Sil: What are your least liked features of Sil?

[MarvinPA]

I made a few patches for Sil to fix my biggest personal annoyances. The patches are pretty quick and hacky for the most part but I'm convinced that the changes themselves are good, at least!

Coming from a DCSS player/developer's perspective there are a few parts of the interface that really bugged me, so the changes are almost entirely interface improvements:

• Always display all monsters/items/artefacts in the knowledge menus (to avoid having to start a new game and pick up Loremaster just to check information - this isn't perfect though because I had to prevent using 'r'ecall on items, since otherwise it would leak their unidentified appearance).
• Adjusted rage display, with red walls and floors instead of recolouring monsters and obscuring information.
• Show item weights when standing over or looking at an item (as suggested by clouded, this makes playing without inventory windows way smoother).
• Remove perception requirements for item use-identification, since in almost all cases you can easily identify the relevant items anyway (and if you have the combat rolls window enabled most of them become completely unambiguous).
• Disable maprot.

There's also a couple of non-interface changes, such as replacing all upstairs with upshafts on the ascent, and the inevitable "remove violet molds".

The commits are here if anyone else wants to try them out. (And by the way Sil is great - it's the first roguelike to really grab my attention since Crawl).

[debo]

[LIST][*]Remove perception requirements for item use-identification, since in almost all cases you can easily identify the relevant items anyway (and if you have the combat rolls window enabled most of them become completely unambiguous).

I like all the changes except the molds and maprot (wimp) but this one in particular is neat -- it may be the indirect nerf to loremaster we were looking for. (Or at least a step in that direction.)

[clouded]

I approve.

[taptap]

7 weapons before the throne room would be a couple more than ideal in my view.

Since I wrote this comment RNG punished me enough... never found the kind of light sword I wanted with my recent chars. Also, staff of treasures makes a big difference, I wrote the comment when I had one and could track down artifacts very efficiently.

[Pete Mack]

Not so much a disliked feature, but some missing ones.
1. No more "show dark squares" in display options. This is a serious pain since there's no illumination spell.
2. No way to cause a warning when a carried "special" weapon starts glowing blue. It's just silly to have to watch the inventory menu as (e.g.) orc detection.
3. Special weapons should ID automatically when they are glowing if
a. there are no "dark" squares in LOS & there is only a single class of monster visible.
b any monster "panics"
Slow ID for glowing equipment is just silly.

[Pete Mack]

... And one last thing: swapping quivers takes 3 turns, and 3 commands. This is silly, and preposterous.
There should be a quiver swap, such as w/n (weild equippy n).

[Pete Mack]

Finally, what's the deal with no EXP for killing monsters you can't see, even if you know what they are? (Like shadow mold, sulrako)

[half]

... And one last thing: swapping quivers takes 3 turns, and 3 commands. This is silly, and preposterous.
There should be a quiver swap, such as w/n (weild equippy n).

I'm not sure what you mean. Swapping quiver 1 and quiver 2? You don't need to do that (except for convenience in a safe place). Just use 'f' to fire from the first and 'F' to fire from the second.

[half]

Finally, what's the deal with no EXP for killing monsters you can't see, even if you know what they are? (Like shadow mold, sulrako)

I'm also puzzled by this. I'm pretty sure you always get experience from killing monsters you can't see, and unlike Angband, the kill count for that monster increases too. Perhaps it was a clear worm mass and you have killed so many you get no experience for them now? Keep an eye on this. If it is really happening, it is a bug.

[half]

Not so much a disliked feature, but some missing ones.
1. No more "show dark squares" in display options. This is a serious pain since there's no illumination spell.
2. No way to cause a warning when a carried "special" weapon starts glowing blue. It's just silly to have to watch the inventory menu as (e.g.) orc detection.
3. Special weapons should ID automatically when they are glowing if
a. there are no "dark" squares in LOS & there is only a single class of monster visible.
b any monster "panics"
Slow ID for glowing equipment is just silly.

1. I haven't had anyone else complain about this. If enough do, I can see what I can do. In general I thought there were far too many options including visual options and I removed those that seemed unnecessary (e.g. that no other roguelikes have).

2. Why is that silly? The detection is weak enough (e.g. orcs and or trolls somewhere in the medium vicinity) that it doesn't matter much anyway. I could add such a set of messages, or an option but it seems pretty unimportant compared to other things I could do.

3. Panicking is not directly related to the special weapons. It is a message I added when the monster thinks it is trapped and so is rapidly recovering morale to fight again. Also, weapons don't only glow when monsters are in LOS. Each monster of the relevant type counts inversely proportional to how far away it is, and if there is enough 'counting' in total, the weapon glows. If anything the auto-id should happen if it stops glowing when you kill a certain monster. A bigger issue though, is that you can work out slaying weapons very easily from the combat rolls window.

[half]

Always display all monsters/items/artefacts in the knowledge menus (to avoid having to start a new game and pick up Loremaster just to check information - this isn't perfect though because I had to prevent using 'r'ecall on items, since otherwise it would leak their unidentified appearance).

Interesting. I was wondering if you could say a few words about why you would want this? I assume most people would prefer something like the current setup. One plan for the future is to make the monster/item memory build up across different characters. You can pretty much get this now if you load old (dead) save files to create your new character, but I aim to make this a bit more intuitive and go further with it. Would that suffice?

Adjusted rage display, with red walls and floors instead of recolouring monsters and obscuring information.

I definitely prefer the standard behaviour. I think there is a bug whereby you can determine the monster types by looking around and using the monster recall, but this will be removed in the future, making things more consistent.

Show item weights when standing over or looking at an item (as suggested by clouded, this makes playing without inventory windows way smoother).

Sounds sensible. I kept these descriptions short, but I suppose weapon weight is so important in Sil that it is worth the extra text and clutter. I always play with the inventory window up so don't notice this much.

Remove perception requirements for item use-identification, since in almost all cases you can easily identify the relevant items anyway (and if you have the combat rolls window enabled most of them become completely unambiguous).

The perception requirements make the most sense for slow things like recognizing rings of sustenance, but I agree that they are a bit odd with weapons of slaying. I'm not sure what to do here, but since perception does already have quite a few gameplay effects, I'm open to removing this dependency.

Disable maprot.

I definitely like the forgetting effect. It is very mild compared to games like Nethack. I think roguelikes need bad effects for the player that are not directly deadly, since you can only suffer one death and it is otherwise not possible to have proper setbacks. People don't like stat drain, inventory destruction, acid damage, or forgetting the map when it occurs, but I think the risk of these add to the texture of the game.

There's also a couple of non-interface changes, such as replacing all upstairs with upshafts on the ascent, and the inevitable "remove violet molds".

See above re violet molds (which are already pretty rare in response to previous complaints). Having your character have less health for a few levels is a pretty interesting setback in my view, leading to increased tension for a while, relief when it is over, a change in how the character feels to play etc. It is better to be able to make such a thing more dependent on an exciting event, but even if it were completely random, there is something to be said for it, and it is actually quite avoidable (i.e. it happens much less to experienced players).

Re the escape, we are planning to have one stair and one shaft of each type on the larger levels, which should have most of the effect of your change. I think this is a better fix than having the dungeon structure mysteriously change when you pick up an item.

(And by the way Sil is great - it's the first roguelike to really grab my attention since Crawl).

Great! I'm glad you are enjoying it!

[fph]

I am not sure that it is sensible (thematically) to be able to miraculously "sense" the weight at a distance on look. The current system where you have to step on an item to have its weight displayed looks ok; you should only try to fit that line in the main term rather than in the inventory window (which might be a problem, since it's already crowded). Maybe a good solution is that weight is displayed on 'l'ook, but only for the item at the character's feet, not at a distance.

Apart from this suggestion, I agree completely with half's view on these topics.

[MarvinPA]

Interesting. I was wondering if you could say a few words about why you would want this? I assume most people would prefer something like the current setup. One plan for the future is to make the monster/item memory build up across different characters. You can pretty much get this now if you load old (dead) save files to create your new character, but I aim to make this a bit more intuitive and go further with it. Would that suffice?

I don't like having persistence across multiple characters like this - I feel like if some information is going to be displayed, it should just always be displayed. For one thing, it's new players that the information is most useful for: when I was just starting Sil, I really wanted to be able to look in the item knowledge screen just to find out what herbs/potions/staves/etc even exist (as I would be able to do in Brogue or Crawl), for example to help me understand what possible effects I'm risking when I use-ID. If this information is only available after I've already stumbled into the item somehow, it's significantly less useful to me (or I'm forced to do the aforementioned "start a new game and pick up Loremaster" or open up the object.txt files just to learn what exists).

Relatedly for monster information - if it's going to be displayed fully ever, I think it should be displayed fully always. Crawl's approach here is not to display monster details in full since damage calculations are so complicated that it just wouldn't be helpful; Brogue's is to always display partial information ("it typically hits for x% of your current health, and at worst, could defeat you in y hits" - a pretty neat approach which works well); Sil's approach looks to me like it is intended to be fairly simple and transparent, which I think also works really well with its design, so it feels weird to me when information that the game is perfectly happy to give to me in principle just isn't available at certain times.

I definitely prefer the standard behaviour. I think there is a bug whereby you can determine the monster types by looking around and using the monster recall, but this will be removed in the future, making things more consistent.

For rage, the problem with obscuring what monsters are is that it's only relevant when entirely new monsters come into view. Certainly this happens, but I don't feel like hiding that information is worth the interface annoyance of obscuring all the monsters that were already in LOS (where you are very likely to know for sure which is which, even if the game refuses to display that information).

I definitely like the forgetting effect. It is very mild compared to games like Nethack. I think roguelikes need bad effects for the player that are not directly deadly, since you can only suffer one death and it is otherwise not possible to have proper setbacks. People don't like stat drain, inventory destruction, acid damage, or forgetting the map when it occurs, but I think the risk of these add to the texture of the game.

I absolutely agree that it's fine to have bad effects that aren't directly lethal and might "annoy" people like item destruction, corrosion, stat drain and so on. The problem with maprot is that it just doesn't function as that - you really can just screenshot the map and then it has no real effect (other than Patashu's edge case mentioned a few pages back of disabling "door sense"). I'm almost always termcasting while playing now, it wouldn't be much of a stretch to record ttyrecs too so I wouldn't have to even stop and remember to screenshot when I spot a Mewlip. I don't want optimal play to require doing this, though! One more ambitious alternative that was suggested when I was talking about this in IRC a bit was to change the maprot effect to actually regenerate the parts of the level that are out of your LOS - it'd give it a (fairly significant?) gameplay effect as well as making the disorientating effect much stronger. Not sure how that would work out or how easy it'd be to implement, though.

But as far as violet molds go I'm not entirely happy with having them just disabled, yeah. I'd rather add them back in and implement a prompt for walking next to one, maybe I'll have a go at doing that today.

Edit: done, there's now a prompt to step next to a mold (might be annoying in some edge cases?) and molds don't disappear from the map when out of vision (this might do weird things with the monster list? I don't think I can easily test it from Cygwin though).

[clouded]

I definitely like the forgetting effect. It is very mild compared to games like Nethack. I think roguelikes need bad effects for the player that are not directly deadly, since you can only suffer one death and it is otherwise not possible to have proper setbacks. People don't like stat drain, inventory destruction, acid damage, or forgetting the map when it occurs, but I think the risk of these add to the texture of the game.

Maprot doesn't belong in that category, it belongs with blindness and hallucination, effects that corrupt the interface to make things difficult for the player. However unlike those two effects, it is only very rarely tactically relevant (never strategically, unless you consider one level to stretch enough for that, I don't) and has an obvious circumvention, which cannot be removed. For the record, I have no problem with stat drain, item destruction/corrosion.

I'm not sure why you mention Nethack. Unlike Nethack, Sil is supposedly a model of good design for roguelikes which is why I dislike to see it include things like this.

[Scatha]

I don't like having persistence across multiple characters like this - I feel like if some information is going to be displayed, it should just always be displayed. For one thing, it's new players that the information is most useful for: when I was just starting Sil, I really wanted to be able to look in the item knowledge screen just to find out what herbs/potions/staves/etc even exist (as I would be able to do in Brogue or Crawl), for example to help me understand what possible effects I'm risking when I use-ID. If this information is only available after I've already stumbled into the item somehow, it's significantly less useful to me (or I'm forced to do the aforementioned "start a new game and pick up Loremaster" or open up the object.txt files just to learn what exists).

Relatedly for monster information - if it's going to be displayed fully ever, I think it should be displayed fully always. Crawl's approach here is not to display monster details in full since damage calculations are so complicated that it just wouldn't be helpful; Brogue's is to always display partial information ("it typically hits for x% of your current health, and at worst, could defeat you in y hits" - a pretty neat approach which works well); Sil's approach looks to me like it is intended to be fairly simple and transparent, which I think also works really well with its design, so it feels weird to me when information that the game is perfectly happy to give to me in principle just isn't available at certain times.

Just to say thanks, you've made a very clean case here and I understand the issue better than I used to.

For this, and rage, and maprot, you are presenting the obviously correct case for interface design. In each case, pushing against this is some flavour/immersion benefit from the current behaviour.

For some reason if I have to deal with rage or maprot in game I'm happy to just roll with my current fallible mental state: they don't trigger my internal sense of "but I could do better by taking this annoying behaviour". I think this is because the annoying behaviour is outside of the game rather than in the game, so it ends up in the same mental class as save-scumming rather than stair-scumming. I can easily understand making the other mental classification, though.

I actually will sometimes look things up in the spoiler files, so I'm somewhat convinced there. There's still a loss to displaying everything: you can make it more overwhelming for new players, as well as reduce the sense of excitement at exploration. This can be a very real source of enjoyment for people, so I have some reluctance towards the idea of cutting it out altogether.

Brainstorming: one possibility would be to bury an option to turn on complete knowledge that people who want to know as much as they can are likely to find. Not perfect.

One more ambitious alternative that was suggested when I was talking about this in IRC a bit was to change the maprot effect to actually regenerate the parts of the level that are out of your LOS

That's actually very cool. Bewildering.

Edit: to clarify wording.