targeting differences between 3.0.9b and HEAD

[d_m]

So I tried playing 3.0.9b recently. While I missed most of the improvements of HEAD, one thing in particular that stood out as being better was the targeting interface.

In 3.0.9b, if there is a pack of monsters and you hit "*" you start highlighting one of them, but can then use the direction keys to toggle between all the visible monsters. In HEAD you can only toggle between what I'll call "border monsters".

It seems to me that some spells (stinking cloud in particular) allow one to target interior monsters in a pack. But maybe I'm wrong. If I manually target an interior monster, does the spell still go off when it hits the border monster? If so, then that explains this change: it shows the player which monsters are valid targets.

If interior monster *are* valid targets, then was this change made explicitly, or is it a bug or regression?

[takkaria]

So I tried playing 3.0.9b recently. While I missed most of the improvements of HEAD, one thing in particular that stood out as being better was the targeting interface.

In 3.0.9b, if there is a pack of monsters and you hit "*" you start highlighting one of them, but can then use the direction keys to toggle between all the visible monsters. In HEAD you can only toggle between what I'll call "border monsters".

It seems to me that some spells (stinking cloud in particular) allow one to target interior monsters in a pack. But maybe I'm wrong. If I manually target an interior monster, does the spell still go off when it hits the border monster? If so, then that explains this change: it shows the player which monsters are valid targets.

If interior monster *are* valid targets, then was this change made explicitly, or is it a bug or regression?

It's a regression (filed as bug 644).

[d_m]

It's a regression (filed as bug 644).

Great. I just posted a patch to revert the behavior, but then I thought that maybe the old behavior wasn't ideal either. Certainly for arrows, there is never any utility in targeting an interior monster, because it will never "beam".

Based on the code, it seems like rewriting the look/target code to pay attention to what kind of spell/attack the user is doing will be kind of hard.

[PowerDiver]

Great. I just posted a patch to revert the behavior, but then I thought that maybe the old behavior wasn't ideal either. Certainly for arrows, there is never any utility in targeting an interior monster, because it will never "beam".

There is definitely utility in targeting a tough guy in the center even when just shooting arrows, so that you can just keep hitting 'n' and shoot wimps when they get in the way and your main foe when the path is clear.

[andrewdoull]

Based on the code, it seems like rewriting the look/target code to pay attention to what kind of spell/attack the user is doing will be kind of hard.

I've done this for Unangband, and it requires a surprising amount of rearchitecting of the whole code base... I'd need to look at the current Angband code for this area as Unangband diverged some time ago and I know there have been a number of changes here on the vanilla side of things as well.

Ironically the changes to the project and targetting parts of the code are relatively straight forward. It's getting all the spells/attacks defined in a way that allows you to specify how the spell projects and aims that is the hard part.

Andrew