The Temple of Torment (Now at Stable 19.0)

[Avagart]

I'm going to play it tomorrow. I'm glad to see major bugs fixed

Oh, man. Sorry, but... nope. New system of display is very uncomfortable. Maybe it's good for tiles (because look, not ease of use), but it's bad for ascii for several reasons. First - aesthetics. Letters are too big and blurred. Second - comfort of use. I very liked old ASCII look, especially when I could use fonts smaller than 16x16. I seen whole map - all shops, NPCs, questgivers. I could move 'smart'. Now? Now the FOV of player are silly small.

[Aukustus]

No need for sorries.

I'll make the letters better when I find a decent 32x32 letters. In theory, the way I coded the larger tiles it's not hard at all to add other rendering for normal sized ascii. The FOV is small to make the light sources not expand the FOV larger than the screen. With torches the FOV is 7 tiles compared to previous 6 tiles without a light source. I'll add at some point a unique item to give a permanent light source.

Either way, I'm going to make the screen taller to give more room for the map display. Then I can increase the FOV a little.

I get the usability of the previous system, but this is the direction I'm going. Then I can only make the current system better.

[Avagart]

If so I suggest to use smaller font - even if old 16x16. I don't know how your system works, but it should double FOV and probably increase ease of orientation and movement.

[Aukustus]

It actually just changes the window size since libtcod window is tied into character cell size.

[Aukustus]

I created a quick patch 7.1 that increases the fov inside dungeons by 2 and in the outdoor maps by 1. Also game window is a little bit larget so that it displays 2 tiles more in the vertical axis.

Full log

Code: [Select]

Bugs, mistakes and missing things
* Fixed a crash with one spell effect

General
* 2 tiles taller Map screen
- Added flavor journal entries inside the main dungeon

Players, talents, spells, such
* Increased the FOV while in dungeon by 2

Items
- Reduced the radius of light sources by 1

[Aukustus]

With inspiration from Avagart's 8x12 font size I'm developing another ASCII font for use:



I have though absolutely no idea what to do with the button images.

[Tzan]

I like the fat font.

Since you are experimenting you might want to try this:
Make things in FAT FONT that are intended to be foreground, like walls, creatures, items on the ground.
Then make some characters in that font less fat, for things that are in the background, like grass and roads.

[Aukustus]

That's a good idea but it's a little bit hard because I have a bitmap font and with libtcod it means that every character must be physically in the font file. Now all the double sized fonts are just sized up from the text font and pasted into the same file and accessed through an index.

[Tzan]

Ah.
To do it any way you would need to hand edit pixels on an actual image file, after it was scaled in an art program.
Or scaled and saved from your program, not sure it can do that.

[Avagart]

Ouh, I very like that font This is not greyscale so looks much better when they are enlarged.

I tested 7.1 for a while.
And yes, now it looks a bit better (I mean display system now, not font size/type), especially in cities. Greater ease of exploration and orientation in the area. However, I have some issues for. First - when mouse is enabled, 'camera' doesn't follow player; I can walk PC out of view, I must... (sorry for my poor english, I lack good words or terms in this moment) I must change the location of camera by mouse. Maybe it's intended, but *necessity* of mouse-scrolling is boring. You know, scrolling as 'scrolling map'. It's very annoying. Second - 'fast travelling'. Without visible causes, PC stops every two tiles.

One more thing - game window is a little bit too big for 768px height screen.

edit: please, tell me, how exacly works your new system? I mean, this 'zoomed' view? Maybe is possible to making options for scaling this zoom?

[Aukustus]

It's intentional the camera doesn't follow the player. There were some issues with mouse movement when it followed: the target coordinates always moved when camera moved. Also plenty of CRPGs have a camera like this.

It's not too large when played with full screen. Without full screen I think it's partly below the taskbar.

It's a very stone age era trick with the scaling: each object knows which *four* 16x16 tiles in the font image belong to it instead of one. Then it prints all four characters to x, y; x+1, y; x, y+1; x+1, y+1 coordinates. Because it's tied to the cell size, no scalings like 150% are supported. Only 2x, 3x etc. that fit evenly with the cells.

[Avagart]

1) in cRPGs yes. But in these games you usually operate with mouse. In TToT, with mouse support enabled, I still prefer keyboard to walking/acting. Mouse movement should be great for greater distance, like in towns, 'cleaned' dungeons, etc. because it could speed up movement; *but* player character stops every two steps, so this is not very efficient and comfortable. Consequently, i think that actually, with existing problems, playing with mouse support seems to be... problematic.

2) Yup, I know that everything should be (and yes, is) good in full screen, but I prefer to playing in window. I have taskbar in right, and TToT window slightly does not fit. TToT 7.1 have. ( http://i.imgur.com/lX7Kjn3.png ) Maybe is possible to make third option, compromise between strict window and full screen? So, miximized window, which fits self for screen as in full screen, but remains a window?

[Aukustus]

1) Now that I think I can easily add a centered camera on player when player uses movement buttons even though mouse is enabled.

2) I have honestly no idea about this.

Edit: What do you mean by character stopping every 2 tiles?

[Avagart]

Exacly what it means For example - in Summerdale I have 27 steps from starting location to well. So, I place cursor over the well, and the path from player character to well is drawn. I click. Player - on empty road, without obstacles, items, NPC etc. - make 2 (or 3, as I noticed now) and stops. Just this. Click again - 2 steps. Again - three steps. This is gif for... visualization http://i.imgur.com/Mz8yP6N.gifv

[Aukustus]

Are you telling me you don't have a perfectly smooth movement when mouse moving left button down all the way to the cursor location? It's not intended to be a single click movement though if that's what you are trying.