Torso & Head direction

[AgingMinotaur]

Very nifty demo, lithander Agreed that the scheme with mouse works well, but I anticipate some problems that have to be ironed out. As in, when you move your guy around without moving the mouse, the position of the cursor relative to the avatar changes. This could lead to annoyances, especially in a system where turning around costs time. Also, I personally prefer a game that can be played with just the keyboard, but would surely get used to an interface where I'm forced to use the mouse as well. And, yeah, it feels as like an FPS-inspired control scheme needs an FPS-inspired map display.

As always,
Minotauros

[lithander]

Thanks for trying the demo, guys! And I'm glad to hear that you like the keyboard + mouse controlscheme because personally I found it pretty interesting, too. Maybe I'll expand on that idea over the christmas break and add some gameplay.
@AgingMinotaur, I agree that the subtle change of viewing direction despite NOT moving the mouse is a little annoying. I could imagine 2 solutions:
a) only when the mouse is getting moved the desired viewdirection is recalculated. Very easy to implement.
b) the character is always in the center of the screen and the map is scrolling. That way your mouse positiion would always be relative to the character regardless of it's current world position.

Based on your feedback I added 2 new control schemes to the demo:

What I mean is: the character is facing N, you press right arrow (RA) to turn E, you press up arrow (UA) to walk E, you press and hold shift and press UA and you still move E (shift just means "no turning" but when going forward no turning is involved anyway), you hold the shift and press RA and you now move S (right arrow meaning move to the right according to character's perspective without turning). That would be what I meant and what I think would be easier to grasp.

I added this as "Control Scheme 2" but I can't get the strafing right on an intuitive level. :/

I've just tried implementing it in URR, and currently each numpad key moves you in that direction (so up is up, no matter how you face) and with shift held down, the same applies (ie up is up), and it works really well, actually.

I'm not sure I understood you correctly. Is "Control Scheme 3" what you meant? I quite like it. I would prefer this over 1 and 2.

But it makes looking around a dedicated action (costing a turn) and I'm not sure how that affects the gameplay. Would you feel like "just" changing your facing is a waste of a turn in combat situations? Not sure.

[pat]

When I played Mujahid yesterday the help-screen says "Use the mouse to look around and aim". It wasn't implemented that way but I kinda expected to be able to control the view direction with the mouse, while walking with the keyboard. Pretty much what you'd do in a FPS game, too. Didn't sound like a bad idea to me. So this evening I hacked together a small prove-of-concept.

http://web.pixelpracht.net/stealthRL.php

Mujahid was my effort, and I struggled for a while with the best way to implement the directional fov for a turn based game so that it wasn't obnoxiously obtrusive but also added something to the gameplay in terms of tactical depth. Turning takes 1/3 as long as moving and that was the cost trade off which felt about right to me and I still think its about right. It's deliberately simplistic in overlooking strafing and moving without turning in other ways and that's probably the next logical extension of the system and I guess it probably would have fit well into the game as it is.

Interestingly, a significant proportion of people who have played the game actively dislike having to press a key twice to turn and then walk a step - I guess because it's so unintuitive compared to virtually every other roguelike with a simpler movement scheme. I have no doubt that I turned off a whole slab of the roguelike community by adding that extra complexity, but that was the whole point of the game so it's more a matter of idle curiosity as opposed to something I can do anything about.

I'm going to play around with your demo, it sounds cool but it seems to me that a directional fov needs some kind of movement cost to look around or otherwise it's just an annoying restriction which is resolved by fast twitch mouse movement which doesn't gel with a turn based game. It would work perfectly in a real time game, and it's kinda what pyromancer does (except that pyromancer uses the mouse for casting as opposed to looking, but it works pretty well).

[radad]

I tried implementing a directional facing method once. I rotated the world about the player though so that the player always faced up the screen. It was a little disorienting but you did get used to it.