Way to show more on screen?

[Derakon]

One thing which does strike me a slightly 'buggy': as soon as I'd acquired a lantern all the flasks of oil seemed to disappear. I've actually had to return to base *twice* to fill up, having been through the full 15k of fuel. Not a problem now because I'm finding other lanterns fairly regularly, but I can't remember the last time I found a flask of oil in the wild.

Are you sure you didn't accidentally squelch them? For several minor versions now (i.e. back through 3.2 at least) I've been playing by fuelling up in town, and then topping off from all lanterns and flasks I find in the dungeon. Even for caster characters this has been sufficient to keep me going, but I could believe that if flasks of oil aren't available then it would be harder.

[scud]

Are you sure you didn't accidentally squelch them?

Heh no, I've checked on that more than once! To be fair the first forced return was probably after a mere 7.5k turns, but since then I've definitely gone through a whole 15k's worth of lantern without striking oil.

But, as I said, I'm now finding other lanterns regularly enough to keep me topped up and I'm sure I'm due My First Randart Lightsource fairly shortly.

[scud]

Stumbo is pleased to announce that he has found a flask of oil in an infinity vault on DL28 (yes, he seems to be heading in the wrong direction!) while down to 1335 turns of light.

[molybdenum]

Molybdenum showed up out of nowhere to offer to work on the problem; that was six days ago, so it's a bit early to start asking if anything's come of it. So don't give up hope.

I got it working well enough that I submitted a pull request. It's pretty much ready to go whenever someone wants to merge it.

[DaviddesJ]

After playing for some time with the current Mac port, it's pretty nice in that it's easy to use different font sizes in the different windows (bigger in the main window, smaller in some of the status windows). Hopefully we won't lose that in a version that handles resizing differently. I've gotten quite used to it now, although it still could be more flexible.

Is there a way to configure which windows show up in which configurations, when I start the game? I see how to change this through the in-game options menu, but not how to change it in the config file. Also, is it possible to specify different fonts for different windows via the config file?

[Derakon]

You seem fond of configuring the game by editing config files rather than by using the in-game tools. I'm curious, why is this? I won't say it's unsupported, but I think the devs implicitly expect everyone to do their configuration within the game.

Of course, anything that the in-game tools can do, the config files ought to be able to do, but they're undocumented, so you have to know exactly what you're doing to achieve the desired result. For font-window specificity, that might be completely specific to the OSX Cocoa port, in which case I would expect it to have its own config files somewhere distinct from the rest of the game's config. But I've no idea where they would be, nor what their format would be.

[DaviddesJ]

You seem fond of configuring the game by editing config files rather than by using the in-game tools. I'm curious, why is this? I won't say it's unsupported, but I think the devs implicitly expect everyone to do their configuration within the game.

I guess it's both historical and cultural. Historical because 20 years ago when I started playing Angband (or in Umoria, earlier than that, or Rogue, earlier than that) that would be the common practice. How were rogue options originally specified? On Unix, at least, it was a dot file in the user home directory. Cultural because if you're a software developer you think in terms of configuration files because they can be checked in and version controlled and copied from one place to another and so on; even if some of these things aren't so important for playing a game, it's hard to shake that way of thinking. Also, for something like writing a complex macro, I would just naturally think of representing it in a text file.

Also because I didn't realize that there is any way to change options in game before the game actually starts.

But if the suggestion is that editing options inside the game is easier and/or better supported than editing the config files, that's good advice, I will try doing it that way. Thanks. Presumably, I can also edit the options in the game, save the configuration, and then find the files and see what is in them. Everything is still stored in ascii files, right?