Level counter

[LostTemplar]

How about introducing a counter, which increases every time player enters new dungeon level and is shown in character dump. It can provide new parameter for competition instead of turncount and will reward ironman-like games without making any strict rules.

[buzzkill]

> = +1
< = +2
WoR =

[fizzix]

seems like that will reward level clearing, not necessarily a bad thing. However, it greatly overvalues farming strategies, summoner abuse strategies, or hanging around on dlevel 30 forever and whacking off all the orc groups that spawn.

[Derakon]

Presumably it would be worked into a scoring strategy that also values not using very many turns. I guess the goal would be to eliminate stair scumming?

Anyway, I support gathering more statistics just from a player interest perspective.

Incidentally, Buzzkill, you forgot about Alter Reality.

[buzzkill]

Two things...

Incidentally, Buzzkill, you forgot about Alter Reality.

1. I was just having a (very) little fun. Alter reality has never been part of my Angband experience, though I've heard rumors of it.

However, it greatly overvalues farming strategies, summoner abuse strategies, or hanging around on dlevel 30 forever and whacking off all the orc groups that spawn.

2. Is it just me?

[ChodTheWacko]

Anyway, I support gathering more statistics just from a player interest perspective.

It would be quite interesting to know how many times a character used each item. (magical items). It would certainly gain some insight to people's strategies, and interesting from a TMJ perspective.

- Frank

[ewert]

I would like a real-time played counter.

[cinereaste]

2. Is it just me?

Thanks for that image.

[Zikke]

I would like a real-time played counter.

Yes I would as well. I imagine in a stateless game this isn't possible

[Derakon]

You could come up with a heuristic that would probably be pretty accurate. Say, if there's no input for more than a minute, then the user has stopped playing. All you'd really need to do is store the time of the last keystroke and the total time played thus far:

In event processing:
    if current time - time of last keystroke < 60 seconds:
        total time played += current time - time of last keystroke
    time of last keystroke = current time

See? Not hard at all.

[Tiburon Silverflame]

It's possible...the question becomes, when do you want the clock running, and when do you want it stopped?

a) (character) File Open to File Close
b) dungeon entry to dungeon exit (stop timer in town)
c) dungeon level to dungeon level (stop timer whenever you change dungeon level; start timer on first real action)
d) How about a Clock Pause, so this timer gets paused when the user requests, and restarts on a real action or by another command?

a and b are closest to "how long have I really been playing this game anyway???" timers. Returning to town, is one common time to walk away from the game for an extended period...which is also the motive behind c, pause between levels, but I am far more likely to pause BEFORE I take the stairs, not after, and I expect that's the more common behavior.

I dunno about anyone else, but I have the game running from a flash drive on one of my Windows laptops. I have tons of RAM...who doesn't these days, on one's PC...and it's trivial to just minimize a window...so I keep the game up most of the time, no matter what I'm doing. So a File Open to File Close wouldn't mean much to me.

[ewert]

I'd go with "if no input to game window in xx seconds, stop clock". What xx is ... 30? 60? Neither matters much tbh, just as long it is there. Maybe 60 secs, just so that if you are taking a realllllly long time to think about something you don't get free time. But any time the char is "open" clock is ticking.

[Nick]

IIRC Heng/Entro has a real time counter.

[buzzkill]

1. Start the timer after character creation.
1a. Put it on screen somewhere.
1b. Keep a cumulative (multi-game) total in the save file.
2. Make a pause button somewhere that resumes on any key press (ctrl-p).
3. Have an optional time based pause with the timeout period selectable by the user.

I envision this being a novelty, not a serious scoring device, therefore I'm not at all worried about abuse by the player.

I think that I play slowly (but I'm not really sure), and I often wonder how my real time progress compares to others.

[ChodTheWacko]

It's possible...the question becomes, when do you want the clock running, and when do you want it stopped?

a) (character) File Open to File Close
b) dungeon entry to dungeon exit (stop timer in town)
c) dungeon level to dungeon level (stop timer whenever you change dungeon level; start timer on first real action)
d) How about a Clock Pause, so this timer gets paused when the user requests, and restarts on a real action or by another command?

a and b are closest to "how long have I really been playing this game anyway???" timers.

"How long have you been playing the game" is very simple.
It's File open - file close - (time the game is minimized/backgrounded).

Yes, a person could take breaks with the game open, but you can't accurately account for that anyway. A pause button till next keypress would be cute, possibly abuseable by people with no life.

and town time is 100% game time, and 'thinking time' studying monster lists/item lists really should be included. And yes, this feature would be 100% awesome.

- Frank