-crawl- Very funny.

B0rsuk wrote:
// Instead of pressing x and having to hover the cursor over
// each monster, you'd just press a _KEY_ to toggle
// 'equipment view mode'. In this mode....

This is probably the most apt solution for presenting this information.


Using branding for everything under the sun just leads to clutter which
makes that feature less useful[1]... worse yet, if you want to stack
brands (so that friendly monsters wielding nasty equipment are reverse
and blinking) there's no guarantee that your term will support that.
It might even do something completely dreadful and mess up the
display[2]. And if it's not your term, it's probably someone elses...
and it's better if the game doesn't head into the territory where
people gain advantages for having a different term (that ultimately
leads to one of the things I hate about a large number of *bands...
they can't be played without colour because they have large areas of
passible terrain marked with the same character as the walls).

Anyways, getting back to the suggestion: the _KEY_ involved could, in
fact, be 'x'. Various extended examination modes could be be added,
quickly flipped through with CTRL keys, defaulting to a mode set in an
option. In fact, you could go so far as to not require going into
examine mode at all... replace branding entirely with various head's up
display vision modes that can be toggled regardless of which mode
you're in (which of course is much harder because command mode has many
CTRL keys already reserved... you'd pretty much need to do it with
cycling. You could still add some direct shortcuts for examine mode,
though).

Brent

[1] The same can be said of the coloured messages... there were
suggestions for non-colour markup flags soon after channels were added.
Things like SHOUT , * * * Stars * * *, and potentially even control
things like Prompt-to-Continue.

[2] Some of the worst behaviour I've seen in a term happened during an
early test of Gavin's patch with the draconian ninja (a monster
coloured BLACK... dangerous in itself as that's typically used to mark
monsters that must calculate their colour). The terminal was so smart
that it not only realised that it didn't have to print the 'd' (BLACK
on a BLACK background), but also when through the trouble of deleting
the character on that square... oddly enough, it did this by shifting
the rest of the line over.

B0rsuk wrote:
// Instead of pressing x and having to hover the cursor over
// each monster, you'd just press a _KEY_ to toggle
// 'equipment view mode'. In this mode....

This is probably the most apt solution for presenting this information.


Using branding for everything under the sun just leads to clutter which
makes that feature less useful[1]... worse yet, if you want to stack
brands (so that friendly monsters wielding nasty equipment are reverse
and blinking) there's no guarantee that your term will support that.
It might even do something completely dreadful and mess up the
display[2]. And if it's not your term, it's probably someone elses...
and it's better if the game doesn't head into the territory where
people gain advantages for having a different term (that ultimately
leads to one of the things I hate about a large number of *bands...
they can't be played without colour because they have large areas of
passible terrain marked with the same character as the walls).

Anyways, getting back to the suggestion: the _KEY_ involved could, in
fact, be 'x'. Various extended examination modes could be be added,
quickly flipped through with CTRL keys, defaulting to a mode set in an
option. In fact, you could go so far as to not require going into
examine mode at all... replace branding entirely with various head's up
display vision modes that can be toggled regardless of which mode
you're in (which of course is much harder because command mode has many
CTRL keys already reserved... you'd pretty much need to do it with
cycling. You could still add some direct shortcuts for examine mode,
though).

Brent

[1] The same can be said of the coloured messages... there were
suggestions for non-colour markup flags soon after channels were added.
Things like SHOUT , * * * Stars * * *, and potentially even control
things like Prompt-to-Continue.

[2] Some of the worst behaviour I've seen in a term happened during an
early test of Gavin's patch with the draconian ninja (a monster
coloured BLACK... dangerous in itself as that's typically used to mark
monsters that must calculate their colour). The terminal was so smart
that it not only realised that it didn't have to print the 'd' (BLACK
on a BLACK background), but also when through the trouble of deleting
the character on that square... oddly enough, it did this by shifting
the rest of the line over.