Angband 80x24 sereen display - a modest proposal

[Magnate]

I've been thinking about this, and while that doesn't suddenly make me a UI expert, it did make me realise one thing. My wife got a new smartphone a few days ago, which is more powerful than any PC I ever owned except the current one - it's a 1.2GHz dual-core Samsung SII with 1GB of RAM. It occurred to me that Angband has been playable on phones since AngbandCE over a decade ago. The real problems were screen real estate (which is now solved with 800x480 WVGA screens) and UI.

Everybody tells me that the future of UI is gestures, not keyboards or pointing devices. So if we can make a UI that interprets gestures correctly, those of us who want to play on a desktop can just plug in a USB touchpad thingy to receive them. (I guess we can then set up our own keybindings if we want, or use the defaults.)

Has anyone done any UI stuff for phones using gestures? It's not something I know anything about. Are there libraries of any useful maturity?

[mariodonick]

One thing that is sorely lacking in angband: a hotkey bar. Allowing you to assign a spell/item/.. to a hotkey in an intuitive way would go a long way toward making things easier.
It's near incomprehensible to me that in 2012 you still need to make a macro to cast spells in any efficient ways.

Agreed. And I think roguelikes can learn a lot from modern MMORPG interfaces. In 2009 I played World of Warcraft, and immediatly after that I gave LambdaRogue a hotkey interface, which is still working fine. I miss this very much in most other roguelikes. Therefore, I am happy that ToME 4 also received such a thing, and I wish Angband had this, too.

I also think that such UI elements should float above the game world, prefarably moveable, instead of being put into ugly rectangular boxes.

[imsabbel]

We already have #1 and #2 of your suggestions.
#1 is the monster list. Set it up by making a second window visible in the window>visibility dropdown menu. Then go to options (=) then (w) for subwindow display settings and you can set the monster list to show in the second window.
#2 is the "center map continuously" option. Go to options (=) then (d)isplay options and turn on center map continuously.
I always play with both of these things turned on.

You perfectly illustrate the whole problem.

Why is "center continuesly" not default, but turned off hidden 2 menue layers deep in a screen with a dozend other options

And it took me 3 years to find out how the window options work - not only do you have to manually activate windows, but they will not show anything until you dig deep into a totally different part of the configuration (window gui menues vs angband internal menue structure) for the options what to show in them.
(and half the time they do not show anything either until selection of a font, etc).
Not to mention that the last time i looked at vanilla, the whole process was not at all documented.

If you insist on windows, it would be a lot better, if:
- those windows were magnetic towards the main window
- something sensible was the default content instead of no selection
- some kind of hint was given to users that this option does exists

Also, it really does not help that all the options are in this convoluted mess of configuration dialog that has been growing for years.

[AnonymousHero]

Why is "center continuesly" not default, but turned off hidden 2 menue layers deep in a screen with a dozend other options

Frankly, I don't understand this either. The ToME 2.x options screen claims that this option is "slow". It is noticably slower even on modern machines, at least with the X11 UI, but that's just because the UI basically hasn't been maintained nor optimized for a long time.)

(snip good points about the window options)

The number of open windows should definitely change dynamically based on what information screens you've chosen in your window configuration. It's absurd to have to invoke

angband -uCHARNAME -mx11 -- -n5

to get 4 extra windows.

Btw, why do I have to choose the name of the savefile (CHARNAME) on the command line, but I choose the name of the character separately?

(I realize that this isn't trivial to implement -- nor have I done so myself back when I was interested in maintaining ToME 2.x, but as long as we're throwing around ideas...)

[Derakon]

I find "center continuously" to be rather annoying -- a single step means that the entire screen changes, which can make motion of other objects harder to track (especially since Angband doesn't have any movement animations). But then again I also play with a gigantic screen that means that I'm never close to the edge of the visible space anyway -- the jump-scrolls occur well clear of the view boundary.

[Magnate]

I find "center continuously" to be rather annoying -- a single step means that the entire screen changes, which can make motion of other objects harder to track (especially since Angband doesn't have any movement animations). But then again I also play with a gigantic screen that means that I'm never close to the edge of the visible space anyway -- the jump-scrolls occur well clear of the view boundary.

I hate it too, it gives me some sort of motion sickness.

And it's not as if the option is hard to find: go to options, and it's under "Interface and Display Options", which is the one you'd expect it to be under.

That said, it wouldn't bother me if the default was reversed.