We can have Q for Quaff. We could
even add a napenthe potion, and ravens..."
Dev Two: Ravens are not a bad idea, but what would a napenthe
potion be good for?
Dev Three: It could give the player amnesia.
Dev One: Gah. We already have a scroll of amnesia, plus mind
flayers, and amnesia is one of the most annoying things
in the game. Let's NOT add a potion of amnesia, just
for the sake of a stupid joke.
Dev Two: Okay, I agree. Q for Quaff, and Ravens, but no napenthe,
and no balm of Gilead either.
Dev Three: Alright, fine, spoil the joke if you must.
Dev Two: Relax, dude, Quaff still sounds funny. It's a good
enough joke without the potion. Besides, nobody would
deliberately quaff a potion of napenthe anyway, if it
gave you amnesia.

If you want another mnemonic letter for drinking other than Drink,
I can suggest Swig or Guzzle or Chug or Imbibe, all of which are
significantly more common words than Quaff.

Better yet, Ingest would work for both eating and drinking, which
reduces the number of commands by one and frees up a key slot.
(Inventory could be Pack contents or Held items etc, or you
could use lowercase i for inventory and uppercase I for Ingest,
which isn't any more confusing than wield/Wear and pay/PutOn.)

Like I said, the individual command mnenomics aren't hard to
devise. The thing that makes the movement keys harder to pick
well is that they need to be picked as a group, together. They
should've had priority.

But, like I also said, it's moot now. NH4 lets you change the
keys to whatever you like, and newbies who don't yet know the
keys are likely to use GUI builds at first anyway (for reasons
discussed upthread, notably that it makes it much easier to
tell new monsters apart from ones you've seen before), so they
can take a few extra days to learn the keys and play meanwhile,
no big deal.

> (You can argue with a dozen people about the best layout and you'll
> likely get more than a dozen opinions.)

Sure. The individual commands are arbitrary.

> > (There is, of course, also the small matter of what
> > happens when the user's keyboard is not QWERTY.
>

> I don't think it would pay to support many fundamentally
> different keyboard types.

Allowing the user to remap the keys has that covered now anyway.

[Jonadab the Unsightly One]

On May 6, 7:20 am, SM <kas...@ne-spamon.gmail.com> wrote:
> > Seems dumb to me to keep holding on to an outdated
> > interface like ASCII.
>
> There are a lot of users who spend most of their "computer time"
> inside various terminal emulators and virtual consoles

Sure, but such people are without question very much
in the minority, even among IT professionals, let alone
the general public.

> (i.e. absolutely without graphical desktop)

That's even deeper into the minority. Most terminal users use
terminal windows within a graphical desktop.

Currently, I have a grand total of twenty windows open, not counting
panels (of which there are three: left edge, bottom edge of left
monitor, and bottom edge of right monitor). In task-list order, the
windows are as follows: dclock, Gnus (in Emacs), OO.o, OO.o, Opera
(seven tabs), Emacs (with a text file open), gedit (long story), a
root terminal, a regular terminal window that I was using to manage
podcasts, a themed terminal window that I was using to telnet into
nethack4.org, Emacs (nhserver.conf), Firefox (seven tabs; this is
my main browser window), OO.o, Totem (I was listening to music while
I ate lunch and hadn't bothered to close the window after), a silly
little game (called Five or More), a themed terminal window that I
keep open all the time running my custom homebrew schedule-watching
script that prompts me with audible alerts and pop-up windows when
I need to leave to be somewhere, another dclock (for the right
monitor), Gjiten, and another Firefox (4 tabs; I use this one on
the second monitor for things I want to leave visible while working
in another window on the main monitor). This is actually rather low
on terminal windows for me, a situation that can mostly be put down
to the fact that I've rebooted recently (due to a brief power blink
the other day). Normally I would have additional themed terminal
windows for MySQL, log tailing, a couple of ssh sessions to other
computers, and maybe a couple of other tasks as well. Each of
these themed terminal windows looks different, both the window
itself (custom colors) and also its task list entry (custom icons),
so that I can easily keep different ones straight. For example, I
always use deep-purple-themed windows for playing NetHack on a
public server and medium-green-themed terminal windows for playing
NetHack on my own system. Root terminals are dark red with white
text, with a big fat # sign on the icon. Log tails are dark red
with yellow text, with a log (of wood) on the icon. MySQL is
medium blue with white text and a dolphin on the icon. The web
server at work is dark blue with white text and the letters "cgi"
on the icon. The firewall at work is orange, with flames on the
icon, and the one at home is yellow/brown. And so on. These
visual clues make it a lot easier to avoid accidents like "Oh,
man, I just typed that command on the wrong server, now we're
going to have twenty minutes' worth of downtime and it's my fault!"

> In fact, I'm writing this post in a terminal emulator right now,

In a terminal emulator within a graphical desktop environment?

> and from this very instance of urxvt I can telnet into a
> NH server and be playing in a matter of seconds.

As far as I know, nobody's suggesting that capability be removed.

In fact, there's thinking along the lines of allowing either
text-mode or tile-mode play on the same server, depending on
which client you use, and users with a text interface could
watch players who are using a tile interface, or vice versa,
without worrying about whether somebody's weird graphics
options are going to be okay on your display.

> Not only that, but I'd be playing in ASCII mode,
> which sparkles up my imagination in a way not even
> the fanciest of tilesets ever could.

I really don't see the difference there (if you're just
playing for yourself). The characters are symbols, just
like the tiles are symbols. They stand for the same thing
either way. (There's a larger difference, of course, if
you're playing for an audience. Tiles are easier for
your non-nethack-playing audience to understand, which
is either good or bad depending on WHY you're playing the
game while they watch. If you're trying to teach them
to play, tiles are probably better; if you're trying to
impress them with your 1337 5X111z, tty mode is very
obviously MUCH better.)

Don't get me wrong: I play almost entirely in tty mode
myself these days. I'm not saying tty mode isn't good,
especially for experienced players. It is good.

I'm just saying that having tiles available as an option
is also good, especially for people who are first learning
the game.

> I have no problem with graphics being part of the package.
> Some people do like them. The problem is the "be gone with
> the ASCII interface" and the "be gone with the vi-style
> keybindings" attitudes. Let there be choice.

I think you're overreacting. Most of the people who are
defending tilesets are NOT advocating removing ASCII mode
as an option. I did see one comment that could be interpreted
that way, but it was a brief comment, and if you read it in
context the person who said it was mainly concerned that the
ASCII mode wouldn't be attractive to new players, and very
probably the person behind it would be perfectly satisfied
with just having tiles as an option.

> A free software developer should code primarily to make
> the software as great as possible.

For the moment, let's accept that premise.

> Not to make it appeal to "new blood".

I think making the software as great as possible *implies*
making it at least somewhat attractive to new users.

> Especially if that means ditching the tried and true
> features that made the software great to begin with.

Removing features is usually bad. (I just wish the Gnome devs
could be made to understand that. Gah.) However, making some
of the harder-to-understand features optional and tucking them
away in an options dialog or maybe even a config file is NOT
necessarily bad.

This should be a mantra: "Defaults are for newbies. Preference
dialogs are for intermediate users. Config files are for advanced
users. Source code is for developers." But note that very large,
very detailed preference dialogs (like Firefox's about:config) are
really config files in disguise, at least for the purposes of this
mantra.

[Jonadab the Unsightly One]

On May 6, 10:18 am, Janis Papanagnou <janis_papanag...@hotmail.com>
wrote:

> (This posting had been influenced by the NH UI discussion but
> is [OT]. Just want to share...)
>
> Amazing what folks do with ASCII; e.g. animated pictures like
> http://tinyurl.com/6vkl969

And here I thought you were going to link to this:
http://www.jfedor.org/aaquake2/

[Jonadab the Unsightly One]

On May 6, 12:14 pm, ais523 <ais...@nethack4.org> wrote:
> I once accidentally installed a non-GUI version of VLC. Apparently the
> other libraries (notably aalib) on my system were sufficient for it to
> attempt to replay videos using ASCII art, and foreground and background
> colors; and in a full-screen terminal, I could sort-of make out what was
> going on. (Perhaps I should have decreased my font size.)

Getting a tileset version of NetHack to work with aalib
is left as an exercise.

[ais523]

On Sun, 06 May 2012 13:28:03 -0700, Jonadab the Unsightly One wrote:
> Just for example, using u for northwest, i for northeast, m for
> southeast, and n for southwest, with the hjkl, would have been MUCH
> better than the present setup.

I strongly disagree with that statement (although, with keys
reconfigurable, it's not so much of an issue nowadays). The big advantage
of hjkl in particular is that you can park your fingers on them while
playing and have one orthogonal direction to each finger. With your hand
in that position, m is very difficult to press. (u, i, and n aren't so
bad, though.) So you'd want m to be a rarely-used command like move. The
choice of keys-to-commands, in terms of how easy they are to remember,
doesn't really matter to experienced players because they can memorise
them, but in terms of how easy they are to press, can really make the
difference (I've heard Adeon is planning to make a keyboard layout where
all the keys are placed due to reduce finger movement and memorability is
irrelevant, and I think this is also the main reason people use vikeys
over numpad, other than not owning a numpad).

The rest of the post is pretty good, though.

--
ais523

[Janis Papanagnou]

On 06.05.2012 23:04, Jonadab the Unsightly One wrote:
> On May 6, 7:20 am, SM <kas...@ne-spamon.gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> A free software developer should code primarily to make
>> the software as great as possible.
>
> For the moment, let's accept that premise.
>
>> Not to make it appeal to "new blood".
>
> I think making the software as great as possible *implies*
> making it at least somewhat attractive to new users.

Erm, no. Sadly. Professional use is often supported by software
design that is contrary to what newbies may (or may not) expect;
keywords: mouse vs. keyboard, parsable output vs. screenshot, etc.
(Of course it's always possible to miserably fail in one or even
both directions WRT attractiveness.)

The problem with the "make the software as great as possible",
statement you're replying to, is that there's typically not a
single dimension of "greatness" identifiable.

Janis

[Rob Cypher]

Well, I suspect one aspect of greatness involves making the game
support graphics that were available back with CGA was the norm.

Nobody is suggesting ditching the ASCII mode; but it seems to me that
you're really limiting your audience if you don't at least throw in a
barebones graphic mode. There's not too many people these days
that want to sit there and learn what symbols mean what via pure
repetition. Most of you guys that prefer the ASCII mode started
playing this game 15-20 years ago, at least.

I've tried turning on some incredibly intelligent people onto this
game and the only ones that would stick with would only do so with
tiles. Nobody wanted to deal with the headache of memorizing ASCII
symbols. Frankly, it's unnessecary in this day and age. We aren't
using DOS, OS/2, or some outdated blend of Unix anymore.

This thing of calling people "stupid" when they don't want to memorize
symbols that were considered antiquated in 1992...is that supposed
to attract new players? Or would Raisse prefer that the already tiny
Nethack fanbase never grow and wither away into digital obscurity ala
Hack?

[Rob Cypher]

On Wed, 02 May 2012 10:08:06 +0200, Patric Mueller <bh...@bigfoot.com>
wrote:

>Rob Cypher <bal...@aol.com> wrote:
>> Well, I guess after 6 years of silence someone had to take the wheel.

>> But is there a build of this (or any of these newer variants) that
>> uses tiles in the same manner as 3.4.3? Unnethack doesn't really use
>> graphical monster tiles in its tile mode (among other things) and the
>
>UnNetHack has a slightly modified Vanilla tiles file bundled with its
>releases in addition to the Abigaba derived default tiles file.
>
>For the last release (4.0.0) I haven't had time to update that but I
>wouldn't mind if some tiles fan would update it before I can get to
>it.

Wait a minute, there's a Vanilla-style Tiles for UnNethack? How do you
access that?

[Rob Cypher]

On Sun, 06 May 2012 18:50:03 -0400, Rob Cypher <bal...@aol.com>
wrote:

Never mind, got it working. (I'm using 3.6.1, I presume trying to
load the Vanilla-style tiles file in 4.0.0 would crash the game or
something.)

It gives me a "cannot load tiles, using default tiles" error, but then
uses Vanilla-style tiles anyway.

The Abigaba one is the "enhanced" ASCII look, right?

[Rob Cypher]

On Sun, 06 May 2012 18:55:21 -0400, Rob Cypher <bal...@aol.com>

One question - what tiles need to be added for 4.0.0? I _might_ be
able to create appropriate 32x32 .png files.

[Janis Papanagnou]

On 06.05.2012 22:28, Jonadab the Unsightly One wrote:
> On May 6, 7:11 am, Janis Papanagnou <janis_papanag...@hotmail.com>
> wrote:
>> 5. how can the movement keys best be integrated in a game where
>> you have practically every key on the keyboard already used
>> (without sacrificing mnemonics for other keys)
>
> The mnemonics for other actions are not as important as the
> direction keys, because there isn't any other action you do
> anywhere near as often as moving.

I seem to disagree in your basic assumption. (You, or others, may
view that differently, I am sure. But I want to prove wrong that
[IMO inappropriate] generalization that you make here.) If you're
a newbie, and also in the very early game phase, movement steps
are mostly done very carefully, one step after the other. After a
while a player that knows Nethack's movement options will use the
various far-move and travel commands; it's one part of experience
to find out that you will have better chances to survive if doing
so. While the movement commands will certainly sum up to a larger
absolute number than the other commands that's not (IMO) reason
enough to complicate access to other commands or put other commands
on key positions with non-mnemonics; those other commands should
be accessible fast, and should be accessible by some mnemonic key.
Having to type #i<CR> to get the inventory items, just to name one
example, I'd find as bad as using the E(at) or D(rop) keys for the
direction. The extended commands set is already boring to use, IMO,
and also the multi-keystroke new menu system (that is certainly
helpful for newbies, granted) I have disabled in my setup.

> Also, and more importantly IMO,
> other keys can have their mnemonics chosen on an individual basis,
> rather than needing to be chosen as a group.

(Yes, what I called "compass rose layout" in my posting.)

> If the keys are
> picked over already, individual commands can still be chosen by
> flipping through synonyms, but finding a place where there's a
> group of keys together would be rather harder, perhaps impossible.

I agree. And I am sure the Devteam has done exactly that; how would
the selection of such words like "quaff" be explained otherwise.

> [...]

>
>>> With games that use ASDW for left/down/right/up, the diagonals
>>> are invariably Q, E, Z, and either X or C. Not ERCV or some jazz
>>> like that.
>>
>> That I consider a good decision for games that are solely movement
>> oriented and do not have dozens of other commands to support. I have
>> to ask you how you would have arranged the Apply, Search, Drop, Wear,
>> Quaff (arguable, but D for Drink is also as unavailable in your list)
>> and Eat commands?
>
> Apply is actually a rather awkward substitute for Use; I assume
> it's what they came up with after U was taken for diagonal movement.
> The fact that you didn't pick up on this proves my point:

I beg your pardon - what that I've done or omitted proves what?

Using U(se) for A(pply) would be fine, in my book. But then you would
have to sacrifice I(nventory) and O(pen) and M(ove) on an HJKL based
layout, or clarify what to do with the other currently used commands
in your QWE/ASD/ZXC movement suggestion.

> as long
> as you make up a mnemonic for them, the various other commands will
> be easy enough to learn and feel fairly natural.

Easily said.

> Movement is what
> should have first choice. Search could just as easily be Look.

L(ook) is as badly a choice as Q(uaff), IMO probably worse, but okay,
I've got used to "quaff" so I might get used to "look".

> Wear would be harder (Don and Equip being taken for movement), until
> you realize that Wear and PutOn are only separate because the devs
> were deliberately trying to make the interface confusing and hard.
> PutOn could just be used for armor as well as rings and such, with
> absolutely no negative impact on anything. (In fact, NetHack4 lets
> you use PutOn and Wear interchangeably. Nobody has yet complained
> about it, to my knowledge.)
>

> Quaff is such an obscure verb, [...big snip...]

> If you want another mnemonic letter for drinking other than Drink,
> I can suggest Swig or Guzzle or Chug or Imbibe, all of which are
> significantly more common words than Quaff.
>
> Better yet, Ingest would work for both eating and drinking, which
> reduces the number of commands by one and frees up a key slot.
> (Inventory could be Pack contents or Held items etc, or you
> could use lowercase i for inventory and uppercase I for Ingest,
> which isn't any more confusing than wield/Wear and pay/PutOn.)

You wrote so many words that I lost track whether your suggestion
is complete or has just covered a few of the simpler cases; I fear
the latter, if I collect what I found...

Q -> I
W -> P
E -> I
A -> U
D -> ???
Z -> ???
X -> ???
C -> ???

The first four choices are not bad, I think. So what do you suggest
for the other not unimportant missing commands; D, Z, X, and C ?

> Like I said, the individual command mnenomics aren't hard to
> devise.

I would agree if I would have seen at least the eight movement keys
that you have preferred all mapped. (Let alone the conflicts of the
other commands that will have to be resolved.)

> The thing that makes the movement keys harder to pick
> well is that they need to be picked as a group, together. They
> should've had priority.

For me it would be a sufficient solution to have the number pad for
that. Next best solution is the HJKL extension, because I prefer to
control the movement with my right hand.

Janis

[Janis Papanagnou]

On 07.05.2012 00:46, Rob Cypher wrote:
>
> Nobody is suggesting ditching the ASCII mode; but it seems to me that
> you're really limiting your audience if you don't at least throw in a
> barebones graphic mode.

I agree.

> There's not too many people these days
> that want to sit there and learn what symbols mean what via pure
> repetition.

It's not hard, though; not really something to learn. As I mentioned
somewhere upthread, even my young children had no problems, and were
even interested and keen to continue playing that game (in ASCII mode).

> Most of you guys that prefer the ASCII mode started
> playing this game 15-20 years ago, at least.

OTOH I have a friend who knows and plays the game that long, and he
is using tiles for some time now.

I really think it depends on the individual player, not their age.
And about their willingness to mentally accept non-state-of-the-art
"graphics". That's also why I agreed to your very first statement.

Janis

[Rob Cypher]

The first roguelike I played was ASCII (Rogue for DOS, I believe), so
I have some experience. But the 3.x versions of Nethack spoiled me on
tiles. I don't play any of the other roguelikes that don't support
either tiles or at least some sort of ANSI graphics mode. Unlike the
other folks here, I don't get much of a charge seeing a red letter
as a symbol for a demon. Sorry. :/

I don't mind the inclusion of an ASCII mode, but I don't understand
why some folks here are dead-set against a tiles mode. It's like
they would prefer the game to be near-unaccessible to first-time
players.

[Janis Papanagnou]

On 07.05.2012 02:23, Rob Cypher wrote:
>
> [...] It's like

> they would prefer the game to be near-unaccessible to first-time
> players.

As explained upthread, in this point I disagree; you maybe repel
some players with a specific mindset, but near-unaccessible is an
exaggeration. Though that doesn't invalidate what has been said
about the advantage of the existence of an alternative UI. An
abstract UI interface layer, technically speaking, that supports
many presentation UIs is good also from a software architecture
perspective.

Janis

[SM]

2012-05-06, Jonadab the Unsightly One wrote:
> On May 6, 7:20 am, SM <kas...@ne-spamon.gmail.com> wrote:
>> There are a lot of users who spend most of their "computer time"
>> inside various terminal emulators and virtual consoles
>
> Sure, but such people are without question very much
> in the minority, even among IT professionals, let alone
> the general public.

Sure. But it's not that uncommon among various free OS users.

>> (i.e. absolutely without graphical desktop)
>
> That's even deeper into the minority. Most terminal users use
> terminal windows within a graphical desktop.

True. Including me. I just like to muck around with fbterm at times.

>> In fact, I'm writing this post in a terminal emulator right now,
>
> In a terminal emulator within a graphical desktop environment?

Yes.

>> and from this very instance of urxvt I can telnet into a
>> NH server and be playing in a matter of seconds.
>
> As far as I know, nobody's suggesting that capability be removed.

You're right. I was implying the usefulness of that age old ASCII UI.

>> Not only that, but I'd be playing in ASCII mode,
>> which sparkles up my imagination in a way not even
>> the fanciest of tilesets ever could.
>
> I really don't see the difference there (if you're just
> playing for yourself).

Believe me, there's a world of difference. Also, I'm pretty sure most of
the Nethack players do play for themselves, not for the audience.

> I'm just saying that having tiles available as an option
> is also good, especially for people who are first learning
> the game.

That's what I've been saying from the start. Let there be choice.

> I think you're overreacting. Most of the people who are
> defending tilesets are NOT advocating removing ASCII mode
> as an option.

I admit. It just shocked me profoundly as an idea :D

>> A free software developer should code primarily to make
>> the software as great as possible.
>
> For the moment, let's accept that premise.
>
>> Not to make it appeal to "new blood".
>
> I think making the software as great as possible *implies*
> making it at least somewhat attractive to new users.

That's just one side of "greatness". That's why there is a lot of
forking in the world of free software. People have different opinions of
what is great and what is not.

--
:wq

[SM]

2012-05-06, Janis Papanagnou wrote:
> On 06.05.2012 23:04, Jonadab the Unsightly One wrote:
>> On May 6, 7:20 am, SM <kas...@ne-spamon.gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> A free software developer should code primarily to make
>>> the software as great as possible.
>>
>> For the moment, let's accept that premise.
>>
>>> Not to make it appeal to "new blood".
>>
>> I think making the software as great as possible *implies*
>> making it at least somewhat attractive to new users.
>
> Erm, no. Sadly. Professional use is often supported by software
> design that is contrary to what newbies may (or may not) expect;
> keywords: mouse vs. keyboard, parsable output vs. screenshot, etc.

True. The old school text editors (vim, emacs, for instance) are
considered great software for a user that has the patience to overcome
the initial steep learning curve. A user without the patience/motivation
for the job will inevitably miss the said greatness of these apps.

> The problem with the "make the software as great as possible",
> statement you're replying to, is that there's typically not a
> single dimension of "greatness" identifiable.

QFT.

--
:wq

[Rob Cypher]

It's not an exaggeration when you consider that the current generation
of gamers grew up on 32-bit gaming consoles (ie PSX, Dreamcast) and
started out on PCs with (typically) WinXP. The "ASCII" look, to them,
is almost akin to playing a "text adventure" game.

ASCII should not be the fore-front of Nethack's GUI, IMO. We aren't
going back to machines that can only run on 640k conventional memory.

[Capt. Cave Man]

One of the things nethack did/does is teach a young, new computer user
how to use the cursor keys and other keyboard navigation techniques. This
is important if you actually taught your kid how to do a spreadsheet or
other field type data entry form work. You should not let that skill
evaporate.

Just like someone can use the MAME source code to investigate CPU
emulation codesets. stop crying that it isn't something you think it
should be. It is what it is and isn't what it isn't.

If you want "that thing", then YOU write it, and leave our staple alone.

[Rob Cypher]

I don't think people are going to play Nethack so they can learn how
to use cursor keys. You're stretching it a bit to defend an arachic
GUI.

No wonder why the DevTeam left. Seems like some of you supposed
"hardcore Nethack fanatics" are incapable of change or fear it.

[Janis Papanagnou]

Am 08.05.2012 09:45, schrieb Rob Cypher:
>
> No wonder why the DevTeam left. Seems like some of you supposed
> "hardcore Nethack fanatics" are incapable of change or fear it.

By lack of arguments and understanding arguments the topic seems
to be escalating, verbally and by content.

Janis

[Capt. Cave Man]

Again, you missed the references. I referenced MAME. In that app are
emulators fore nearly every processor that came down the pike. It is
quite pertinent to someone on a computer science educational path, which
a lot of kids are. I referenced nethack and keyboard use, because if you
study computers, you WILL be using command line interfaces AND ASCII.

I started on a rare 186 and then a nice 286 and worked up. IfItaught my
son computers, I would start with BASIC and an old Tandy or Timex. It is
an important part of the process. You missed it I suppose.

Holier than thou dopes who have never held anything but a mouse and
want to only have 'fun' with a computer know nothing of the roots or
'underpinnings' that make it up.

I suggested a graphical front end with a nethack engine under it YEARS
AGO. Way back when DOOM was just coming out. And before Vulture's Eye.
Vulture's eye is already as good as it gets as this game is turn by turn
and movement by movement based. That will not change. So the interpreter
type GUI front ends already exist and already ARE the proper way to
utilize the base engine and get graphical depth of play, as it were.

YOU are jaded, and nothing more. Particuarly NOT open minded.

Leave the nethack engine alone, and build the GUI front ends completely
separately, just as has been the case thus far. You cannot change that
without changing the turn by turn basic paradigm of the MAIN game engine.
So you are stuck.

That is my vote.

We do not need to do the "tell it where you want to go with a mouse
click" and *it* walks you over that way, where there is no longer a move
for move answerability involved.

Go play Starcraft if you want that.

[ais523]

On Sun, 06 May 2012 19:17:43 -0400, Rob Cypher wrote:
> One question - what tiles need to be added for 4.0.0? I _might_ be able
> to create appropriate 32x32 .png files.

Not directly ontopic (and not an answer to the question), but I find
Slash'EM a useful source of tiles for variants. There are so many
ridiculous things in Slash'EM that it's rare that none of them fit
whatever you want to add.

(It is somewhat less useful as a source for new monsters/items, of
course. Although Un copied the Black Market from it, and I'm not
completely opposed to the idea.)

--
ais523

[Jonadab the Unsightly One]

On May 6, 7:17 pm, Rob Cypher <bals...@aol.com> wrote:

> One question - what tiles need to be added for 4.0.0? I
> _might_ be able to create appropriate 32x32 .png files.

The first step would be to implement a UI that can actually
*display* tiles, I should think.

One supposes it would be designed to support different tile
sizes (not different sizes within the same set of tiles, I mean,
but different sets with different sizes). The existing sets of
tiles from 3.4.3 could be used during initial development and
then once it's working more tilesets could be created.

As far as what sizes tiles should be, I think it'll depend on
the user's screen resolution and whether they mind having
to scroll around the map. Personally I would probably want
the whole map (up to, what, 80x25 tiles?) to fit in 1600x1200
*minus* the size of whatever auxilliary stuff also has to fit in
the same window as the map. (Anything that can be opened
in a separate window, however, could go on my second
monitor.) YMMV. Although, it's probably moot for me at
this point, as I'm pretty well accustomed to tty mode now.

[Raisse the Thaumaturge]

Rob Cypher wrote:

> Nobody is suggesting ditching the ASCII mode;

Er, you were:

>Rob Cypher wrote:
>
>> Nethack has to evolve past the ASCII phase! Or at least make tiles
>> mandatory!

> This thing of calling people "stupid" when they don't want to memorize
> symbols that were considered antiquated in 1992...is that supposed
> to attract new players?

I wish people (not just you) would make a difference between "memorize" (as
a standalone thing, like the alphabet or the multiplication tables) and
"learn" (i.e. by doing). I never sat down with a list "h = left, j = down, k
= up, l = right" and memorized it, and yet vi keys are now second nature to
me.

> Or would Raisse prefer that the already tiny
> Nethack fanbase never grow and wither away into digital obscurity ala
> Hack?

No, I would just prefer that the existing old-school Nethack fanbase would
not be turned off by "mandatory" tiles. I know that I'd never play again if
ASCII was removed as an option.

Raisse, killed by a rock troll, while helpless

--
Status of Raisse (piously neutral): Level 8 HP 63(67) AC -3, fast.
LegoHack: http://www.valdyas.org/irina/stuff/legohack/

[Jorgen Grahn]

On Fri, 2012-05-04, David Melik wrote:

> On 05/01/2012 08:41 PM, Rob Cypher wrote:
>> Well, I guess after 6 years of silence someone had to take the wheel.

...
>
> I do not believe this is a real new version of Nethack. I will wait for
> a release by the development team.

I partly agree. All the recent activity here is great, but it doesn't
feel right to just hijack the Nethack "brand". Has anyone mailed or
phoned Pat Rankin and said:

"OK, you guys did a good job, but you're not producing anything now
and we don't think you will again. We're going ahead calling
ourselves the rightful heirs. Do you think you or the other Devteam
members can help us in some way? PS. We're not stupid and we care
about things like game balance."

(I hope such a conversation /has/ happened; I've not read all the
messages.)

/Jorgen

--
// Jorgen Grahn <grahn@ Oo o. . .
\X/ snipabacken.se> O o .

[Capt. Cave Man]

On 11 May 2012 14:06:52 GMT, Jorgen Grahn <grahn...@snipabacken.se>
wrote:

+1

There is a reason for the user license.

If hey are following it. More power to them.


If not, all these (not your views) amount to are excuses for character
compromises..

[deltopia]

On Friday, May 11, 2012 11:56:06 AM UTC-4, Capt. Cave Man wrote:
>
> There is a reason for the user license.
>
> If hey are following it. More power to them.
>
>

Basically, the NetHack GPL (
http://nethackwiki.com/wiki/NetHack_General_Public_License )
says that anyone is basically allowed to copy, edit, modify,
and distribute any form of NetHack, modified in any way he
or she sees fit, as long as the license is retained intact.

So, the NetHack4 team has that one covered. Legally, the
license at least says explicitly that they're good to go.

--
Del
(Two-month vacation from NetHack in progress... damn
grad school.)

[Rast]

Jonadab the Unsightly One wrote...
> Dev One: "Okay, D for Drink..."
> Dev Two: "Wait, D is already Drop."
> Dev One: "Fine, so shift-D for Drink."
> Dev Three: "No, dude, I've got this idea for a really great
> time-saving feature where you Drop a whole bunch
> of things at once, by selecting them from an inventory
> list. I want shift-D for that."

That's the only kind of dropping I do in nethack. Lowercase d is
wasted as far as I'm concerned.

[Raisse the Thaumaturge]

AmEye wrote:

> Capt. Cave Man <ItIsSoEasyAC...@upyers.org> wrote in
> news:olrhq7h6j9l1gjbjr...@4ax.com:

>> We do not need to do the "tell it where you want to go with a mouse
>> click" and *it* walks you over that way, where there is no longer a
>> move for move answerability involved.
>

> Er, with apologies for taking this thread (even more) off-topic,
> isn't that *exactly* what the travel command is for?

But the travel command is done with the *keyboard*! Obsolete!

Raisse, killed by a newt, while helpless

[Jonadab the Unsightly One]

I will admit to occasionally dropping just one thing,
and the lowercase d is slightly faster for that if you
have the inventory letter already memorized. But
yeah, uppercase D is the more frequent action.

[Jonadab the Unsightly One]

On May 13, 4:53 pm, Raisse the Thaumaturge <rai...@valdyas.org> wrote:
> > Er, with apologies for taking this thread (even more) off-topic,
> > isn't that *exactly* what the travel command is for?
>
> But the travel command is done with the *keyboard*! Obsolete!

In tiled versions (e.g., the Qt build of 3.4.3), you can use
either the keyboard or the mouse to specify the destination
of the travel command. If it's more than about ten tiles
away from your present location, the mouse is faster.
The same holds true for farlooking at something three
quarters of the way across the map seen by telepathy,
and for controlled teleporting from the down stairs to
the up stairs or vice versa, and other similar actions
where you need to specify a point on the map that's
quite far from the cursor's starting point.

Mind you, the mouse is orders of magnitude slower
for practically everything else, or about the same for
a few things (like opening doors), so it's really not
worth playing a tiled build if all you want it for is
a slightly faster travel command.

[Capt. Cave Man]

On Sun, 13 May 2012 22:53:08 +0200, Raisse the Thaumaturge
<rai...@valdyas.org> wrote:

>AmEye wrote:
>
>> Capt. Cave Man <ItIsSoEasyAC...@upyers.org> wrote in
>> news:olrhq7h6j9l1gjbjr...@4ax.com:
>
>>> We do not need to do the "tell it where you want to go with a mouse
>>> click" and *it* walks you over that way, where there is no longer a
>>> move for move answerability involved.
>>
>> Er, with apologies for taking this thread (even more) off-topic,
>> isn't that *exactly* what the travel command is for?
>
>But the travel command is done with the *keyboard*! Obsolete!
>
> Raisse, killed by a newt, while helpless

Ding!

[Corey]

To: Capt. Cave Man
Re: Re: The recently "taken over" Nethack project (aka 4) - when will any
By: Capt. Cave Man to rec.games.roguelike.nethack on Sun May 13 2012 05:00 pm

err, went the trolly?

[Janis Papanagnou]

On 13.05.2012 23:21, Jonadab the Unsightly One wrote:
> On May 13, 4:53 pm, Raisse the Thaumaturge <rai...@valdyas.org> wrote:
>>> Er, with apologies for taking this thread (even more) off-topic,
>>> isn't that *exactly* what the travel command is for?
>>
>> But the travel command is done with the *keyboard*! Obsolete!
>
> In tiled versions (e.g., the Qt build of 3.4.3), you can use
> either the keyboard or the mouse to specify the destination
> of the travel command. If it's more than about ten tiles
> away from your present location, the mouse is faster.

How do you use the keyboard, if you say it's slower than mouse?

> The same holds true for farlooking at something three
> quarters of the way across the map seen by telepathy,
> and for controlled teleporting from the down stairs to
> the up stairs or vice versa, and other similar actions
> where you need to specify a point on the map that's
> quite far from the cursor's starting point.

(The same above asked question for far-looking and teleporting.)

Hint: Ever used HJKL, etc. to move the cursor more than 1 square?
Ever used '<', '>', '_', '{', etc., as super-fast keys to the most
common movement and teleportation targets? - Nothing beats those!

(Moving your hands and fingers away from the keyboard and back
to the keyboard is slow.)

Janis