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The more time you spend on a level, the more monsters there'll be, and most of 'em will be awake too. Spending time searching isn't necessarily going to be fatal but it is time wasted to little productive end.
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Well, I get that and fair enough.
However, we were talking about the 'Stuck Newbie Conundrum' and, in that respect, the shift-s command is useful. Many's the time a low-level character of mine has found himself on a two room level and has had to run around the known periphery searching for a door every couple of moves. Shift-s certainly lessens the tedium in these situations.
(Providing you remember to turn it off, of course).
Given that, I was wondering why it was considered to be 'included solely for historical reasons?'.Comment
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Yes, maybe you're right - this game just isn't for me because I like to save unnecessary key strokes.
Here are a couple of examples that prove your point. I find repeatedly typing <m1g> quite tedious, so to save time I [drops to hushed whisper] map it to <Z>! And what's more, sometimes, instead of typing <fn'>, [whisper now nearly inaudible] I just press the 'h' key!
Yes, you're quite right. I should give up this game because it's just not for me and go back to playing Elite.
[Sighs, puts down keyboard and starts dusting off BBC Micro Model B]Comment
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You claimed to be "wondering" why I said such a thing, so I answered you. If you don't like my answer then maybe you aren't actually wondering, you just want to pick a fight. If you can't see how substituting one keystroke for another that does exactly the same thing is different from searching with every step and therefore being much less efficient than searching where the doors are likely to be, then I probably can't explain it to you. Just take it as a difference in our perspectives.Comment
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You are a fine one to talk about picking fights. May I remind you of this unsolicited little gem:
Date: Fri, 26 Nov 93 16:34:12 EST
From: desj@CCR-P.IDA.ORG(David desJardins)
To: izzy4av@MVS.OAC.UCLA.EDU
Subject: Re: Three Questions
It is extraordinarily rude to post questions to newsgroups, which means
that you are asking thousands or tens of thousands of people to look at
what you have to say, and not even be willing to read the newsgroup to
see the answer.
David desJardins
Welcome to our community. Not."Been away so long I hardly knew the place, gee it's good to be back home" - The BeatlesComment
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That sounds pretty solicited to me. Anyway is the purpose of this forum to drag your petty grudges across 20 years? Really?Comment
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"Been away so long I hardly knew the place, gee it's good to be back home" - The BeatlesComment
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Clearly we need this. And maybe people will even want to discuss secret doors on this thread.One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.Comment
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Wow. I'm sorry I hurt your feelings 20 years ago, and you're welcome to get it off your chest. But at this point I think people are learning more about you than about me.Comment
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Firstly, let me assure you that the last thing I want to do is pick a fight.
My last post was in response to someone saying that, just because when I'm stuck in a room with no visible doors I prefer to run around the perimeter in search mode, I should stop playing the game. But apologies if I laid the sarcasm on a bit thick.
As for what I was wondering, my original question was what you meant by 'historical reasons'. It was a genuine question, although I'm sorry if it came across as anything other than that. I was just wondering what made it useful in the past but not now. Did the normal search command not exist? Were there no detection spells? That sort of thing. Just idle curiosity.
Anyway, no offense intended and I hope none taken.Comment
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By "historical reasons" I only meant that the shift-S for toggling "search mode" dates back to the original Rogue command set. I would assume that Michael Toy or Glenn Arnold came up with the notion of secret doors that you need to search for, the "s" command to spend a turn searching, and shift-S to toggle search mode (which worked exactly the same in the original Rogue, one extra turn of searching for every step you take). Then many subsequent games, including Moria (which led to uMoria, which led to Angband) adopted many of the commands from the original game. In Rogue, there was no chance of finding a secret door except by searching, so it's different from Angband where you have some chance to find the door just when moving, and an increased chance when searching.
In Rogue, even more than Angband, every move counts (you can often lose in original Rogue by running out of food and starving), and so searching efficiently was even more important. Therefore the "search mode" was not a good choice for experienced players (the stereotypical layout of levels also made it often very obvious where the secret door must be). So it's not really that it's in there because it was a logical idea, just that it happened to be one of the commands that the Rogue designers added (of course, Rogue didn't have macros or keymaps, either) and so it's persisted in a lot of subsequent games because they copied those commands.
No one said that if you like using the search mode you should stop playing the game. I'm sorry you took it that way. Hopefully, in 20 years you won't be tracking me down to remind me how I viciously attacked you.Comment
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That & traps actually tended to kill you a lot. Did the original moria have the detect traps spell? I didn't play it enough to remember, played Nethack more which didn't. You'd fall through a trapdoor, land next to a floating eye, it'd freeze you & then something would come along & kill you. Was heaps of fun.Comment
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