Aim, Target, ESC and performance?

[fruviad]

I'm playing 4.2.4 on Ubuntu 18.04. While playing, I'm listening to music using the Audacious application running on the same system.

In Angband, I choose to fire ammo, or aim a wand, or zap a rod. I use * to begin the process of selecting a specific target. Instead of hitting "." to select a specific target, I hit the Escape key to undo my targeting and revert to the previous prompt.

At the moment I hit Escape, the music playback in Audacious pauses for the briefest moment. After the brief pause, the prior Angband prompt is re-displayed: Direction ('*' or <click> to target, "'" for closest, Escape to cancel)?

The same pause does not occur if I'm not targeting as part of using a device or distance weapon. i.e. If I simply press "*" to target and then I Escape out of the same point in the prompts, there's no side effect. The resulting message from the system is "Target Aborted."

Known issue?

[emar]

It looks like your music is being interrupted by a silent terminal bell that is signaled by an internal error that you didn't provide a valid target. I don't see any actual reason why it should bell, as (as you note) the targeting process repeats until you escape out anyway.

The real question is whether escaping out of firing using interactive targeting should return the player to the targeting options or to escape the command entirely?

[fruviad]

It looks like your music is being interrupted by a silent terminal bell that is signaled by an internal error that you didn't provide a valid target. I don't see any actual reason why it should bell, as (as you note) the targeting process repeats until you escape out anyway.

The real question is whether escaping out of firing using interactive targeting should return the player to the targeting options or to escape the command entirely?

I don't see any problems with the current behavior of returning to the targeting options.

If there's a silent terminal bell being triggered, then this is the only context in the game where I've ever encountered it. If this terminal bell is a feature, then I'd expect it to be used more commonly elsewhere in the game.

Additional experimentation reveals that if I type the following set of keystrokes once:

f ENTER * ESCAPE ESCAPE

...then the issue occurs after the first ESCAPE. However, if I continue to run through those keystrokes without pausing, the issue does not recur. I need to stop doing anything for a dozen seconds before I can get it to happen again.

It feels like whatever's happening is being cached, so immediate re-attempts won't trigger the issue, but once ??? falls out of the cache, another attempt to repro the problem causes the system to pause while it's pulled back into the cache.

[backwardsEric]

If there's a silent terminal bell being triggered, then this is the only context in the game where I've ever encountered it. If this terminal bell is a feature, then I'd expect it to be used more commonly elsewhere in the game.

Additional experimentation reveals that if I type the following set of keystrokes once:

f ENTER * ESCAPE ESCAPE

...then the issue occurs after the first ESCAPE. However, if I continue to run through those keystrokes without pausing, the issue does not recur. I need to stop doing anything for a dozen seconds before I can get it to happen again.

It feels like whatever's happening is being cached, so immediate re-attempts won't trigger the issue, but once ??? falls out of the cache, another attempt to repro the problem causes the system to pause while it's pulled back into the cache.

The bell was made functional again in 4.2.4; for some period (probably years; see https://github.com/angband/angband/issues/4400 ) nothing was relayed to the front ends. Which front end are you using? The X11, GCU, and Windows front ends all handle the bell differently; the SDL front ends do nothing.

[fruviad]

I'm using the X11 front end.