Uniques now purple in nightlies

[d_m]

I'm withholding judgment on this one until I try it out a bit, but I will say that I mourn the loss of the purple worm's purple color!

[bebo]

I definitely like this, been advocating this for quite some time. imho gameplay should always come before flavour, and this change really helps to avoid random stupid deaths due to distraction/not having the moster list in a subwindow/etc . The real difficulty of the game should not come from the necessity to take a whole lot of time to distinguish in a room full of hellhounds which one is Charcharoth and if he has line of sight to you, but rather in all the tactical and strategical elements that come into play when fighting him.

why should uniques get special color treatment?

.... uh, the name says it all?

Besides, there are relatively few uniques where changing the colour to purple can't be justified flavourwise (the elemental uniques, the phoenix, smaug and scatha, ... and that's pretty much it)

[Ferrat]

Suppose Sauron summons the Mouth, Saruman, Harowen, and Sangahyando. Will they all be purple?

Suppose they start pushing past each other. How do you tell them apart? Should the colouring give them equal importance, or imply similar properties?

What about Morgoth summoning other giants, or Ancalagon calling dragon uniques?

[Nick]

I'm in the distinctive but not necessarily purple camp. A big help here could be introducing NPP's extended colour patch - I have that in FA, and I tend to make uniques a shade different to everyone else, which is enough to make them noticeable.

[d_m]

I'm in the distinctive but not necessarily purple camp. A big help here could be introducing NPP's extended colour patch - I have that in FA, and I tend to make uniques a shade different to everyone else, which is enough to make them noticeable.

That's a good idea--I could imagine having 4 or 5 shades which are "unique only" and which give you purplish, greenish, reddish, bluish and blackish uniques, or something.

Of course people playing in GCU with only basic ANSI colors would be out of luck, but those people are already out of luck (they don't see orange or brown for instance), and I think many GCU people play in xterm or another 256-color capable terminal.

[PowerDiver]

Suppose Sauron summons the Mouth, Saruman, Harowen, and Sangahyando. Will they all be purple?

Suppose they start pushing past each other. How do you tell them apart? Should the colouring give them equal importance, or imply similar properties?

What about Morgoth summoning other giants, or Ancalagon calling dragon uniques?

Come on. When is the last time Sauron summoned 4 'p' uniques against you? Most people try to track down uniques and kill them first.

Nevertheless, to answer your question, if it happened to me I would go into the knowledge menu and change Sauron's color. Maybe 10 keystrokes one time in this exceedingly rare occurrence. OTOH, current non-obvious uniques annoy me multiple times every game for a total of hundreds of keystrokes on average.

[Nightmarjoo]

Because it's such a pain to hit space a dozen times to find out which spider is Shelob or which balrog is the unique in a room with 30 of them. Should a 3500 hp spider be obviously different from a 10 hp spider? Some say yes.

Boring is hitting the space bar in look mode.

I definitely like this, been advocating this for quite some time. imho gameplay should always come before flavour, and this change really helps to avoid random stupid deaths due to distraction/not having the moster list in a subwindow/etc . The real difficulty of the game should not come from the necessity to take a whole lot of time to distinguish in a room full of hellhounds which one is Charcharoth and if he has line of sight to you, but rather in all the tactical and strategical elements that come into play when fighting him.

.... uh, the name says it all?

Besides, there are relatively few uniques where changing the colour to purple can't be justified flavourwise (the elemental uniques, the phoenix, smaug and scatha, ... and that's pretty much it)

So change the colour of things like Shelob and Carcharoth, or change the colour of the things they conflict with, don't change everything. This change is just awfully boring and lazy ._.

Adding new colours only uniques would use would be nice, but not necessary. I didn't have a problem with the old setup, except very occasionally with things like Shelob and Carcaroth. And every black W was really scary until I noticed it wasn't a ring wraith.

[Magnate]

I'm withholding judgment on this one until I try it out a bit, but I will say that I mourn the loss of the purple worm's purple color!

But I didn't change that, did I? w is one of the letters with no unique ...

[shawnosullivan]

yeah, im not into this idea at all.
negatively impacts game flavor in a very huge fashion, while imparting only nominal benefits (and introducing a set of problems of its own). i don't see the point.
just change the colors of uniques that conflict.

[Magnate]

I'm in the distinctive but not necessarily purple camp. A big help here could be introducing NPP's extended colour patch - I have that in FA, and I tend to make uniques a shade different to everyone else, which is enough to make them noticeable.

Do you have a patch anywhere? I asked UnAndrew (who I understand wrote one for V a year or two ago), but no joy.

I was in a bit of a hurry last night. I meant to say: I'm very keen to add 256-colour support, and I regard this as an interim fix until then. It looks like there is a degree of consensus around distinguishing uniques from non-uniques (not everyone can have the monster list in a subwindow), but it would of course be better if they weren't all the same. Ideally they would use a small set of a dozen or so colours which are never used for other monsters. Furthermore, it's quite possible that Takk will revert this change if 256-colour support is not implemented for 3.1.2.

@pav: you need to look at who created the ticket. I intend to implement all tickets I create (unless Takkaria vetoes them) - because I only create them when I've gleaned some degree of consensus here and/or on rgra, angband-dev or wherever. I created this ticket because there was a long thread a while ago about all sorts of uniques who were being confused with other monsters. Making them all purple was an idea in that thread that I quite liked (and nobody objected to it at the time). Just so you know.

[Magnate]

just change the colors of uniques that conflict.

If you'd care to give me a definitive list, and you can get the agreement of everybody here, I'll happily revert the change and use said list. In fact it would be even better if you could attach it as a patch against the previous version of monster.txt (before my change). Thanks.

[Derakon]

I threw together a quick Perl script to find symbol conflicts in the 3.1.1 (not nightly) monster.txt. The output's pretty lengthy, so I haven't pasted it here in its entirety, but here's an excerpt:

Uniques with symbol h:B conflict with each other: Smeagol, Fundin Bluecloak

Uniques with symbol U:v: The Balrog of Moria, Lungorthin, the Balrog of White Fire, Gothmog, the High Captain of Balrogs
  conflicts with monsters: Lesser Balrog, Greater Balrog

Uniques with symbol E:r: Vargo, Tyrant of Fire
  conflicts with monsters: Fire spirit, Fire elemental

The attached conflicts.txt is the full output; uniquecolorconflicts.txt is the Perl script so you can run it yourself.

[Marble Dice]

I threw together a quick Perl script to find symbol conflicts in the 3.1.1 (not nightly) monster.txt.

Nice one. It looks like the biggest problems are Shelob, Ungoliant, Draugluin, Carcharoth (already fixed in nightlies?), Beorn, Lungorthin, Gothmog, and the Balrog of Moria.

[Skelwing]

Nice one. It looks like the biggest problems are Shelob, Ungoliant, Draugluin, Carcharoth (already fixed in nightlies?), Beorn, Lungorthin, Gothmog, and the Balrog of Moria.

Carcharoth was violet in the nightlies before this change.

The Ringwraiths are also a problem, even all purple. Is there any reason for them not to be assigned to capital N, and all made different colors?

[Magnate]

Nice one. It looks like the biggest problems are Shelob, Ungoliant, Draugluin, Carcharoth (already fixed in nightlies?), Beorn, Lungorthin, Gothmog, and the Balrog of Moria.

Cool. Now all we need to do is reach agreement on what colour each should be. And as Skelwing said, let's not forget the ringwraiths.