Ideas to improve usability and avoid repetition
Sonja Kisa
wonder if there is any way to change the defaults to improve usability
and simplify the game interface.
Coloured Hit Points and Hunger:
I would like my hit points to turn different colours as they go lower,
e.g. red when I'm under 20% or whatever. Likewise with my hunger
level. Is this an option I can set?
Simplified Looting:
I have to type l, y, o, a just to loot a chest. I find this
ridiculous, since 100% of the time, I always grab all the contents of
the chest, and I wish I only had to type l instead of these four to
see the contents. I understand that at higher levels there are other
ways of using chests, but there should be some sort of "simplified
looting" option I can set on or off.
Smart Autopickup:
Can I tell it to autopickup specific sub-type items? For example,
autopickup all food items, except corpses. And autopickup lichen
corpses. Or autopickup all gems except grey ones. Or autopickup all
arrows that came directly out of my quiver when retrieving them after
battle. Maybe it could be called "smart autopickup" and it would do
all these things for you, on top of the usual autopickups you can
uncomment in the defaults file.
Travel Through Pet:
For some reason, using _ (or clicking on a destination in VGA mode)
doesn't work if my pet is in the way. I think it should automatically
walk through the pet to displace it so you can get to your
destination. Or at least have this as an option you can set on or off.
Kick Doors on Click:
I love kicking doors instead of opening them, when I know it's not a
shop. In the VGA version, you only have to click on a door to open it.
I wish there was a way to set this default function to kick instead of
open. So you can kick adjacent doors by clicking on them.
Is there any way of doing these options or any talk of adding them in
future versions?
Peace,
Sonja
www.kisa.ca
Bruce
> Here are a few commands I would like to "improve" in the game. I
> wonder if there is any way to change the defaults to improve usability
> and simplify the game interface.
> Coloured Hit Points and Hunger:
> I would like my hit points to turn different colours as they go lower,
> e.g. red when I'm under 20% or whatever. Likewise with my hunger
> level. Is this an option I can set?
No, but a patch exists. Someone can point you to it, I'm sure.
> Simplified Looting:
> I have to type l, y, o, a just to loot a chest. I find this
> ridiculous, since 100% of the time, I always grab all the contents of
> the chest, and I wish I only had to type l instead of these four to
> see the contents.
First of all, grabbing all the items in a chest is liable to harm you
down the line. You're picking up items you don't need, possibly
burdening yourself or picking up a loadstone. That's silly. Secondly,
you don't always want to see what's in a chest. Sometimes (often, if
you use stashes), you just want to put things into the chest, not take
them out.
> I understand that at higher levels there are other ways of using
> chests, but there should be some sort of "simplified looting" option I
> can set on or off.
Have you tried all the different menutypes?
> Smart Autopickup:
> Can I tell it to autopickup specific sub-type items? For example,
> autopickup all food items, except corpses. And autopickup lichen
> corpses. Or autopickup all gems except grey ones. Or autopickup all
> arrows that came directly out of my quiver when retrieving them after
> battle. Maybe it could be called "smart autopickup" and it would do
> all these things for you, on top of the usual autopickups you can
> uncomment in the defaults file.
No, you can't do these things. Generally, it's not a big deal, as the
exceptions are few and far between. Angband has a system allowing you
to inscribe certain items with commands, one of which is autopickup,
causing you to automatically pick up that item when you walk over it.
It's extremely useful for ammo you've fired, though I don't miss it for
anything else.
> Kick Doors on Click:
> I love kicking doors instead of opening them, when I know it's not a
> shop. In the VGA version, you only have to click on a door to open it.
> I wish there was a way to set this default function to kick instead of
> open. So you can kick adjacent doors by clicking on them.
Moving onto a door would kick it? That's fairly reckless. After the
first few levels, there's really no reason to kick down doors. You wake
up monsters in the vicinity when you do so and there's no real benefit.
--
Bruce Labbate | The US has a three-branch judicial
shiftless layabout | system which is weak against water
| Pokemon and adds a +7 to STR.
| - Lowtax
james
Sonja Kisa <marras...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>Coloured Hit Points and Hunger:
>
>I would like my hit points to turn different colours as they go lower,
>e.g. red when I'm under 20% or whatever. Likewise with my hunger
>level. Is this an option I can set?
There is a patch. Wish it could have made it into 3.4.2.
>Simplified Looting:
>
>I have to type l, y, o, a just to loot a chest. I find this
>ridiculous, since 100% of the time, I always grab all the contents of
>the chest
That's what you do. I'd say it's dangerous, potentially fatal,
behavior. The container sorting was good, though.
>Smart Autopickup:
>
>Can I tell it to autopickup specific sub-type items?
I would really like to be able to just autopickup arrows, without
picking up all weapons.
>Travel Through Pet:
So, if the pet is asleep or paralyzed, should it go ahead and kill it
for you as well?
>Kick Doors on Click:
Another good way to get killed.
Yashichi
> Sonja Kisa <marras...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>>Smart Autopickup:
>>
>>Can I tell it to autopickup specific sub-type items?
>
You can set this in nethack.cnf. For example, I have a line in mine that
says
OPTIONS=autopickup,pickup_types:$?/=+!
So I grab gold, spell books, wands, rings, scrolls, and potions, but
nothing else unless I explicitly do so with [,]. This keeps me from
grabbing anything too heavy, especially anything too heavy to put
down again. (I could add amulets there too, but just haven't for
laziness's sake.) Turning off autopickup before wandering through a store
full of scrolls, though, is essential.
See Eric Raymond's guide for a list of all the map symbols that you can
use with pickup_types.
> I would really like to be able to just autopickup arrows, without
> picking up all weapons.
Hear, hear! I've often wished the same (for darts and shuriken mostly).
But the way the game is currently written for symbols and autopickup,
missile weapons would, I believe, need to be given a different symbol and
class than other weapons. That would likely be a bones-file breaker,
wouldn't it?
JH
"Yashichi" <dev...@127.0.0.1> wrote in message
news:pan.2003.11.14....@127.0.0.1...
> > I would really like to be able to just autopickup arrows, without
> > picking up all weapons.
>
> Hear, hear! I've often wished the same (for darts and shuriken mostly).
> But the way the game is currently written for symbols and autopickup,
> missile weapons would, I believe, need to be given a different symbol and
> class than other weapons. That would likely be a bones-file breaker,
> wouldn't it?
There exists a patch, called "pickup_thrown" or such, I found it linked to
Ali's site, this markes anything you have thrown or fired with a special bit
and then you always pick it up. It makes rogues and rangers a bit more fun.
Does anyone remember off the tops of thier heads who made this patch and
where it can be found?
--
-JH
Ascended V,A,W(x2),B,K,Ro
Martin Read
>Simplified Looting:
>
>I have to type l, y, o, a just to loot a chest. I find this
>ridiculous, since 100% of the time, I always grab all the contents of
>the chest,
How many characters have you lost due to being burdened because you
picked up a loadstone?
>and I wish I only had to type l instead of these four to
>see the contents. I understand that at higher levels there are other
>ways of using chests,
"higher levels"? Stashes become useful quite quickly.
>but there should be some sort of "simplified
>looting" option I can set on or off.
>
>Smart Autopickup:
>
>Can I tell it to autopickup specific sub-type items? For example,
>autopickup all food items, except corpses. And autopickup lichen
>corpses.
Even ordinary food is heavy.
>Or autopickup all gems except grey ones. Or autopickup all
>arrows that came directly out of my quiver when retrieving them after
>battle. Maybe it could be called "smart autopickup" and it would do
>all these things for you, on top of the usual autopickups you can
>uncomment in the defaults file.
This is really a very large amount of work.
>Travel Through Pet:
>
>For some reason, using _ (or clicking on a destination in VGA mode)
>doesn't work if my pet is in the way. I think it should automatically
>walk through the pet to displace it so you can get to your
>destination. Or at least have this as an option you can set on or off.
Your pet might not want to get out of your way (displacement of pets is
not 100% reliable), or it might be asleep, or paralysed, or busy eating,
or stuck in a pit or a bear trap.
>Kick Doors on Click:
>
>I love kicking doors instead of opening them, when I know it's not a
>shop.
You love being robbed blind by nymphs?
m.
--
\_\/_/| Martin Read - my opinions are my own. share them if you wish.
\ / | a passer by was staring deep into your open skirt as we lay there
\/ | in the dirt as we lay there in the dirt should we make ourselves do
------+ painful things? and do they really hurt? -- Naevus, "Harm"
james
Yashichi <dev...@127.0.0.1> wrote:
>
>
>On Thu, 13 Nov 2003 19:18:59 +0000, james wrote:
>
>> Sonja Kisa <marras...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>>
>>>Smart Autopickup:
>>>
>>>Can I tell it to autopickup specific sub-type items?
>>
>
>You can set this in nethack.cnf. For example, I have a line in mine that
I think you missed the point. You can't set this to pick up just
arrows but not all weapons for instance. Since I pretty much only
play rangers, I'd really like that.
Another example might be to just pickup rations but not corpses.
>This keeps me from
>grabbing anything too heavy, especially anything too heavy to put
>down again.
There's pickup_burden also.
>> I would really like to be able to just autopickup arrows, without
>> picking up all weapons.
>
>Hear, hear! I've often wished the same (for darts and shuriken mostly).
So you do understand the question after all.
How about "item has been in your inventory?" (Sure it's a
bones-file-breaker, but if it was in an official release, that wouldn't
be a problem).
JPEG
It's by Roderick Schertler and if it hasn't been moved it should still be
on Ali's site (a recommendable collection of patches) under the 3.4.0
section (it hasn't been updated, but it's not affected by the version changes).
It's a really cool patch! Simple and awesome!
Unluckily Roderick implemented it in a reworked version of the NetHack
source with markers for where new code may go. He did so in the hope of this
new system being adopted by other coders, but it hasn't (too much work, really,
and not worth the effort, IMHO), so the patch has to be applied manually.
The same is valid for another nice patch, the BOTL_HELD-patch (adds a "Held"
flag on the bottom line, useful for eels or owlbears).
jpeg
David Damerell
>Coloured Hit Points and Hunger:
Patch exists. Me, I can't stand that angry fruit salad effect; when I play
Angband variants, one of the first things I do is to comment out all the
colour gack in the monster memory.
>Simplified Looting:
>I have to type l, y, o, a just to loot a chest. I find this
>ridiculous, since 100% of the time, I always grab all the contents of
>the chest,
That's a bug in your playing style.
In practice finger bindings quickly come to the fore to deal with these
cases. The problem I have is now an opposite one; my finger bindings for
"take things out of a container" and "put things in" are so learned I find
it extremely difficult to carry out both operations in a single turn.
>I love kicking doors instead of opening them, when I know it's not a
>shop.
Ill-advised; later on you'll find sleeping nymphs are often best left to
lie (or carefully lined up and peppered with missile weapons).
--
David Damerell <dame...@chiark.greenend.org.uk> Kill the tomato!
dogscoff
there's really no reason to kick down doors. You wake
up monsters in the vicinity when you do so and there's no real
benefit.
Sure there is: Being able to walk through the door diagonally. Maybe
there's a trap or boulder in front of the doorway, so you have to shut
the door and kick it in in order to go through. Also, whenever i come
across a (non-temple) altar I kick in all the doors nearby so I can
get go though diagonally and get back there more quickly (keep those
corpses fresh!)
Not that any of this has much to do with the topic in hand... I
approve of most of the suggestions although I agree that you need to
see the contents of a chest before grabbing the contents. As a
compromise, what would be wrong with #looting the chest and then being
immediately presented with the chest's contents? To put items in it
you could simply hit d/D for drop and then be prompted "drop item(s)
in the chest or on top of it?"
Maybe the autopickup could be worked into it somehow- you open the
chest and if autopickup$!\? is on, all cash, potions, wands and
scrolls get automatically grabbed.
Oh, and thanks for the advice about how to work autopickup- I'll
definitely be making use of that.
N.B.
Of course, I usually play a wizard so for 'kick' read 'force bolt'.
Especially good fun when there are a few beasties behind a door- extra
splat for your magic power=-)
Boudewijn Waijers
> Oh, and thanks for the advice about how to work autopickup- I'll
> definitely be making use of that.
You could have read this earlier, if you'd taken some time and read the
Guidebook, as the RNG intended...
It's not too late, though! Get your copy of the Guidebook and read it now!
There's many more tips in it that you might not yet know.
--
Boudewijn Waijers (bwaijers at home.nl).
There are 10 types of people in the world:
those who understand binary, and those who don't.
Rob Ellwood
>
> Coloured Hit Points and Hunger:
I agree that this would be an improvement. I can't help but
notice that the Dev Team hasn't already implemented it. Conclusion:
the Dev Team sees this as a move in the wrong direction. It would
make the game easier, which is generally the Wrong Thing. Counter
argument:
Killing a player with a double swarm of rothes is a legit
kill. Having a player kill himself with his own stupidity is also
a legit kill. Killing a player...
...by deliberately having a badly flawed user interface...
... is NOT a legit kill.
Arguing that this badly flawed user interface improves the
game implies that the user interface should be made even worse. Add
more trash messages! Six or more per turn! Completely remove the
hunger status from the status line! Have experienced players starve
to death in mid-game without ever realizing that they were hungry!
> Simplified Looting:
In the unlikely event I finish the de-irkification patch,
I might chop one keystroke out of the looting procedure.
> Smart Autopickup:
>
> Can I tell it to autopickup specific sub-type items? For example,
> autopickup all food items, except corpses. And autopickup lichen
> corpses. Or autopickup all gems except grey ones. Or autopickup all
> arrows that came directly out of my quiver when retrieving them after
> battle.
Autopickup of stuff that you've dropped, or of stuff that
would stack with items you're already carrying, should be fine.
Separating "food items" into "corpses" and "non-corpse food items"
should be fine. For me, that gives 90% of the benefit of smart
autopickup.
After that, specifying autopickup at the "elven short swords,
but not dwarven" level of detail doesn't look worth it to me. I'm
not concerned about the work required, just how the user interface
would be big and bulky. You would often be specifying the pickup
behaviour for dozens of different items, and you would sometimes be
changing all these in mid-game.
> Travel Through Pet:
>
> For some reason, using _ (or clicking on a destination in VGA mode)
> doesn't work if my pet is in the way. I think it should automatically
> walk through the pet to displace it so you can get to your
> destination.
The travel command has a few rough spots. For a number of
cases, it screams in fear, falls to the ground, and dies. This
makes it less useful than it could be.
> Kick Doors on Click:
The auto-open patch opens doors when you walk into them.
Once you start using it, it's hard to play without it.
--
Rob Ellwood
Kent Paul Dolan
>> Simplified Looting:
> In the unlikely event I finish the de-irkification patch,
> I might chop one keystroke out of the looting procedure.
Before you start, nobody seems yet to have mentioned the crucial
consideration: the present interface was probably designed for,
and _works_ for, multiple containers in a single grid position.
I can't believe it will be the least bit of fun to change that
behavior without breaking something unexpectedly. I vote to
leave it alone. In an entire game, stashes excluded, you probably
#loot something at most 40 or 50 times; even 150 extra keystrokes
is sort of trivial in a game that for most of us runs 50K or more
moves if we ever chance to "win" one.
xanthian.
In an entire "xanthian" game of course, I rarely live long enough
to see the third chest or box, which _may_ color my thinking.
Think of it this way: creation in its infinite potential complexity,
_may_ have provided for _each_ of us, at least one village in which
we can be the official village idiot, and in rgrn, I may well have
found my destined slot in life at last. Please excuse my occasional
overexuberant basking.
--
Posted via Mailgate.ORG Server - http://www.Mailgate.ORG
Rob Ellwood
>
> "Rob Ellwood" <rob.e...@shaw.ca> wrote:
>
> >> Simplified Looting:
>
> > In the unlikely event I finish the de-irkification patch,
> > I might chop one keystroke out of the looting procedure.
>
> and _works_ for, multiple containers in a single grid position.
Yup. And, for me, the present interface doesn't work too
well. When I'm dropping stuff off, I tend to put it all into the
first container on the square, even if that's a bag dropped on the
same square as my stash.
Thus, replace "loot this particular container? y/n" with
"loot which container? a) a large box b)..." for the special case
where there's more than one container on a square.
--
Rob Ellwood
james
Rob Ellwood <rob.e...@shaw.ca> wrote:
> Yup. And, for me, the present interface doesn't work too
>well. When I'm dropping stuff off, I tend to put it all into the
>first container on the square, even if that's a bag dropped on the
>same square as my stash.
This is one of the few instances where I'm likely to have a BoH
explosion.
dogscoff
> Guidebook, as the RNG intended...
>
> It's not too late, though! Get your copy of the Guidebook and read it now!
> There's many more tips in it that you might not yet know.
Yes, thanks for your sarcasm, but I have read the guidebook several
times. For the most part it is excellent but the bits about making
changes to the defaults.nh file are next to useless, as are the
comments in the file itself. Whenever I have tried to make changes in
the past, the game has not acepted them. I assume I just had the
syntax wrong, but nowhere does it tell you the correct syntax. The
best you can do is try to copy the examples given then wonder why it
doesn't work, then just give up and restore the file to its original
state. Even simply uncommenting some of the suggested entries causes
the game to throw errors at me on startup.
I'm playing the factory-compiled windoze version on a pair of fairly
predictable WinXP systems, so it's not some kooky home-compiler
problem. Of course I'm sure plenty of other ppl have had completely
different experiences, but that's how it is for me.
Anyway, with the comments in this thread, I may finally have the
problem licked.
David Damerell
>Sonja Kisa wrote:
>>Coloured Hit Points and Hunger:
>I agree that this would be an improvement. I can't help but
>notice that the Dev Team hasn't already implemented it. Conclusion:
>the Dev Team sees this as a move in the wrong direction.
Unjustified conclusion. Two alternative possibilities are that they can't
be bothered, or that they dislike angry fruit salad on the status line, or
a combination of the above.
Topi Linkala
Don't drop annotations and don't whine.
If you have a problem write us what is it. Give an example, not just
vague description.
You'll find that the denizens of this newsgroup are actually very
friendly and answers your questions.
So if you have any problem on setting options in the defaults.nh tell
exactly what you've written and what was the error message you got. It
could even be that there is a bug in the nethack.
Yours: Topi
--
"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are
always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts."
- Bertrand Russell
"How come he didn't put 'I think' at the end of it?" - Anonymous
Kevin Wayne
Fri, 14 Nov 2003 23:59:37 +0100:
>You could have read this earlier, if you'd taken some time and read the
>Guidebook, as the RNG intended...
>
>It's not too late, though! Get your copy of the Guidebook and read it now!
>There's many more tips in it that you might not yet know.
You know what, though, something needs to be done about the Guidebook.
I find it unreadable (that is, straight through), and I'm a "read the
instructions first" kind of guy.
The main problem is that technical stuff is mixed in with gameplay
stuff. As a tiles player (Horrors!), knowing what an & is is
completely irrelevant (unless I'm looking to bless-genocide). The
whole thing seems to be badly organized, although I confess I have no
grand scheme to reorganize it better.
It would probably be helpful to have a well-hyperlinked version--not
merely index-to-section links, but keyword links, so that if you're
reading about dwarves and you read something about dwarvish armor
being superior, you can click on armor and jump to the armor section.
Boudewijn's post was very polite and helpful, so I'm not reacting to
that, but a lot of questions tend to get a terse "Read the Guidebook"
answer, which I think is a touch unfair with the Guidebook presently
as a written analogue to Nethack's Gehennom.
--
Kevin Wayne
"Stark raving sane."
-- Rosencrantz and Guildenstern
Rob Ellwood
>
> ...something needs to be done about the Guidebook. I find
> it unreadable (that is, straight through), and I'm a "read the
> instructions first" kind of guy.
There's an HTML version, which is a step better. I think
that the Falcon's Eye version is a step better again. I once did
up a two page intro for new players:
http://members.shaw.ca/rob.ellwood/NethackQuickStart.txt
--
Rob Ellwood
Eric Wright
I'm not going to argue whether or not the guidebook needs updating,
but realize that it dates from the 1980s. There was no such thing as
a URL back then, and tiles? Puh... we don't have no steenken tiles.
There was ASCII, and ... there was ASCII.
So, yes, it may be woefully out of date, but it harkens back to the
roots of nethack in content (modified to add content when the game
itself adds content). As for referencing character letters... you
have it but don't really need it. The flip side of that is someone
who needs it can't find it in the Guidebook. Then, they're left
source diving, which is a good bit more difficult than Guidebook
diving...
Not to belabor this point, but that's like saying "I only ever use
original roguelike commands, never the number pad. Take that
information out of the guidebook, it's useless!" I'm a
dyed-in-the-wool-hardcore-vi user, but I use the number pad whenever
possible because the square layout is more easily ingrained in my
fingers than the slanty diagonal rhomboid that is 'hjklyubn'. Both
are perfectly valid ways of playing, so help for both methods should
be included in the Guidebook.
In short, I agree that a restructuring of the Guidebook would be a
welcome addition, but the content contained in the Guidebook is there
to cover all the bases, and ASCII symbols for monsters is about as
basic as you get.
Ah, well, that's more than my 2 zorkmids...
E
Boudewijn Waijers
> Boudewijn's post was very polite and helpful, so I'm not reacting to
> that, but a lot of questions tend to get a terse "Read the Guidebook"
> answer, which I think is a touch unfair with the Guidebook presently
> as a written analogue to Nethack's Gehennom.
The Guidebook has a "source code", which is written in troff, if I'm not
mistaken. Troff is the unix ASCII predecessor of LaTeX (sort of).
The main advantage of troff is that you can do all your editing and layout
in ASCII, which is portable over systems, unlike, say, Word, which isn't
available on all platforms.
I do agree, though, that it could be converted to LaTeX (not really worth
the trouble), or HTML, which does offer some new possibilities. As for
layout, troff is much more versatile than HTML, though.
--
Boudewijn Waijers (kroisos at home.nl).
"Perhaps your sole purpose in life is to serve as a warning to others."
dogscoff
Sorry if I came across as whining, but was only defending myself
against a non-inflammatory but unignorable allegation that I had come
in here complaining without having forst read the manual.
> If you have a problem write us what is it. Give an example, not just
> vague description.
OK, I'll do that in a later post. I'll have to re-discover what my
exact complaint was- it's a while since I tried and gave up on
defaults.nh, so I don't remember the specifics.
BTW the change to the autopickup line suggested a few posts ago worked
for me. My thanks to the poster.
> You'll find that the denizens of this newsgroup are actually very
> friendly and answers your questions.
That is what I have observed so far, although there is a tendency to
leap savagely upon ppl with innocent but apparently obvious or
well-documented questions. I thought it easier to simply hit
@Oac<enter> at the beginning of every game to set my preferences than
to get my head bitten off for asking a question that could be answered
by (Quote:) "reading the guidebook as the RNG suggested".
I've seen how things can escalate round here so let me point out now
that I don't want to be confrontational about this, I never did. Have
a happy day everyone.
Kevin Wayne
15:05:22 -0800:
>Kevin Wayne <killed...@yahoo.com> wrote in message news:<k11frv8k42eiti8ld...@4ax.com>...
>
>I'm not going to argue whether or not the guidebook needs updating,
>but realize that it dates from the 1980s. There was no such thing as
>a URL back then, and tiles? Puh... we don't have no steenken tiles.
>There was ASCII, and ... there was ASCII.
>
>So, yes, it may be woefully out of date, but it harkens back to the
>roots of nethack in content (modified to add content when the game
>itself adds content). As for referencing character letters... you
>have it but don't really need it. The flip side of that is someone
>who needs it can't find it in the Guidebook. Then, they're left
>source diving, which is a good bit more difficult than Guidebook
>diving...
>
>Not to belabor this point, but that's like saying "I only ever use
>original roguelike commands, never the number pad. Take that
>information out of the guidebook, it's useless!" I'm a
>dyed-in-the-wool-hardcore-vi user, but I use the number pad whenever
>possible because the square layout is more easily ingrained in my
>fingers than the slanty diagonal rhomboid that is 'hjklyubn'. Both
>are perfectly valid ways of playing, so help for both methods should
>be included in the Guidebook.
Oh, no no no no no! You misunderstand my point. I'm not at all
suggesting that information should be taken out of the Guidebook; I'm
saying that it should be reorganized so as to be more accessible and
so as to be able to skip parts that one doesn't need without
accidentally missing parts that one does.
For example, section 3.2 of the Guidebook tells you that "The top line
of the screen is reserved for messages that describe things that are
impossible to represent visually." That is not true for interfaces in
which game messages are presented in another window. Of course, two
pages earlier, the Guidebook had said, "The way the screen looks for
you depends on your platform," but the newbie reader might be forgiven
for not recognizing that that meant that a section two pages later
might be inapplicable, and for the eyes beginning to glaze.
Another example: the Guidebook tells you how to get a saddle off a
horse. This information is placed as part of the description of the
#loot command. You're unlikely to find it, however, if you don't
already know that #loot is how you get the saddle off a horse. Someone
might reasonably look for the information under "Steeds," (6.3) in
which #riding skill is discussed, and assume that the Guidebook
doesn't address the issue when it's not found there.
Similarly, information about what "Elbereth" does is given within a
section describing the engrave command; not, say, in a section
describing monster behavior. Hints on how to bless or curse objects
are given, not in the section on blessed and cursed objects, but in
the section on potions. I played for a long time without any clue as
to how to accomplish this. Information on scoring and explore mode, of
interest to most beginning players, I think, is sandwiched between a
long section of customization options, including nethack for the
blind, and credits. I just think that the organization of the
Guidebook isn't intuitive for those who still need to use the
Guidebook--i.e., newbies.
However, rereading the Guidebook and looking for examples, it now
appears to me that the situation is not nearly as bad as I'd recalled.
I think that the main problem was the technical information up front,
such as what the ascii characters meant and what key commands were
used to accomplish what tasks. My reaction was, "Most of this I'll
never remember, and a lot doesn't seem to apply to me anyway. I know
how to use "?" and "/" and ";" to get information; let's just play the
game!"
If section 3 were condensed into a discussion of the status line, with
general observations about the map and messages (not specific to any
particular port), and with the ascii character information located in
an appendix, and if the long list of individual commands were also
placed in an appendix and configuration options placed in a third, the
actual gameplay section (sections 5-8) would appear earlier in the
document. Where key commands or customizable options do appear in this
section (which they do, frequently) they could be hyperlinked to the
appropriate entry in the appendix, where exact usage would be found. I
think the result would be a more readable document from the newbie's
standpoint.
Seraphim
> Similarly, information about what "Elbereth" does is given within a
> section describing the engrave command; not, say, in a section
> describing monster behavior.
Its also worth mentioning that the last time I checked, "Elbereth" was
hyphenated, making easy to miss in a quick search if you somehow hear
something about it (say in RGRN).
Topi Linkala
> However, rereading the Guidebook and looking for examples, it now
> appears to me that the situation is not nearly as bad as I'd recalled.
> I think that the main problem was the technical information up front,
> such as what the ascii characters meant and what key commands were
> used to accomplish what tasks. My reaction was, "Most of this I'll
> never remember, and a lot doesn't seem to apply to me anyway. I know
> how to use "?" and "/" and ";" to get information; let's just play the
> game!"
>
> If section 3 were condensed into a discussion of the status line, with
> general observations about the map and messages (not specific to any
> particular port), and with the ascii character information located in
> an appendix, and if the long list of individual commands were also
> placed in an appendix and configuration options placed in a third, the
> actual gameplay section (sections 5-8) would appear earlier in the
> document. Where key commands or customizable options do appear in this
> section (which they do, frequently) they could be hyperlinked to the
> appropriate entry in the appendix, where exact usage would be found. I
> think the result would be a more readable document from the newbie's
> standpoint.
So are you ready to make the reorganisation of th guidebook or are you
assuming that somebody else does the job for you?
Matt Shepherd
Until I found this group, I kept spelling it WITH the hyphen and
getting my ass kicked, actually.
- Matt
www.man-man.org
Kevin Wayne
12:05:10 +0200:
>So are you ready to make the reorganisation of the guidebook or are you
>assuming that somebody else does the job for you?
I'm actually thinking seriously about doing that, although I have more
pressing personal matters at the moment. Also, if the reorganized
version doesn't pass muster with the DevTeam, then all I can really do
is to upload it somewhere and post the link. By the time someone finds
that link, they've probably found lots of other spoilers, too, in
which case a rewritten Guidebook is a moot point.
I guess all I am offering at the moment is a mild plea that a terse
"Read the Guidebook!" may be less helpful to a newbie than one might
think.
Kevin Wayne
GMT:
>Its also worth mentioning that the last time I checked, "Elbereth" was
>hyphenated, making easy to miss in a quick search if you somehow hear
>something about it (say in RGRN).
That's interesting. I hadn't noticed it, and I had had this nervous
feeling in the back of my mind as I was writing that anyone could just
search the document for a key word, and find it no matter where it
was.
Wes Irby
>
> [quote]
> there's really no reason to kick down doors. You wake
> up monsters in the vicinity when you do so and there's no real
> benefit.
> [/quote]
>
> Sure there is: Being able to walk through the door diagonally.
> Maybe there's a trap or boulder in front of the doorway, so
> you have to shut the door and kick it in in order to go
> through.
That certainly doesn't come up often enough to automate it!
> Also, whenever i come across a (non-temple) altar I kick in
> all the doors nearby so I canget go though diagonally and get
> back there more quickly (keep those corpses fresh!)
Yikes! I want doors! I fact, if I lose one I may take the
trouble to replace it with a boulder. I don't want the
monsters I create leaving and I don't want my pet to help.
He may eat something I planned to sacrifice and even a non
eating pet can finish off a big monster before you can lure
it onto the altar.
Doors are good to keep your pet separated from a succubus
you might want to come back to later, isolate anything you
don't want save for later or bypass for now, you may not
want to wake a nymph or you might want to leave a floating
eye, just in case.
In my current game I have a pony locked in a closet in a
room (locked) with a polymorph trap. If I decide later I
need a big pet for something, I've got the makings reserved.
--
Wes
The early bird may get the worm,
but the second mouse gets the cheese.
Dr. Richard E. Hawkins
Eric Wright <ewr...@nc.rr.com> wrote:
>Kevin Wayne <killed...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
>news:<k11frv8k42eiti8ld...@4ax.com>...
>> Boudewijn's post was very polite and helpful, so I'm not reacting to
>> that, but a lot of questions tend to get a terse "Read the Guidebook"
>> answer, which I think is a touch unfair with the Guidebook presently
>> as a written analogue to Nethack's Gehennom.
>I'm not going to argue whether or not the guidebook needs updating,
>but realize that it dates from the 1980s. There was no such thing as
>a URL back then, and tiles? Puh... we don't have no steenken tiles.
>There was ASCII, and ... there was ASCII.
Hey. That's not quite right. We had white ASCII, and we had green
ASCII. And sometimes, apparently due to manufacturing accidents, we had
sickly yellow ASCII . . .
>Not to belabor this point, but that's like saying "I only ever use
>original roguelike commands, never the number pad. Take that
>information out of the guidebook, it's useless!" I'm a
>dyed-in-the-wool-hardcore-vi user, but I use the number pad whenever
>possible because the square layout is more easily ingrained in my
>fingers than the slanty diagonal rhomboid that is 'hjklyubn'. Both
>are perfectly valid ways of playing, so help for both methods should
>be included in the Guidebook.
Careful, there. You're dangerously close to suggesting that using EMACS
doesn't make you a bad person :)
hawk
--
Richard E. Hawkins, Asst. Prof. of Economics /"\ ASCII ribbon campaign
doc...@psu.edu Smeal 178 (814) 375-4700 \ / against HTML mail
These opinions will not be those of X and postings.
Penn State until it pays my retainer. / \
Raisse the Thaumaturge
> We had white ASCII, and we had green
> ASCII. And sometimes, apparently due to manufacturing accidents, we
> had sickly yellow ASCII . . .
We had that, an amber Hercules screen, and I still miss it. Can't get
the same eye-friendly colour in an xterm whatever I try.
Raisse, killed by a grid bug
--
ir...@valdyas.org LegoHack: http://www.valdyas.org/irina/nethack/
Status of Raisse (piously neutral): Level 8 HP 63(67) AC -3, fast.
Topi Linkala
You could always post a link to it regularyly.
Janis
> In article <221fdb16.03111...@posting.google.com>,
> Eric Wright <ewr...@nc.rr.com> wrote:
>
> >I'm not going to argue whether or not the guidebook needs updating,
> >but realize that it dates from the 1980s. There was no such thing as
> >a URL back then, and tiles? Puh... we don't have no steenken tiles.
> >There was ASCII, and ... there was ASCII.
>
> Hey. That's not quite right. We had white ASCII, and we had green
> ASCII. And sometimes, apparently due to manufacturing accidents, we had
> sickly yellow ASCII . . .
Some have ASCII some have not. I always considered NH an unsuitable game,
because it did not run on a 6-bit-character CDC. ;-)
> >Not to belabor this point, but that's like saying "I only ever use
> >original roguelike commands, never the number pad. Take that
> >information out of the guidebook, it's useless!" I'm a
> >dyed-in-the-wool-hardcore-vi user, but I use the number pad whenever
> >possible because the square layout is more easily ingrained in my
> >fingers than the slanty diagonal rhomboid that is 'hjklyubn'.
Not to mention keyboards where y and z are swapped... horrible!
Janis
Kent Paul Dolan
> Careful, there.
> You're dangerously close to suggesting that using EMACS
> doesn't make you a bad person :)
Indeed, and any psych major looking for a PhD topic could
do worse than to study code for traces of how using emacs
turns programmers to the Datk Side.
xanthian.
Kent Paul Dolan
> Quoth Seraphim <gm...@cornell.edu>:
>> Its also worth mentioning that the last time I checked, "Elbereth" was
>> hyphenated, making easy to miss in a quick search if you somehow hear
>> something about it (say in RGRN).
> That's interesting. I hadn't noticed it, and I had had this nervous
> feeling in the back of my mind as I was writing that anyone could just
> search the document for a key word, and find it no matter where it
> was.
Yeah, coming around to the unobvious point that nroff/troff/groff (the
whole processing family for that text markup style) are historically
antiques, from the days when hardcopy was far the preferred choice, and
hyphenation made some weird kind of sense to save trees. With HTML and
incredibly easier to use hyperlinked softcopy, hyphenation is a horrible
idea, it saves nothing useful, causes infinite hardship, and will
someday go away with the other dinosaurs.
xanthian, occasional proofreader for hardcopy books. Bleah.
I love ragged right justification.
Roger Broadbent
news:ecf2e4b7.03112...@posting.google.com:
> Not to mention keyboards where y and z are swapped... horrible!
It's the French "azerty" keyboards that really got me (this was before I
started playing nethack however).
Roger
Boudewijn Waijers
> It's the French "azerty" keyboards that really got me (this was before I
> started playing nethack however).
What I do when I occasionally have to use a French keyboard or a native
Dutch keyboard (which almost noone in the Netherlands uses), is to just
install the US international keybaord driver, and blind-type. The keyboard
shows other characters than get onto my screen, but I don't mind about
that.
Richard Bos
> In article <221fdb16.03111...@posting.google.com>,
> Eric Wright <ewr...@nc.rr.com> wrote:
> >I'm a dyed-in-the-wool-hardcore-vi user, but I use the number pad whenever
> >possible
>
> Careful, there. You're dangerously close to suggesting that using EMACS
> doesn't make you a bad person :)
It doesn't. Being a bad person causes you to be forced to use Emacs
_and_ vi for the rest of your afterlife.
Richard
Darshan Shaligram
I use both, so I guess I'm the damned. :-)
Being damned apparently has its advantages.
--
Darshan Shaligram dars...@aztec.soft.net
Christopher Jeris
> With HTML and
> incredibly easier to use hyperlinked softcopy, hyphenation is a horrible
> idea, it saves nothing useful, causes infinite hardship, and will
> someday go away with the other dinosaurs.
Would you say the same about ligatures and kerning? Don't be so quick
to throw away the fruits of five centuries of the typesetter's art.
The problem is not hyphenation, but the ugly product of bad algorithms
for hyphenation and line-breaking. Granted, web pages set to text-align:
justify; look terrible on my PC, but I chalk that up to Windows's poor
quality text rendering. People just need to adjust their settings to
their medium.
--
peace, Chris Jeris cje...@oinvzer.net
Apply (1 6 2 4)(3 7) to domainname to reply.
Kent Paul Dolan
> "Kent Paul Dolan" <xant...@well.com> writes:
>> With HTML and
>> incredibly easier to use hyperlinked softcopy, hyphenation is a horrible
>> idea, it saves nothing useful, causes infinite hardship, and will
>> someday go away with the other dinosaurs.
> Would you say the same about ligatures and kerning?
Ligatures where they aren't a real separately alphabetizing letter
of the language are also a bogosity, for someone whose eyes have
started going cloudy, they make reading much much harder in exchange
for some minimal increment in attractiveness. Kerning both plus and
minus does lots for appearance at a small cost in legibility, but you
need to strike a good balance between inter-word and intra-word kerning,
or your lines still pied.
Totally stupid stuff, like displaying Usenet postings in proportional
fonts just demonstrates cultural ignorance by the software jockey, only
economic pressure cures that level of stupidity.
> Don't be so quick to throw away the fruits of five centuries
> of the typesetter's art.
I'm not, I've both created fonts and written fancy quality typesetting
software, but hyphenation is still silly, it breaks find on page tools,
it makes the eye read a word in two chunks, slowing reading speed and
disrupting visual scanning for a word on a page.
> The problem is not hyphenation, but the ugly product of
> bad algorithms for hyphenation and line-breaking.
If hyphenation is bad per se, better algorithms won't help.
One of the ugliest things you can do is spread one word across
a whole line, and that is just the stupidity of insisting that
double sided justification look ugly in preference to having
exceptions.
> Granted, web pages set to text-align: justify; look terrible
> on my PC, but I chalk that up to Windows's poor quality text
> rendering. People just need to adjust their settings to
> their medium.
My opinions on MS-Windows are so wallpapered over the Net I'll
spare you my usual burst of scatology.
xanthian, typing from MS-Win98SE -- not my machine.
Kent Paul Dolan
> It doesn't. Being a bad person causes you to be forced to use Emacs
> _and_ vi for the rest of your afterlife.
Ummm, and what happens to the poor souls who end up in Hell, instead?
xanthian.
Richard Bos
> "Christopher Jeris" <cje...@fake.address.us> wrote:
> > "Kent Paul Dolan" <xant...@well.com> writes:
> >> With HTML and
> >> incredibly easier to use hyperlinked softcopy, hyphenation is a horrible
> >> idea, it saves nothing useful, causes infinite hardship, and will
> >> someday go away with the other dinosaurs.
>
> > Would you say the same about ligatures and kerning?
>
> Ligatures where they aren't a real separately alphabetizing letter
> of the language are also a bogosity, for someone whose eyes have
> started going cloudy, they make reading much much harder in exchange
> for some minimal increment in attractiveness. Kerning both plus and
> minus does lots for appearance at a small cost in legibility,
Neither of those are true. Both ligatures and kerning, when applied
well, actually increase legibility.
Richard
Kent Paul Dolan
> Neither of those are true. Both ligatures and kerning, when applied
> well, actually increase legibility.
Are you always this unpleasant and incorrect?
Perhaps you claim you are trying to muddle out an "ffl" ligiture
using my 60 year old eyes, to which it is a smudge compared to
the three separately set letters?
Consider maturity, if your immediate social contacts allow you the
chance by letting you live. It's not that bad.
xanthian.