Press to move or press to single-step?

[SomeGuy]

Sorry for the poll, I know it may annoy some people, but I got some feedback from people that says that "move your character while key is pressed" is not good , it could be dangerous, etc...

SO basically, I am interested in community opinion about this matter.

The options in the poll are, I think, quite self explanatory:

1: means that you like to move your character while you keep the key pressed, and he will always move or attack until blocked by something or killed, or key is released
2: means that you prefer one key press per step, so transversing a 5 squares corridor requires 5 key presses, and attacking an enemy requires you to press the key for each weapon blow.
3: means that you would find interesting that the game allows switching modes, so you can use whatever you want in different situations.
4: means you got some other method that you find interesting.

Thanks a lot.

[NON]

but I got some feedback from people that says that "move your character while key is pressed" is not good , it could be dangerous, etc...

Haha what? The way it normally works (a delay before fast repeating starts) is a combination of all your 3 points, with all of their benefits and none of their disadvantages. You can easily just go one step at a time by releasing the key before repeating starts.

Is the person who gave you this feedback retarded not experienced with Roguelikes, or with typing on a computer?

[Holsety]

NON hit the nail on the head, really, but I'll just add some things.

Sure, you COULD die while holding a movement key pressed because you bulldozed into lava/dragon/exploding heart trap, but there's ways around it. You could stop the player and give them a prompt that they have to get rid of (with ANY key press. Don't make it spacebar only or something like that, just ANY key) if they walk into a trap or engage in combat with a monster.

What you get when you remove hold-to-walk is one of two things;
-combined input (shift+movement) to run in one direction; annoying
-tap a movement key each time you want to move

Unless you're making a game for a touchscreen/smartphone, option 2 means that I hate you, that you should feel bad and that everyone in the world is going to uninstall your game for being eldritch torture.
If it's for a smartphone/touchscreen it just means everyone in the world is going to uninstall your game because roguelikes on smartphones/touchscreens are shit that people just install to have AMAZING GEEK CRED.

[SomeGuy]

but I got some feedback from people that says that "move your character while key is pressed" is not good , it could be dangerous, etc...

[...]

You can easily just go one step at a time by releasing the key before repeating starts.

Basically you say here is "perform a step-per-key but bait xxx miliseconds to see if player keeps pressing it". Isn't it?
That's a good solution.
I will look into that method.

Is the person who gave you this feedback retarded not experienced with Roguelikes, or with typing on a computer?

Well, he may have a point. If the @ keeps walking, you may walk into something you don't want.

But then, here is Holsety comment.

The stop-player-when-find-something is a nice solution too. And I think it is quite easy to implement, at least for when the player detects a monster.

[NON]

Basically you say here is "perform a step-per-key but bait xxx miliseconds to see if player keeps pressing it". Isn't it?

I will look into that method.

You make it sound like it's some obscure technique
It's just like when typing text here. Hitting 'a' doesn't put "aaaa" before you can react.

And almost every Roguelike responds like this.

[TheCreator]

Well, he may have a point. If the @ keeps walking, you may walk into something you don't want.

If you don't want to walk, don't walk. Simple. If your auto-repetition rate is too high, reduce it in your system settings. If you don't like it at all, disable it in the settings. Restricting players to "one step per key press" independently of the system settings would be extremely annoying.

[Omnomnom]

On a related note how can per action animation be handled? Eg a monster launches a rocket towards a Target which explodes. If a rocket is depicted as flying from the monster to Target for 200ms and then an explosion takes another 200ms that's pretty quick, but it still means one monster's turn taking 400ms. Imagine 10 monsters firing each turn. The player has to wait 4 seconds per turn even if they are holding the move key down.

It doesn't seem correct to run the animations in parallel because the turns are in series and it causes strange results (monster hit by arrow appeared to dodge it before it arrived).

Dungeons of dredmore had a lot of animation, inc movement animation and as a result you had to wait for all monsters to animate each turn. Which could be very annoying when you wanted to wander around quickly while your pet was in combat with a monster. You can't even tap tap tap, you have to sit through animations.

Perhaps a solution is to skip animation if the players taps an action key and immediately process the key. But this then makes it easy for the player to accidentally skip animations.

[SomeGuy]

Finally I implemented the "press to walk, then after xxx milliseconds, start running", like NON suggested.

It's the best way I can think.

I set key delay to 0.2 seconds and key repetition to 0.05 seconds.

It works better this way.

On later versions I will make a config file, so the user can change and save game options like this.