Graphical UI and other upgrades to Angband?

[AnonymousHero]

This covers at least some of it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_symbols

... and then of course there's the (almost?) every-character-can-be-accented thing which could be used for any number of things: Showing status effects, distinguishing between normal/greater monster types, etc.

[Magnate]

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).

This is what I was getting at. I don't know much about these things, but I do know that ASCII only has about 255 characters, lots of which aren't printable (linefeeds and the like). Whereas Unicode has about a bazillion, so surely we can just add the neat glyphs Jeff and co created onto an existing Unicode font and use them? (I guess we need them in different sizes.)

[nppangband]

This is what I was getting at. I don't know much about these things, but I do know that ASCII only has about 255 characters, lots of which aren't printable (linefeeds and the like). Whereas Unicode has about a bazillion, so surely we can just add the neat glyphs Jeff and co created onto an existing Unicode font and use them? (I guess we need them in different sizes.)

Correct. With UTF-8 we should have access to many symbols, but I don't know if even unicode has open and closed doors, etc....

But first, can we separate the symbols for rods and wands, and use different letters so we can see the difference between dragons /great wyrms, or medium dragons and baby dragons.

[Magnate]

Correct. With UTF-8 we should have access to many symbols, but I don't know if even unicode has open and closed doors, etc....

But first, can we separate the symbols for rods and wands, and use different letters so we can see the difference between dragons /great wyrms, or medium dragons and baby dragons.

Definitely. Opened as #1555.

[Nick]

Correct. With UTF-8 we should have access to many symbols, but I don't know if even unicode has open and closed doors, etc....

In addition to AnonymousHero's link, here is a big page of symbols - I don't know how complete it is, and a lot of them don't display in my browser (I'm a unicode n00b).

I think trying to use just standard unicode fonts would be far preferable to adding glyphs and shipping fonts; I just hope it's possible.

[Nick]

Here are a very few possibly useful glyphs:
☖ ☗░▒▓♨⍋ᗝᚎ⌘⺽日目艹ʭ

[nppangband]

In addition to AnonymousHero's link, here is a big page of symbols - I don't know how complete it is, and a lot of them don't display in my browser (I'm a unicode n00b).

If I can suggest a couple new characters to replace duplicates:

Great Wyrms: Ð (# 209 if the symbol to the unicode letter to the left doesn't show up)

Morgoth: Ƥ (#420), or anything besides 'P', just becuase I think he should have a unique symbol)

medium dragons/drakes: ď


Rods: – (#150)


I think those might be the most important changes, but once you start thinking about it stopping is difficult, such as:
Shields: ϴ (# 1012)

[Nick]

Great Wyrms: Ð (# 209 if the symbol to the unicode letter to the left doesn't show up)

This one: Ð ?

[Derakon]

I'm a bit concerned about how users will be able to access information on these characters via the '/' command. Am I overthinking this? I was wondering about the feasibility of internally aliasing the letters that these symbols most look like to include these symbols as well, so doing '/D' would still turn up info on great wyrms even though that's not strictly their symbol.

Of course that's no help if we use symbols that aren't simply modified ASCII...

[AnonymousHero]

I'm a bit concerned about how users will be able to access information on these characters via the '/' command.

Perhaps just present users with a full list (or maybe a grid-like menu) instead?

[AnonymousHero]

I think trying to use just standard unicode fonts would be far preferable to adding glyphs and shipping fonts; I just hope it's possible.

I think shipping a "default" font along with Angband might still be preferable to using system-installed fonts for the simple reason that the supported set of unicode code points can vary greatly between various fonts. (I'm not sure how much it varies in practice.)

[Derakon]

Perhaps just present users with a full list (or maybe a grid-like menu) instead?

I guess you could make '//' or '/*' bring up a menu to let you pick from the various extended characters. Present you with a full list would kind of remove the purpose as it'd look something like this:

Recall information on
a) ants
A) Ainur
b) bats
B) Birds
c) centipedes
...

and there'd be no room in the alphabet for the user to select anything from the extended character set, because all the possible selector keys have been used already.

Though actually, you could also just make the extended characters be a second page on that listing. So yeah, that could work.

[Nomad]

I guess you could make '//' or '/*' bring up a menu to let you pick from the various extended characters. Present you with a full list would kind of remove the purpose as it'd look something like this:

Recall information on
a) ants
A) Ainur
b) bats
B) Birds
c) centipedes
...

and there'd be no room in the alphabet for the user to select anything from the extended character set, because all the possible selector keys have been used already.

Though actually, you could also just make the extended characters be a second page on that listing. So yeah, that could work.

Or you could have something like the option to change visuals on the knowledge menu, where you see all possible characters listed in a long line and can select one with the arrow keys.

[buzzkill]

What if we did something like link the look command to the knowledge menu.

While looking at something you could press the ~ key to bring up the knowledge menu with the appropriate entry already open. In this way the player would not only get the info he was looking for, but could also see likely related symbols/info too.

[Derakon]

If you can look at something, then you can bring up recall on it, so that's no trouble (and is why I was wondering if I was making a big deal out of nothing much). It's when you want to bring up recall on something you can't currently see that this becomes a problem.