reduce slot size

[Derakon]

Say you have 10 stacks of 29 arrows:

Using the method of lowering the max per slot to 30 you can get all those arrows in your quiver and take three slots of inventory.

This is not what I was intending to describe, so apologies if I was unclear. My suggestion was to make it so that each slot in the quiver can hold a maximum of 30 projectiles -- however, these projectiles can be of any type. So your 10 stacks of 29 arrows is 290 projectiles, which means using 10 slots in the quiver (and thus 10 slots overall of inventory space). However, you could also have 3 stacks of 30 projectiles and 10 stacks of 5 projectiles each, which is 140 projectiles total and 5 slots.

In other words, "quiver compression" would only kick in when you have many small stacks of ammo.

That said, d_m has some good points about potential UI problems. I'm not certain how to respond to them.

[Timo Pietilä]

I think that this can be fixed independently of any "weakening" we do. In fact, I thought I tried to make sure it wouldn't do this unless you explicitly wielded something from the floor (e.g. not auto pickup).

So sorry if this has been you driving crazy... I will see if I can replicate this, although if you give me a specific scenario where you notice it that will make it easier.

Wield from floor when pack is full. Message "you have no room for this and that" and "you see this and that" are too similar to get my attention.

Anyway quiver expanding to another letter is IMO "unrealistic". I see quiver as fixed size specialized expansion of the backpack using one slot there. One slot. Quiver can't magically expand to another quiver when there is not enough room for additional arrows. 99 is max you can have in single inventory slot, so that's what quiver max size should be. 99 ammo.

[PowerDiver]

Would your quiver still have a cap on how many types of ammo it could hold? If not I feel like that will end up being a nightmare to code correctly (and would probably still be buggy/confusing for the user). If so, then we're just arguing about what the constant should be.

I believe that it would be important to limit the quiver to 10 items. That allows for UI where it is understood that numbers '0' through '9' refer to ammo and letters to non-ammo. Then you can use the @C5 for macros for command C affecting non-ammo, and @Ce for macros acting on ammo and get unified @ handling instead of the dreadful f0 kind of thing. There are other reasons too.

I could do the quiver now, I think quite stably, except for the selection code. When you read a scroll from your pack, you might see choices e through j if that is where the scrolls are. If you read from the floor, the choices are a-f even if the 6 scrolls are at different places in the floor stack. If you think about it for a while, you can see how things might have been implemented in an ad-hoc approach that is hard to modify. It is worse than that.

[PowerDiver]

The quiver issues are an important side effect, but why is no one commenting on the main change?

What is the maximum number of consumables that should be allowed to stack in a slot for best gameplay?

The 99 limit appears to me to just be the max you can describe with two characters. I've always thought it seemed high. Would you feel inconvenienced in a bad way if you could only carry 50 !CCW or ?phase in a slot?

[d_m]

The quiver issues are an important side effect, but why is no one commenting on the main change?

What is the maximum number of consumables that should be allowed to stack in a slot for best gameplay?

The 99 limit appears to me to just be the max you can describe with two characters. I've always thought it seemed high. Would you feel inconvenienced in a bad way if you could only carry 50 !CCW or ?phase in a slot?

I would be fine with reducing the slot size. I don't know what I think the lowest it could be is, but 50 would be fine.

Like I said, it would probably break save files, so that's not ideal. This change would probably need to wait until some other savefile-breaking changes pile up.

[nullfame]

Wield from floor when pack is full. Message "you have no room for this and that" and "you see this and that" are too similar to get my attention.

This happens to me all the time. It would be nice if I could inscribe an item with !d or !* to prevent it from dropping a valuable swap and instead dropping a useless staff. I've gotten used to it. I would accept a "don't hold it like that" argument insofar as I should be reading the messages rather than being lazy.

I think I was in the Derakon camp of reduce quiver compression but I'm starting to see how that could be complicated. Maybe some compromise of Timo's idea: "compression" only goes up to 99 arrows but, for the convenience of f0-9, you still put additional arrows in the quiver but each new type always take up a new inventory slot (as they would if they weren't in the quiver).

E.g., 99 (+0,+0) arrows, 10 (+1,+1) arrows, and 10 (+2,+2) arrows = 3 inventory slots. 79 (+0,+0) arrows, 10 (+1,+1) arrows, and 10 (+2,+2) arrows = 1 inventory slot.

I think, though I haven't given it careful consideration, that would preserve "if you can put it in the pack, you can put it in the quiver" while still reducing the effectiveness of the quiver. It is probably non-trivial to implement since now you have 2 ways of affecting inventory slots from the quiver instead of 1.

[Timo Pietilä]

The quiver issues are an important side effect, but why is no one commenting on the main change?

What is the maximum number of consumables that should be allowed to stack in a slot for best gameplay?

The 99 limit appears to me to just be the max you can describe with two characters. I've always thought it seemed high. Would you feel inconvenienced in a bad way if you could only carry 50 !CCW or ?phase in a slot?

I sometimes carry more than 50 items in one slot: scrolls of ID as warrior, CCW sometimes when I don't have anywhere else to put them mainly. Not often though.

Why change that old 99 item limit? I don't think we need to limit slot size. Carrying more than 50 is rare enough already that we don't need to limit it artificially.

IMO if it is not broken don't fix it.

[miyazaki]

I sometimes carry more than 50 items in one slot: scrolls of ID as warrior, CCW sometimes when I don't have anywhere else to put them mainly. Not often though.

Why change that old 99 item limit? I don't think we need to limit slot size. Carrying more than 50 is rare enough already that we don't need to limit it artificially.

IMO if it is not broken don't fix it.

I can't remember the last time I carried more than 50 of a single item. If we are going to make a change to slot limit, I think it should be more drastic, like 25 or 10. Then I would totally be on board.

[PowerDiver]

Like I said, it would probably break save files, so that's not ideal. This change would probably need to wait until some other savefile-breaking changes pile up.

It can be done without breaking savefiles. E.g. you do not allow items to merge into stacks more than 50, but existing stacks are unaffected. Quiver changes that result in stuff not fitting just gets dropped on the floor. This concern is no big deal.

[PowerDiver]

IMO if it is not broken don't fix it.

That's the question. I think 99 items per slot is too many and thus broken. You think not. Anyone else?

[PowerDiver]

My main complaint about quiver is that it can expand to another letter in inventory pushing something out of the pack. Usually an artifact you use as a swap.

BTW - this is a result of the IMO bad design involving wielding. The UI ought to be that you attempt to 'g'et the ammo on the ground [or autopickup] and if they fit they should go into the quiver and if not nothing should happen. It is the requirement to wield into the quiver along with the understanding that wields always succeed even if they result in overflow that causes the problem. Remove the wield command from the quiver mechanic and this problem goes away.

[Derakon]

That's the question. I think 99 items per slot is too many and thus broken. You think not. Anyone else?

I'm with Timo here. Angband is already weird with how it restricts your carrying capacity to 24 different kinds of items regardless of size; I don't feel that 50 ?Phase is more realistic than 99 ?Phase, especially since we're doing nothing to cover carrying 50 full plate armors or 50 halberds.

If you want to change carrying limits, this isn't the right way to go about it IMO. The right way, realism-wise, would probably be to go to some kind of "bulk" system where you have a finite volume and each individual item you pick up uses some of that volume. However, I think we'd find that any such system would result in the character being unable to carry enough stuff to effectively deal with the dungeon while still being able to carry any loot.

[d_m]

BTW - this is a result of the IMO bad design involving wielding. The UI ought to be that you attempt to 'g'et the ammo on the ground [or autopickup] and if they fit they should go into the quiver and if not nothing should happen. It is the requirement to wield into the quiver along with the understanding that wields always succeed even if they result in overflow that causes the problem. Remove the wield command from the quiver mechanic and this problem goes away.

Out of curiosity, are you still using that patch I posted? I'm pretty sure it implements everything you wanted (with the exception that some commands which should ignore ammo let you try to select it, e.g. (t)akeoff).

[PowerDiver]

Out of curiosity, are you still using that patch I posted? I'm pretty sure it implements everything you wanted (with the exception that some commands which should ignore ammo let you try to select it, e.g. (t)akeoff).

Not at the moment. There was some reason to upgrade to a newer nightly and I misplaced the patch, and I plan to upgrade again soon, so maybe then.

I keep complaining about the quiver. I am not complaining about your work! You have done admirably given your instructions and the current state of affairs.

[miyazaki]

I'm with Timo here. Angband is already weird with how it restricts your carrying capacity to 24 different kinds of items regardless of size; I don't feel that 50 ?Phase is more realistic than 99 ?Phase, especially since we're doing nothing to cover carrying 50 full plate armors or 50 halberds.

If you want to change carrying limits, this isn't the right way to go about it IMO. The right way, realism-wise, would probably be to go to some kind of "bulk" system where you have a finite volume and each individual item you pick up uses some of that volume. However, I think we'd find that any such system would result in the character being unable to carry enough stuff to effectively deal with the dungeon while still being able to carry any loot.

Armours and weapons could be made 'unstackable'. This wouldn't be a bad idea even if carrying capacity stayed at 99 per inventory space.