Graphical UI and other upgrades to Angband?

[Shockbolt]

I'd not call these screen mockups I'll be posting here for suggestions, but rather ideas for Angband UI/graphics upgrades. I've spent a little time making this Angband game screen, be aware that everything might not be 100% perfect as is.

Ideas behind it:

-Made the UI graphical rather than pure text based
-Added mouse support
-Menu/Game/Map/Inventory/Help screens are switchable by tabs to the top of the screen
-Wounds, haste, bleed, hunger etc are displayed by their respective icons to the left, beneath the player stats.
-Customizable fast buttons for spellbooks, lightsources etc placed to the bottom right of the screen. A click on a spellbook might open up a list of spells and allow the player to quickly cast one of them. A click on a lightsource switch it on/off

[awldune]

That looks nice, especially for ports to mobile devices (iPad).

It looks like you would shoot an enemy by clicking the Bow icon below and then selecting a missile and target? A "repeat last command" button would save a lot of tedium if so.

One idea that might help ranged combat would be for double-clicking an attack spell (or missile when shooting) to auto-target the nearest monster.

A row of "quick use" item slots would be nice when you are using a lot of devices. Especially useful to warriors who have to use their detect rods all the time.

[sethos]

That looks fantastic!
I do have a few points though.

I know that I try to move through my turns fairly quickly, and having everything on tabs sounds, well, really bad. I think that there is plenty of room on the left if you were to shrink the text, and you could have something display there, albeit it would be small. Maybe if you could pick between monster list, Inventory, equipment, or monster memory? (those just happen to be the subwindows I cannot live without. I use messages as well, but you seem to have covered that.)

Auto Clear -More- is so sweet. until it gets you killed. Not yet for my character!

[Derakon]

I wish I had about 24 more hours in each day so I could work on all the projects I want to do, because a ground-up rewrite of Angband in Python with a more close-in focus and so on would definitely be one of them.

[smileyy]

I wish I had about 24 more hours in each day so I could work on all the projects I want to do, because a ground-up rewrite of Angband in Python with a more close-in focus and so on would definitely be one of them.

I'm doing the same thing, but in Java, with the plan for a web UI as the first client (connecting to a local or remote server). And also as a brain stretch exercise of "If I were to write a roguelike from scratch, without ever looking at angband code, but knowing some of the ideas that go into it, how would it turn out?"

[Timo Pietilä]

Just a quick post to say that graphical interface is not an upgrade in my opinion. Others might disagree, but I like things like they are done in Sangband (and even old vanilla) more.

If this get implemented please keep the old way in the game.

[Shockbolt]

Just a quick post to say that graphical interface is not an upgrade in my opinion. Others might disagree, but I like things like they are done in Sangband (and even old vanilla) more.

If this get implemented please keep the old way in the game.

I'm not saying that the way the game is played should be changed, I'm only saying that it should include graphics, to bring it up to 2011. The general keyboard commands should by all means remain 100% as before, and in addition Angband should have a way to control the game more or less by mouse/tablet also, as most people do have one of these attached to their computers.

[Timo Pietilä]

I'm not saying that the way the game is played should be changed, I'm only saying that it should include graphics, to bring it up to 2011. The general keyboard commands should by all means remain 100% as before, and in addition Angband should have a way to control the game more or less by mouse/tablet also, as most people do have one of these attached to their computers.

And I'm not saying that your graphics are bad. I just like the old way better. Symbols instead of pictures.

[Shockbolt]

And I'm not saying that your graphics are bad. I just like the old way better. Symbols instead of pictures.

I didn't think that either, I do know now after all these months that the hardcore players do love their ascii

[Magnate]

I didn't think that either, I do know now after all these months that the hardcore players do love their ascii

We're all safe on this one - takkaria has said on several occasions that the core ascii game is not going anywhere. But that doesn't mean we can't have nice fancy graphics as well! (I also like the pseudo-graphic symbols used in Sangband btw - I wonder if Leon created his own font.)

[nppangband]

(I also like the pseudo-graphic symbols used in Sangband btw - I wonder if Leon created his own font.)

Yes, a group of 4 of us did (although my contribution was only about 5% of the total group effort). We created the custom fonts used with the xchar patch (recently replace by UTF-8). I think Diego (NPP co-maintainer) and Leon made the actual fonts with the pseudo graphics for doors and things of that nature. We lifted the idea for pseudo-graphics from TOME.

[Azerath]

A few thoughts on richer graphics:

- when looking at your proposal it is overwhelming (positively), but soon it appears that this lacks something… It is animation. Those images crosses border between symbolic tiles and more realistic ones.
- During gameplay there are a lot of monsters – A LOT of them. Having simple symbols (characters or small, crispy iconic images) do not overload you with information.
- bigger tiles, with more details (distracting?) when you have a lot of information – monsters, items, etc is not good I think
- skewed tiles makes dungeon grid not clear. When I’m looking at you picture, it is not clear on first sight what part of stairs belongs to what tile? Is top of stairs hide part of above tile, or whole stairs are single tile?
- monsters that are higher than 1 tile make something similar as above stairs

Your proposal would be fine when we would have about 10% of current mosters :-)

Of course after a few games with new look everyone woulod get used.

Generally I like your proposal, those images are really nice - resembles me cRPG that I've played years ago... :-) I only think that havy-monster/details specific of Angband (and seems that roguelikes in general) makes it not most egronomic.

[Magnate]

Yes, a group of 4 of us did (although my contribution was only about 5% of the total group effort). We created the custom fonts used with the xchar patch (recently replace by UTF-8). I think Diego (NPP co-maintainer) and Leon made the actual fonts with the pseudo graphics for doors and things of that nature. We lifted the idea for pseudo-graphics from TOME.

Those are really nice. Is there any way to use those pseudo-graphic characters in UTF-8? (Sorry, I'm an ignoramus about fonts and glyphs and code-points and suchlike.)

[nppangband]

Those are really nice. Is there any way to use those pseudo-graphic characters in UTF-8? (Sorry, I'm an ignoramus about fonts and glyphs and code-points and suchlike.)

What we did with the xchar patch was we stored some of them in the lower part of the ASCII that doesn't have actual character representations (0-31, the space is #32 and then the standard english keyboard and alphabet is represented from there. I am sure the same thing can be done with the new UTF-8 fonts, since I understand it 0-127 is identical in ASCII and UTF-8. I don't remember the actual code hack that we did to display them on screen, however. I think that code support may have been wiped out of vanilla when UTF-8 was implemented.

[Nick]

What we did with the xchar patch was we stored some of them in the lower part of the ASCII that doesn't have actual character representations (0-31, the space is #32 and then the standard english keyboard and alphabet is represented from there. I am sure the same thing can be done with the new UTF-8 fonts, since I understand it 0-127 is identical in ASCII and UTF-8. I don't remember the actual code hack that we did to display them on screen, however. I think that code support may have been wiped out of vanilla when UTF-8 was implemented.

This is also the method that I copied (via Leon's instructions) to make some of the fonts that Vanilla currently has.

My understanding of the move to UTF-8 is that we'll have more glyphs to choose from than we can poke a stick at, and would be able to move away from having Angband fonts (which would solve a raft of problems).

I hope if I'm wrong someone more knowledgeable will shoot me down. Be as brutal as you like.