Temple of The Roguelike Forums
Game Discussion => Player's Plaza => Topic started by: Kneller on April 20, 2014, 07:43:53 PM
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I recently acquired a netbook, but the max res is 1024x600. I've been playing a lot of Sil and Infra Arcana. IA is too big for the screen. Considering the number of windows it uses, I'm not even going to try Sil. What's out there that will work on a netbook? Thanks.
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ADOM (http://www.ancardia.com/download.html) is a good bet. It is a pretty deep Roguelike, uses only the single console window at 80 x 25, and runs at 738 x 464 on my screen.
you can use the 1 3 7 and 9 keys for diagonal movement, arrow keys for cardinal movement. It's not ideal, but after you have played for a while, it will become second nature.
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Powder is a good one with 4 way movement.
Cardinal Quest is also nice.
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Shouldn't IA in ascii mode work? The classics (Rogue, ADoM, DCSS, Nethack …) are all played in a console window, so they would work. Or take it as an opportunity to try out PrincessRL, or of course Caves of Qud (imho one of the best RLs ever made).
As always,
Minotauros
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I did manage to get IA to work in ASCII-mode, which was super cool as it's my current favorite. I should try CoQ. I keep hearing about it, but for some reason haven't been able to get into it.
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Considering the number of windows it uses, I'm not even going to try Sil.
For the record, I play Sil just with the map window on a small laptop, and it's fine (then again I haven't descended past 300' yet ;) )
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How do you compensate for the other windows, then? I think you can do inventory management from the map window, and I might be able to live without seeing the combat rolls, but the recall window helps me tons with enemy information.
Edit: I tinkered and I see how it's possible now, but it's a little cumbersome for sure.
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For the record, I play Sil just with the map window on a small laptop, and it's fine (then again I haven't descended past 300' yet ;) )
I just use the main window too, and I've won the game. You don't need any of that other stuff.
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I am continually astonished at the way angband variants use this horrible multi-window interface. What is so hard about using a single terminal window? A full screen terminal window on a modern computer is massive, especially in the horizontal. There's tons of room for a map, multi-line (!! take note angband developers) message display, inventory, monster/targeting status bars and so on. Meanwhile, in some, e.g. tomenet you can't even meaningfully resize the windows you have. What a joke.
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I am continually astonished at the way angband variants use this horrible multi-window interface.
It's really dumb.
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I am continually astonished at the way angband variants use this horrible multi-window interface.
I totally agree. All the effort they spent coding multi-window interfaces would have been better spent optimizing the single window interface they already have. I think Sil is a great game (and I normally don't like fantasy medieval games), but the interface is terrible.
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I am continually astonished at the way angband variants use this horrible multi-window interface.
I totally agree. All the effort they spent coding multi-window interfaces would have been better spent optimizing the single window interface they already have. I think Sil is a great game (and I normally don't like fantasy medieval games), but the interface is terrible.
The interface is that way for a reason. What do you think that reason is?
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I am continually astonished at the way angband variants use this horrible multi-window interface.
I totally agree. All the effort they spent coding multi-window interfaces would have been better spent optimizing the single window interface they already have. I think Sil is a great game (and I normally don't like fantasy medieval games), but the interface is terrible.
The interface is that way for a reason. What do you think that reason is?
Redundancy.
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I think Sil is a great game (and I normally don't like fantasy medieval games), but the interface is terrible.
1) Close every window except the main window.
2) Enable the option that shows your inventory and equipment whenever you interact with them.
There you go, now the interface is perfect.
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I am continually astonished at the way angband variants use this horrible multi-window interface.
I totally agree. All the effort they spent coding multi-window interfaces would have been better spent optimizing the single window interface they already have. I think Sil is a great game (and I normally don't like fantasy medieval games), but the interface is terrible.
The interface is that way for a reason. What do you think that reason is?
Because it was the easiest thing to do given the existing codebase at the time and the game is written by uncompensated volunteers.
I think Sil is a great game (and I normally don't like fantasy medieval games), but the interface is terrible.
1) Close every window except the main window.
2) Enable the option that shows your inventory and equipment whenever you interact with them.
There you go, now the interface is perfect.
What you describe is the default terminal interface for angband (i.e. what you get if you play the game the way you should). It would be radically improved by a) taking into account the actual height of your terminal (emulator), which is probably much more than 24, and drawing the map to take advantage of that height (maybe this is done in the other interfaces, idk) and b) using the huge horizontal margins to permanently house useful information, of the type available in the various windows.
If I've misunderstood your suggestion and there actually is an option that reasonably approximates the above, I'd like to hear it.
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The interface is that way for a reason. What do you think that reason is?
Because it was the easiest thing to do given the existing codebase at the time and the game is written by uncompensated volunteers.
This to me along with the preceding posts, portrays a sentiment here that the developer shouldn't have their own interest in the game. That their choices couldn't be valid ones to make because they prefer it that way themselves, and are willing to do the work. Rather the undesirable way to do whatever it was they decided to do, must have been the easiest way. Or a mistake that needs to be rectified.
It's a vein that runs through a lot of the threads posted on this forum. Where various posters (not yourself) often betray an entitlement that games be done their way, and talk rabidly with their hands over their ears.
Uncompensated volunteers? Hmm. Really?
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The interface is that way for a reason. What do you think that reason is?
Because it was the easiest thing to do given the existing codebase at the time and the game is written by uncompensated volunteers.
This to me along with the preceding posts, portrays a sentiment here that the developer shouldn't have their own interest in the game. That their choices couldn't be valid ones to make because they prefer it that way themselves, and are willing to do the work. Rather the undesirable way to do whatever it was they decided to do, must have been the easiest way. Or a mistake that needs to be rectified.
It's a vein that runs through a lot of the threads posted on this forum. Where various posters (not yourself) often betray an entitlement that games be done their way, and talk rabidly with their hands over their ears.
Uncompensated volunteers? Hmm. Really?
What you say here is a fair point and it's fine as far as it goes. Obviously, I can't deny it's possible that someone actually likes the multi-window angband interface better than various obvious alternatives outlined above and that this someone might be the guy who wrote it that way. However incomprehensible it is to me that someone would like angband this way without it being thrust upon them as the default interface, it's obviously true that it could be the considered decision of the development team that this interface is the best way to go given what they have to work with and, if so, one can only criticize their taste.
From my experience with angband variant developers, I don't believe this is the reason, but your point still stands.
Perhaps more importantly, it may be bad form to say "Well, they do it this way because they're not getting paid to put in the time/effort/thought to get it right, they're not consumer-oriented because the game is free, etc." or to go even further in this vein to say it's just not a professional enterprise. It's important to recognize that the people working on, say, angband put a lot of time into it and how I, say, think the current crop of developers stand up against the old guard etc. is the kind of thing people ought to shut the hell up about in public. You're right, it's not cool to talk about people's work that way.
On the other hand, in this particular case, if you look at the angband multi-window interface, I mean... C'mon. I would be interested to know why you think it's the way it is, if you think there's a good reason beyond some variant maintainer did this 15 years ago and it was marginally better in some respects than what was available in vanilla, so it was incorporated and spread to other variants and it doesn't change because no one wants to spend the time writing something better (or perhaps few or no current maintainers know what's going on in the part of the source that this is implemented in well enough to make a major change -- this kind of thing happens in angband/variants).
I guess what I'm saying is criticism of open source/free software projects ought to be tempered by the considerations you bring up. On the other hand, there's a certain threshold of shoddiness beyond which criticism is warranted and appropriate.
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It would be radically improved by a) taking into account the actual height of your terminal (emulator), which is probably much more than 24, and drawing the map to take advantage of that height
If you change the visible map size it's going to be different experience with larger map, because longer visibility range makes it easier to avoid monsters.
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It would be radically improved by a) taking into account the actual height of your terminal (emulator), which is probably much more than 24, and drawing the map to take advantage of that height
If you change the visible map size it's going to be different experience with larger map, because longer visibility range makes it easier to avoid monsters.
It's harder in the sense of usability, not gameplay. The player is still able to see and target monsters off screen in the vertical using scrolling commands. If you play carefully, you don't die or take more damage or whatever because of it, you just enter a lot of commands that should not be necessary. Indeed, variants going back to at least 1999 have resizable map windows. My comments here are about the unix terminal version gotten by passing -mgcu as a command line option. It may well be resizable in the sdl/whatever windowed version.
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The player is still able to see and target monsters off screen in the vertical using scrolling commands.
Sounds like bad design. The visibility should be restricted to a static size. In fact also the gameview should be set to same static size. I don't see any logic allowing changes in the visible map size.
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If you change the visible map size it's going to be different experience with larger map, because longer visibility range makes it easier to avoid monsters.
In Sil's case, your light radius will rarely be more than four or five tiles so this won't be an issue.