Travel function

[Jazerus]

In general, I find Angband to have one of the more convenient and intelligent movement setups among roguelikes - shift-moving in Angband is significantly more intelligent than the equivalent in Nethack, for example - but has any thought been given to implementing a Nethack-style travel function that can auto-move to a given character, such as the up/down-stairs, as well as any arbitrary position? This would make returning to stairs that are across the level after clearing the level out, and more generally any already-explored space, more convenient.

Of course, it would abide by the same rules as shift-move - not while confused, etc.

[buzzkill]

Didn't vanilla implement point and click movement? I know FA has it, though it's not perfect.

[Derakon]

The main danger with such automated exploration is that the dungeon is never "cleared out" (more monsters continually spawn), and particularly later on in the game you need to be aware of monsters before you enter line-of-sight of them. That means stopping your motion from time to time either to check what telepathy is telling you or to cast detection spells.

In other words, certainly such a travel feature could be implemented, but I worry that it would be teaching bad habits to players.

[Jazerus]

The main danger with such automated exploration is that the dungeon is never "cleared out" (more monsters continually spawn), and particularly later on in the game you need to be aware of monsters before you enter line-of-sight of them. That means stopping your motion from time to time either to check what telepathy is telling you or to cast detection spells.

In other words, certainly such a travel feature could be implemented, but I worry that it would be teaching bad habits to players.

A more nuanced approach might include the ability to set up auto-disturb at detection borders, etc. (similar to the way trap detection borders cannot be passed with shift-move) once you reach depths where this is a problem; post-generation spawns are not terribly frequent, nor (typically) as dangerous as the monsters placed at level generation in my experience. Certainly, if I were at such a depth that I had to worry about gravity/time hound packs spawning in, for example, I doubt I'd travel - but I also don't shift-move down an extremely long corridor in such situations, either, despite my usual inclination to do so and its current presence in the game.

[kaypy]

What could be generically useful would be commands

(a) set target to nearest <symbol>
(b) pathfind to target and run in the appropriate direction. Following the path, but obeying current stop-running triggers

Then we would have a mechanism for
(a) travel - target feature, move to feature
(b) re-gather ammo - target ammo, move to ammo, collect, repeat
(c) handle non-attention-worthy fights - target monster, move to / attack monster, repeat. Not something you would use in serious fights, but an equivalent of the mage's "magic missile at whatever" macro

[dos350]

this is the only good idea ive seen proposed for this game ever,

adding good things to game is good,

taking things away and changing things to suck isnt,

please no rage!~