Suggestion re: navigating to the nearest staircase

[fruviad]

One concern I have with the recent change to allow @ to run to the nearest stairway if entering ">" or "<" when not on a staircase is the possibility of accidentally hitting the wrong key and suddenly finding yourself running halfway across the level, and potentially into a dangerous situation. In fact, I first discovered the change in behavior when I hit "<" instead of ">" (or vice versa) only to find @ zooming across the level.

Perhaps it could be refined to throw the original "I see now up|down staircase here" message on your first attempt to ascend/descend when not on a staircase, and then navigate to the nearest staircase if you enter the same command again?

[fph]

Even better: display a preview of the path that will be taken after the first keypress.

But honestly I am not sure how effective this change would be for me: I suspect my muscle memory will quickly teach me not to check; it is dangerously easy and quick to double-press the same key in a fast sequence.

[PowerDiver]

One concern I have with the recent change to allow @ to run to the nearest stairway if entering ">" or "<" when not on a staircase is the possibility of accidentally hitting the wrong key and suddenly finding yourself running halfway across the level, and potentially into a dangerous situation.

I hate the change. Occasionally I get confused in my dotage, and I hit the wrong one when on a staircase.

[Nick]

Noted. Maybe it should be an option

[PowerDiver]

Why focus on stairs? If you really want auto movement, you might as well make a new command, and let the player choose the destination a la directed teleport. Then sane people could disable the key.

[ewert]

Would personally never use it, but yeah just adding a setting for disallow automovement/pathing for people who want to disable it...

[fruviad]

Why focus on stairs? If you really want auto movement, you might as well make a new command, and let the player choose the destination a la directed teleport. Then sane people could disable the key.

The nice thing about the stair-focus is that after clearing a level, one can just auto-navigate to the nearest set of stairs without looking at the map trying to figure out where they are. I like the feature now that I've gotten used to it.

[PowerDiver]

The nice thing about the stair-focus is that after clearing a level, one can just auto-navigate to the nearest set of stairs without looking at the map trying to figure out where they are. I like the feature now that I've gotten used to it.

People who do this deserve to be surrounded and killed by a pack of spawned hounds.

The real problem is the 'l'ook command. In look mode, pressing '>' should bounce the cursor to the next nearest down stairs from the current focus.

[backwardsEric]

The real problem is the 'l'ook command. In look mode, pressing '>' should bounce the cursor to the next nearest down stairs from the current focus.

The post 4.2.5 releases since 4.2.5-152-g430033147 should do that. '<', for nearest up staircase, and 'x', for nearest passable location with an unknown neighbor, are also accepted while looking or targeting.

[PowerDiver]

The post 4.2.5 releases since 4.2.5-152-g430033147 should do that. '<', for nearest up staircase, and 'x', for nearest passable location with an unknown neighbor, are also accepted while looking or targeting.

Whaddaya know. The last time I tried it, it did not work. That must have been years ago, but I guess I have no sense of time any more.

My apologies.

[edit] Also, THANK YOU! I'll be using this a lot going forward.

[backwardsEric]

Gwarl deserves most of the credit for allowing '>' and '<' while looking or targeting: he suggested something along those lines in the thread discussing the auto-exploration changes.

In the post-4.2.5 releases from 4.2.5-463-ge299499872 on, the auto-exploration behavior of '>', '<', and 'p' is hidden behind the user interface option, autoexplore_commands, that is off by default. '>', '<', and 'x' while looking or targeting are not affected by that option.