Poll: changes to zephyr hounds

[bebo]

EDIT: and speaking of misinterpreted ascii, I also prefer the same change be made for Glaurung that was recently made for Kavlax. He's way more dangerous than Smaug or a Dracolisk, but he looks the same as a light red 'D'.

I'm with you on this. However, now i misinterpret kavlax as a black dragon often enough, even though the colour is slightly darker. I'd suggest to change the colour to something like like cyan (law dragons etc) or light green (nether dragons) or purple (chaos dragons) which are way more dangerous and are also very hard to miss colours on a black background. I don't know how this might fit the flavour though.

[PaulBlay]

I'm with you on this. However, now i misinterpret kavlax as a black dragon often enough, even though the colour is slightly darker. I'd suggest to change the colour to something like like cyan (law dragons etc) or light green (nether dragons) or purple (chaos dragons) which are way more dangerous and are also very hard to miss colours on a black background. I don't know how this might fit the flavour though.

Make him come back as "Kavlax of many colours" and rainbow-cycle that sucker.

[PowerDiver]

Instead of worrying about which color is right, why not make all uniques purple for royalty?

[Pete Mack]

@bebo -- you may want to edit your color preferences for "light dark" or fix the alpha on your screen. It really shouldn't be hard to distinguish between those colors.

[Jungle_Boy]

Instead of worrying about which color is right, why not make all uniques purple for royalty?

Or you could play with tiles...!!!! *gasp*

[/end heresy]

[Atarlost]

Sure. With tiles you can tell Ancalagon from an ancient black dragon, but you can't tell a large kobold from Mim. That's a real improvement.

[Mondkalb]

Sure. With tiles you can tell Ancalagon from an ancient black dragon, but you can't tell a large kobold from Mim. That's a real improvement.

Of course you can. At least with the Gervais tiles.

[ThunderToads]

I like Zs as they are, but minor tweaks couldn't hurt.

Come to think of it, I wouldn't mind seeing even more types of Hound, new and exotic ones. Hellfire Hounds, Confusion Hounds, Rocket Hounds, Nuke Hounds, Disintegration Hounds...

[Donald Jonker]

Instead of worrying about which color is right, why not make all uniques purple for royalty?

That makes a whole lot of sense. Only reservation would be that it might be a tad confusing when you have multiple uniques together of the same type, in a vault say. Which I guess is likely a problem already. In all cases, an improvement over the status quo.

Paul, kindly switch one of my votes over to this, would you?

[andrewas]

If it was possible, I'd vote for giving uniques bold characters. Lets them keep their colours while still being easily distinguishable.

[Whelk]

Fungal Hounds should be added. They can breathe fungal spores at you that can cause any effects, good or bad, produced by edible mushrooms in the game.

[Pete Mack]

Adding bold isn't fundamentally hard, because only a few colors are currently used. You would just need to take up one bit for bold-face. The trouble is that BF fonts are a little wider than ordinary fonts; if you made room for BF, you would have an extra pixel or two spacing for the ordinary font.

EDIT: NPP solves the problem in a better way by adding an extra layer of colors, then using the new (darker) colors for the uniques.

[Atarlost]

Dos versions used to use a custom font. An 8 bit font has extra accented charachters, ligatures, and decorative charachters that can be replaced with eg. inverted charachters.

[Schroeder]

Something that i've noticed with the Zepher hounds, is that, usually, if you have stone to mud, you can just keep trying to bug the hounds AI by making a little alcove in the wall bigger and bigger until the AI considers it a room. Then they will come at you without them all being able to breath at once.

Imo, its just a dumb waste of time to give hounds that smart AI, since your just going to bug it/trick it into being dumb anyway. I can understand and accept good pack thinking on non-breather packs, but, imo, thats just a douche move, since it forces you to just bug their AI unless you want to get owned (unless you are overpowered and fighting non-base hounds)