Sil: What are your least liked features of Sil?

[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.)

[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 .

[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?

[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.

[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 .

[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]

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.

[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...).

[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.

[evilmike]

Oh, actually, that reminds me. It would be good to have a better interface for enabling and disabling abilities. There are a couple where it can make sense to turn them on and off a lot, for example flaming arrows, but it sucks how the menu takes up the whole screen and how you have to go into a sub menu. Maybe a key that brings up a menu of abilities that are worth toggling. It could behave like the song menu.

[half]

Oh, actually, that reminds me. It would be good to have a better interface for enabling and disabling abilities. There are a couple where it can make sense to turn them on and off a lot, for example flaming arrows, but it sucks how the menu takes up the whole screen and how you have to go into a sub menu. Maybe a key that brings up a menu of abilities that are worth toggling. It could behave like the song menu.

I actually designed the menu to work well for fast switching too. You just hit, say, "<tab> a a" in order to toggle Power. Believe it or not, the spell system in Angband requires you to do a three key sequence like this every time you want to fire a magic missile. I think doing the three key dance when you want to toggle something is pretty easy and you will memorise the two non-tab keys for the ability very quickly.

[evilmike]

I actually designed the menu to work well for fast switching too. You just hit, say, "<tab> a a" in order to toggle Power. Believe it or not, the spell system in Angband requires you to do a three key sequence like this every time you want to fire a magic missile. I think doing the three key dance when you want to toggle something is pretty easy and you will memorise the two non-tab keys for the ability very quickly.

When I use the ability menu to toggle power, I can't just hit tab-a-a.. I also need a sequence of keys to escape the menu. For me, it's tab-a-a-tab-tab, with the last two keypresses being how I get out of the menu (if there's a better way to quickly exit the skill menu, I don't know it...).

I use macros now to get around this issue (same with casting spells in angband), but this is a complicated feature which I don't think most people know how to use. A basic macro to toggle Power would be something like "\taa\t\t" for example. This doesn't give much feedback though - the macro will work, but you will only see an extremely brief screen flash (from the menu). There won't be a message printed, since it only gets printed in the menu system. Overall it's convenient, but a bit kludgey.

[half]

When I use the ability menu to toggle power, I can't just hit tab-a-a.. I also need a sequence of keys to escape the menu. For me, it's tab-a-a-tab-tab, with the last two keypresses being how I get out of the menu (if there's a better way to quickly exit the skill menu, I don't know it...).

Ah, you are right. I had thought it would disappear on the keypress, but I now see that it doesn't and that it would be a bit inconsistent with other menus if it did. tab-a-a-tab-tab is probably the best you can do at the moment (and then use macros). I agree that this isn't ideal though!

[half]

I also wanted to give a general thanks for the recent discussion of features to change. Compared to the average on this forum, Scatha and I are pretty far out in the dimension of wanting to make the fun and optimal play coincide in Sil (and in most games in general). It is fascinating to receive criticism from people who are further in that direction than us! If we are hesitant to adopt the suggestions, it is usually because we think that it is not worth the flavour sacrifices. This is something we also care about a lot and is an area in which we think Sil excels. Do keep up the suggestions though, and don't let our reluctance to implement some of them make you think that we aren't taking them seriously.

Am I right in thinking that MarvinPA and evilmike come from the Crawl community? I really like the idea of more cross-fertilisation between Sil and Crawl as there is a lot of overlap in the design style (probably more so than between Sil and Angband). I hear that Crawl has taken the Song of Slaying. That's great to hear. Do take other features you like. The rage visual effect, the style of the in-game help screens, and the behaviour of Grotesques were definitely influenced by Crawl, and there may be other things too that I'm forgetting.

[evilmike]

Am I right in thinking that MarvinPA and evilmike come from the Crawl community? I really like the idea of more cross-fertilisation between Sil and Crawl as there is a lot of overlap in the design style (probably more so than between Sil and Angband).

MarvinPA and I are both members of the Crawl dev team, although I'm currently inactive (right now all my attention is going into another game I'm developing - still unannounced). clouded is also a major contributor to Crawl.

There is a large overlap between the design philosophies of Sil and Crawl, which is why Sil is fairly popular with some crawl players. Some big differences are that Sil is much more concerned with theme/flavour, and that Sil has been carefully designed from the ground up. Crawl has sort of just evolved over time, so it's not as tightly designed, although its also much larger.