Sil: What are your least liked features of Sil?

[taptap]

Rage: The typical situation for rage for me is my (often flanking) char being pinned by many o or @ one (or two) of whom is an unique (well then there is no positioning anyway), but as soon as I have an opening to choose for running it starts to matter somewhat.

Smithing: Default weights are the easiest and fastest to smith. An Edain with 1 or 2 grace may only be able to smith the easiest one. Also with artistry you might be able to get a direct bonus when taking the default weight, but not anymore when weight is changed, being able to see the base difficulty at a glance has some value.

0.9 lb shortbow / shortsword: great idea for rapid attack / rapid fire unbuffed and giving MOAR criticals. How light can a sword / bow be? Sadly there are no mithril shortswords Mithril longswords are possible as light as 1 lb as far as I know.

1.5 lb shortsword: STR 3 and momentum in a light weapon build.

Something else: I would like follow through to ignore unaware opponents (always or only when the player has assassination). It is a pain to turn it on / off for every attack.

[MarvinPA]

For weapons, it's a bit trickier. It would make sense if it tried to round to .5 though, because there's never a reason to craft a weapon that weighs 2.9, that I know of.

I made a couple of commits to always round item weights to a multiple of 0.5 (both from regular generation and smithing), and it was pointed out to me that technically there are times when you'd want a 0.9 lb shortsword: when you have negative effective strength, for example with Rapid Attack, it lets you avoid getting a damage side penalty while still being reasonable to smith. I'm not sure if that's a particularly significant case though so I'm trying it to see how it feels for now (good so far - the other main benefit and the actual reason I changed it in the first place was to avoid having to repeatedly check weapons and swap from 3.3 lb to 3.2 lb to 3.1 lb...).

[evilmike]

3. Red walls is substituting a real effect for eye candy without any purpose in game. What else is rage supposed to do than to make you oblivious to danger and attacking everything in sight without second thoughts about optimal positioning?

You can already tell what the enemies are, though. The messages and everything clearly show you what you're fighting, the only thing that changes is colour. I always assumed the red colouring was just meant to be eye candy because it never has a real gameplay effect. It just makes me pay more attention to combat messages. Although, even then it's not always super important - it's not like that C on 100' you were raging against will turn out to be Gorthaur.

5. I wouldn't want the game to force "optimal" weights on me. It is less transparent because it proposes different things every time. There are different preferences for armour -> heavy armour ability vs. stealth, different preferences for weapons and abilities interacting with it - I did smith 6 lb battle axes before on the first forge -> STR 3 + charge, I want a shortsword to be 1lb regardless of my strength. In other words, quite a bit of programming for saving a few keystrokes on a 2 lb longsword that would instantly be required to forge a 1 lb shortsword at the same forge. And even with high grace / smithing I don't want to waste a 100 turns just to get my first shovel optimized.

I wouldn't want it to force anything... the idea is just to make things a bit more convenient. I'll put it this way - if you ignore the "numbers" menu when smithing a weapon, right now it just goes to the default weight. 1.5 for a short sword, 3.0 for a long sword, 7.0 for a great sword, and so on. What I'm proposing is just that if you ignore the "numbers" menu, it tries to make the weight something more reasonable. That seems more useful than crafting a 1.5lb shortsword by default (I'm not sure why you'd ever want 1.5 instead of 1.0).

You're right that just going for str isn't going to work, but when I look at the default weight values, most of them look pretty bad (for example, a 6lb great sword can be useful, but that default of 7 is pretty unlikely to be useful before the lategame).

There are a bunch of ways to solve it, I doubt my ideas are the best approach. I'd love to see something done to improve it though.

Maybe a "minimal/maximal possible weight" option would solve the issue in a less complicated way.

This would definitely be useful for armour. For weapons, it's a bit trickier. It would make sense if it tried to round to .5 though, because there's never a reason to craft a weapon that weighs 2.9, that I know of.

7. Ascent: The ascent should be optimized for first time winners not for people routinely winning the game. The first time I had Morgoth breathing down my neck was intense. That said, I am happy about all revelations and upshafts I get.

I actually got a bit bored on my first win... morgoth wasn't super hard to avoid, I was most scared of dragons breathing on me. The ascent itself wasn't boring all the way, it was just too long. On later games I made sure to stockpile revelations staffs to speed things up.

[taptap]

1. The default character for food looks too much like the character for floor.

The solution here is to change the food character to something more visible. '%' and ':' are the ones most often seen in other roguelikes, although I guess these are already taken in Sil.

3. I don't like how herbs of rage make everything go red.

5. The smithing interface is really bad, and I tend not to use smithing much because of it, except for jewelcrafting. The main problem is the number of keystrokes needed to create relatively simple items. For example, a huge number of characters benefit from crafting the same 2lb long sword at their first forge... and it gets old going through the same complicated routine each time.

One thing that should be streamlined is the way item weights are selected. I suggest having it so, in addition to the "increase weight" and "decrease weight" options, there is an "auto weight" option which is enabled by default. With this it should try to pick an "optimal" weight for your item, using whatever leftover points are available. For a weapon this would be your str, and for an armour it would be the lowest possible value (maybe).

Of course, there are lots of reasons a player might want different numbers, so there should still be the option of manually selecting the weight. If you do this, "auto weight" would be automatically disabled and you'd be free to pick whatever you want.

1. Yes.

3. Red walls is substituting a real effect for eye candy without any purpose in game. What else is rage supposed to do than to make you oblivious to danger and attacking everything in sight without second thoughts about optimal positioning?

5. I wouldn't want the game to force "optimal" weights on me. It is less transparent because it proposes different things every time. There are different preferences for armour -> heavy armour ability vs. stealth, different preferences for weapons and abilities interacting with it - I did smith 6 lb battle axes before on the first forge -> STR 3 + charge, I want a shortsword to be 1lb regardless of my strength. In other words, quite a bit of programming for saving a few keystrokes on a 2 lb longsword that would instantly be required to forge a 1 lb shortsword at the same forge. And even with high grace / smithing I don't want to waste a 100 turns just to get my first shovel optimized. Maybe a "minimal/maximal possible weight" option would solve the issue in a less complicated way.

But there are bugs in the interface. Notably when switching between artifice screen and changing numbers more than once, it doesn't highlight selected abilities anymore while still calculating their difficulty and you can choose them twice. Especially when tinkering around instead of having your artifacts preplanned this can get really annoying. Basically I had to leave the menu completely and start again for the more elaborate artifacts.

7. Ascent: The ascent should be optimized for first time winners not for people routinely winning the game. The first time I had Morgoth breathing down my neck was intense. That said, I am happy about all revelations and upshafts I get.

[evilmike]

Sil is one of my favourite roguelikes, and I'm glad this thread exists. Most of my complaints here are interface related. This is in no particular order, some of these issues are a lot less important than others. The points I make about smithing are by far the most important to me.


1. The default character for food looks too much like the character for floor. I know I can change this by editing pref files somehow, but figuring out where to do this is nearly impossible for most people, including me. The result is that it's very easy to miss picking up herbs, especially ones that are a similar colour to the floor. Here's a quick example:



Certainly visible, but it could stand out more. Some fonts are better than others, but the one I'm using here is one of the better ones. Anyway, it can be annoying to miss useful herbs because you don't see them.

The solution here is to change the food character to something more visible. '%' and ':' are the ones most often seen in other roguelikes, although I guess these are already taken in Sil. But there are other characters to choose from, and pretty much anything is better than ','.


2. I don't like the amnesia effect, especially from amnesia traps. I'd rather take some sort of debuff.


3. I don't like how herbs of rage make everything go red. Crawl used to do this with its berserk effect, but it was eventually changed so only floors and walls turn red. Monsters keep their original colour, so you can still see what you are fighting. It's a good compromise.


4. The 'R' character is overloaded. There are a lot of "demon" type enemies which use 'R', and on top of that, it's one of the most common characters for uniques (thanks to the Balrogs). To be honest, I have trouble keeping straight which R is which, except for the really common ones. I think you should move the balrog uniques to 'B'.


5. The smithing interface is really bad, and I tend not to use smithing much because of it, except for jewelcrafting. The main problem is the number of keystrokes needed to create relatively simple items. For example, a huge number of characters benefit from crafting the same 2lb long sword at their first forge... and it gets old going through the same complicated routine each time.

One thing that should be streamlined is the way item weights are selected. I suggest having it so, in addition to the "increase weight" and "decrease weight" options, there is an "auto weight" option which is enabled by default. With this it should try to pick an "optimal" weight for your item, using whatever leftover points are available. For a weapon this would be your str, and for an armour it would be the lowest possible value (maybe).

Of course, there are lots of reasons a player might want different numbers, so there should still be the option of manually selecting the weight. If you do this, "auto weight" would be automatically disabled and you'd be free to pick whatever you want.

In addition to this, you should be prevented from choosing a number that's out of bounds. If I hold down the "decrease weight" button, it should just go to the lowest possible weight that I can still smith. The way it works now, I have to carefully select the exact number, or it won't let me continue. That's very annoying.

Finally, I think the scale is too fine grained. The lowest and highest weights you can choose should be in increments of .1, but everything in between should just round to the nearest .5. There's basically no reason for me to ever make a long sword that weighs 2.2 lb.

In other words, let's say the lowest weight I can make an item is 1.1, and the highest is 4.7. If I hold "decrease weight" all the way, the number will go to 1.1 and no lower (because anything lower is impossible for me to make with the points I have left). If I increase the weight by one notch, it goes to 1.5. Then 2.0, 2.5... and so on. After 4.5, it goes to 4.7 and stays there, since anything higher is impossible.

This sounds complicated when I write this out, but these suggestions would greatly streamline the worst part of Sil's smithing interface.


6. I'm not done with smithing yet! Another problem is that I often make the same items (eg the 2.0lb long sword. There really needs to be some kind of "recently smithed" list of items, that gets written to my save file. When I use a forge, one of the options on the list should be "Recent" or something like that. If I select this, I see the last 15 or so items that were smithed over my current/previous characters on that save. Stuff that can't be made with the current character's skill is greyed out and can't be selected. But if I can make the item, I just select it from the menu and immediately start smithing it.

Therfore, if I want to make that long sword, I just need three keystrokes. '0' to open the smithing menu, 'r' (let's say) to open the Recent menu, and 'a' to select the first item on the list, which is a 2.0 lb long sword.

I'd actually use smithing _a lot_ more if such a feature existed. It would skip all the crap and just let me select the item I want, instead of manually crafting it each and every time.


7. The ascent can be a bit dull. Being chased around by morgoth can be cool, but the whole thing is really long. I like the idea of converting all the up stairs to shafts on the ascent.


8. I don't like the maze vaults, e.g. "N:10:Maze". You eventually get used to the layouts that are available, which makes them feel really weird after a while. It doesn't make sense that Angband has a bunch of these tiny prefab maze things that are exactly the same. Vaults like "N:24:Hallway Rooms" are _much_ better, because even though its a recognizable layout, it has a logical pattern to it that fits within the dungeon. Somehow it just makes more sense that such a thing would repeat, maybe because I can imagine a "purpose" behind such a layout, as opposed to a maze. This is really just a flavour thing, but Sil tends to be fairly strong in that aspect, so I don't like it when bits of the dungeon feel "off".

The problem really isn't mazes, it's mazes where I have seen the exact layout a dozen times. I think you should get rid of the maze vaults and generate those areas procedurally instead.

In general, Sil vaults are very abstract looking: a bunch of geometrical rooms, some rooms with pillars, some rooms with a notable feature in the middle, etc. In a game like this, these are the best kind of vault in a game like this, because they fit perfectly.


9. Traps in vaults are bad. They are always in the same spot, so if I memorize the layouts I can know exactly which squares are trapped. I think traps only work if you can't predict where they are. Therfore I think you should remove pre-placed traps from vaults and rely entirely on random traps.


Anyway, that's all I can think of for now, but I might have more to post later .

[MarvinPA]

I've just had a look at these and added a couple to the Sil code (mainly the "!a" one). Thanks for linking to them. I assume you are OK with the GPL 3 license?

Yep, absolutely.

[half]

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).

I've just had a look at these and added a couple to the Sil code (mainly the "!a" one). Thanks for linking to them. I assume you are OK with the GPL 3 license?

[evilmike]

Sil is one of my favourite roguelikes, and I'm glad this thread exists. Most of my complaints here are interface related. This is in no particular order, some of these issues are a lot less important than others. The points I make about smithing are by far the most important to me.


1. The default character for food looks too much like the character for floor. I know I can change this by editing pref files somehow, but figuring out where to do this is nearly impossible for most people, including me. The result is that it's very easy to miss picking up herbs, especially ones that are a similar colour to the floor. Here's a quick example:



Certainly visible, but it could stand out more. Some fonts are better than others, but the one I'm using here is one of the better ones. Anyway, it can be annoying to miss useful herbs because you don't see them.

The solution here is to change the food character to something more visible. '%' and ':' are the ones most often seen in other roguelikes, although I guess these are already taken in Sil. But there are other characters to choose from, and pretty much anything is better than ','.


2. I don't like the amnesia effect, especially from amnesia traps. I'd rather take some sort of debuff.


3. I don't like how herbs of rage make everything go red. Crawl used to do this with its berserk effect, but it was eventually changed so only floors and walls turn red. Monsters keep their original colour, so you can still see what you are fighting. It's a good compromise.


4. The 'R' character is overloaded. There are a lot of "demon" type enemies which use 'R', and on top of that, it's one of the most common characters for uniques (thanks to the Balrogs). To be honest, I have trouble keeping straight which R is which, except for the really common ones. I think you should move the balrog uniques to 'B'.


5. The smithing interface is really bad, and I tend not to use smithing much because of it, except for jewelcrafting. The main problem is the number of keystrokes needed to create relatively simple items. For example, a huge number of characters benefit from crafting the same 2lb long sword at their first forge... and it gets old going through the same complicated routine each time.

One thing that should be streamlined is the way item weights are selected. I suggest having it so, in addition to the "increase weight" and "decrease weight" options, there is an "auto weight" option which is enabled by default. With this it should try to pick an "optimal" weight for your item, using whatever leftover points are available. For a weapon this would be your str, and for an armour it would be the lowest possible value (maybe).

Of course, there are lots of reasons a player might want different numbers, so there should still be the option of manually selecting the weight. If you do this, "auto weight" would be automatically disabled and you'd be free to pick whatever you want.

In addition to this, you should be prevented from choosing a number that's out of bounds. If I hold down the "decrease weight" button, it should just go to the lowest possible weight that I can still smith. The way it works now, I have to carefully select the exact number, or it won't let me continue. That's very annoying.

Finally, I think the scale is too fine grained. The lowest and highest weights you can choose should be in increments of .1, but everything in between should just round to the nearest .5. There's basically no reason for me to ever make a long sword that weighs 2.2 lb.

In other words, let's say the lowest weight I can make an item is 1.1, and the highest is 4.7. If I hold "decrease weight" all the way, the number will go to 1.1 and no lower (because anything lower is impossible for me to make with the points I have left). If I increase the weight by one notch, it goes to 1.5. Then 2.0, 2.5... and so on. After 4.5, it goes to 4.7 and stays there, since anything higher is impossible.

This sounds complicated when I write this out, but these suggestions would greatly streamline the worst part of Sil's smithing interface.


6. I'm not done with smithing yet! Another problem is that I often make the same items (eg the 2.0lb long sword. There really needs to be some kind of "recently smithed" list of items, that gets written to my save file. When I use a forge, one of the options on the list should be "Recent" or something like that. If I select this, I see the last 15 or so items that were smithed over my current/previous characters on that save. Stuff that can't be made with the current character's skill is greyed out and can't be selected. But if I can make the item, I just select it from the menu and immediately start smithing it.

Therfore, if I want to make that long sword, I just need three keystrokes. '0' to open the smithing menu, 'r' (let's say) to open the Recent menu, and 'a' to select the first item on the list, which is a 2.0 lb long sword.

I'd actually use smithing _a lot_ more if such a feature existed. It would skip all the crap and just let me select the item I want, instead of manually crafting it each and every time.


7. The ascent can be a bit dull. Being chased around by morgoth can be cool, but the whole thing is really long. I like the idea of converting all the up stairs to shafts on the ascent.


8. I don't like the maze vaults, e.g. "N:10:Maze". You eventually get used to the layouts that are available, which makes them feel really weird after a while. It doesn't make sense that Angband has a bunch of these tiny prefab maze things that are exactly the same. Vaults like "N:24:Hallway Rooms" are _much_ better, because even though its a recognizable layout, it has a logical pattern to it that fits within the dungeon. Somehow it just makes more sense that such a thing would repeat, maybe because I can imagine a "purpose" behind such a layout, as opposed to a maze. This is really just a flavour thing, but Sil tends to be fairly strong in that aspect, so I don't like it when bits of the dungeon feel "off".

The problem really isn't mazes, it's mazes where I have seen the exact layout a dozen times. I think you should get rid of the maze vaults and generate those areas procedurally instead.

In general, Sil vaults are very abstract looking: a bunch of geometrical rooms, some rooms with pillars, some rooms with a notable feature in the middle, etc. In a game like this, these are the best kind of vault in a game like this, because they fit perfectly.


9. Traps in vaults are bad. They are always in the same spot, so if I memorize the layouts I can know exactly which squares are trapped. I think traps only work if you can't predict where they are. Therfore I think you should remove pre-placed traps from vaults and rely entirely on random traps.


Anyway, that's all I can think of for now, but I might have more to post later .

[AnonymousHero]

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.

Simply presenting monster recall using a more regular or tabular display would help a lot with that, I should think. (But of course this may also slightly reduce that ineffable "immersion" quality.)

[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.

[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.

[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).

[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.

[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!

[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.