Squelching: some feature requests

[jv123]

Hello! I've been playing 3.1.0 for the first time recently, and I really like the squelching system. It's great to be able to get on with the game and not have to spend 20% of my time destroying things.

Here are some things I'd like to be able to do, or that I think need to be fixed.

1. Finer control over autosquelch would be nice. This could be achieved with an inscription that means "never squelch an item identical to this". For example: I want to be able to squelch all bad, average and good ammo, except for arrows. Also, what if I want to autosquelch all good armour, except for cloaks? I can't do that, which is frustrating if your cloak happens to be your only non-ego armour item.

2. It's annoying that I can't e(x)amine items in the item squelch settings. Why not combine the item squelch settings with the excellent autoinscription interface, which allows much more fine-grained control?

3. If I set something to autosquelch, that means I am not at all interested in it --- so it shouldn't appear in shops! This makes perfect sense: the shopkeeper should know what I'm interested in, and won't bother showing me things I don't care about. It also means that it doesn't matter if shops stock lots of low-level items --- if they're set to autosquelch, they won't get shown to me, and the shop's stock will still be quick to browse through. This could be a user-interface option.

4. In 3.1.0, if I'm carrying a squelchable item in my inventory and I drop something else from my inventory, the squelchable item gets squelched. Surely this is a bug.

Cheers,
JV.

[PowerDiver]

3. If I set something to autosquelch, that means I am not at all interested in it --- so it shouldn't appear in shops!

The shopkeeper wants your money. If you want the item to disappear, you just have to buy it. That's important for balance, and a reason there needs to be a button to buy everything in the store and destroy it all at once.

Also, there are things that I squelch that I later want to buy, such as stat restore potions. I don't want to see them until I get drained and unsquelch them, but they belong in the stores. I'm pretty sure there are items I might want to buy and transfer to the home that I would want to ignore in the dungeon, but can't think of an example at the moment.

As to the other points, improvements are on the way. Unfortunately they have been on the way for 6 months, but the good news is that I'm feeling a burst of coding energy these days.

[jv123]

The shopkeeper wants your money. If you want the item to disappear, you just have to buy it. That's important for balance, and a reason there needs to be a button to buy everything in the store and destroy it all at once.

Also, there are things that I squelch that I later want to buy, such as stat restore potions. I don't want to see them until I get drained and unsquelch them, but they belong in the stores. I'm pretty sure there are items I might want to buy and transfer to the home that I would want to ignore in the dungeon, but can't think of an example at the moment.

I completely agree!! I didn't explain my suggestion very clearly: the idea was that the items are in the shops all along, but they just don't appear in the listing. If you unsquelch an item, and go back into the shop, it'll be visible again. I'm not at all suggesting that your squelch settings should somehow affect the inventory of the shop, that would be utterly idiotic.

Rather, the idea is that when you walk in, the shopkeeper says "aah, my dear friend PowerDiver, how are you today, here are some objects you may be interested in!" and only ever shows you things that you haven't set to squelch. If you desquelch something, it will immediately appear again (if it's in stock, that is).

[jv123]

As to the other points, improvements are on the way. Unfortunately they have been on the way for 6 months, but the good news is that I'm feeling a burst of coding energy these days.

Great! Do it now!

[Taha]

Squelching vs autoinscription

This is more of a squelching question than a feature request, but fixing it may require some changes.

I have a savefile that has been used for a mage, but is now being played as a priest (wanted the monster memory). This means I have autoinscriptions for both types of books (to assign them to numbers and !d!k!v). I have the first four magic books set to squelch, but they still appear. Try to destroy a book, and after confirming (!k), get asked to ignore items of this type from now on. Squelch was already on. Choose yes to ignore, the dialog ends, and the book is still in my inventory. Dropping it to the floor does not make it dissappear.

I am assuming this is something to do with the autoinscription logic overriding the squelch settings. I don't want to remove the magic autoinscriptions from my savefile, because they are a real pain to reenter. I will almost certainly play a magic user again at some point. Any ideas?
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VOLCANO CLASSIC VAPORIZER

[PowerDiver]

My advice is to autoinscribe with !d but not with !k. Then, even if you squelch by accident, they are not automatically dropped, and you can effectively squelch the books you do not use. If they are squelched, you don't pick them up so should not be bothered by the !d except in the case of a rare early find you take home to sell rather than squelch.

[PowerDiver]

I didn't explain my suggestion very clearly: the idea was that the items are in the shops all along, but they just don't appear in the listing.

The problem with that is the importance of clearing cheap slots from the stores to speed generation of useful items. Squelched items are likely candidates for items the player should buy and drop outside the door.

If you want to implement this, it needs to be done through a gameplay option that people like me can turn off when we play.

[Maupin]

All I ask is for a way to turn off the constant nagging about squelching items in the future whenever you destroy an item.

In my games I usually reach a point where I decide, "Okay, screw all these normal items, I only need good stuff." So I go to the squelch menu and set it accordingly. Then when my character advances further, it's "screw all these magical items, I only need excellent stuff." Etc. Perhaps one or two exceptions if I've been lucky/unlucky. That's what the squelching menu option is for.

I also regularly destroy useful potions/staves/scrolls/slime molds/whatever that I don't need at the moment but might need in the future. So I don't want to set them as autosquelched and that means I have to choose 'n' every single time that question pops up.

(Yes, I know I've written about this before, but it truly bugs me that much! Bring back the old 'k' functionality!)

[Zikke]

Can we be able to squelch specific ego types perhaps?

[Magnate]

This is more of a squelching question than a feature request, but fixing it may require some changes.

I have a savefile that has been used for a mage, but is now being played as a priest (wanted the monster memory). This means I have autoinscriptions for both types of books (to assign them to numbers and !d!k!v). I have the first four magic books set to squelch, but they still appear. Try to destroy a book, and after confirming (!k), get asked to ignore items of this type from now on. Squelch was already on. Choose yes to ignore, the dialog ends, and the book is still in my inventory. Dropping it to the floor does not make it dissappear.

I am assuming this is something to do with the autoinscription logic overriding the squelch settings. I don't want to remove the magic autoinscriptions from my savefile, because they are a real pain to reenter. I will almost certainly play a magic user again at some point. Any ideas?

I have a ton of problems related to macros and autoinscriptions for one character being not quite right for another character and I *hate* re-making them all the time. On my to-do list for 3.1.2 is a total overhaul of "pref" files, so that it's totally obvious and user-friendly to decide what gets saved as specific to that character, what is specific to that class (and to a lesser extent race, though I don't personally have a use for that), and what you want loaded for ALL characters. It's probably going to be quite a big job, but it should be worthwhile. (Tickets #671 and #758 on trac.rephial.org)