Tears unnumbered ye shall shed

[nppangband]

All right, let's do this. I can wield this thing safely, right?

Long live the King!

[AnonymousHero]

All right, let's do this. I can wield this thing safely, right?

It's permanently cursed!

It summons Cyberdemons!

[AnonymousHero]

Pyrel's artists (i.e. the classes that are responsible for drawing things) all work on "layers" -- the map layer, the player status layer, the UI-prompt layer, the animation layer, etc. They just get drawn on top of each other in a specific order. As for the game knowing what is being displayed, right now all of the drawing logic is "pull"-based -- that is, the game says "Hey, here's the game state, and this is the current active prompt" and the artist draws what it thinks it should based on that, its window size, etc.

You're right in that this the way things should generally work in this day and age with GL compositing which is essentially "free" with good hardware acceleration -- the trouble it that it's really hard to tell exactly when you should flush (and what, exactly) in the virt-term interface. (In T2 this is not helped by the fact that sometimes the engine is trying to do animation (intro) and at other times it doesn't really care about flushes.)

But really, the important thing is to have good separation between the game state and the UI. Once you have that, there's any number of good approaches you can use.

Indeed. Unfortunately this wasn't realized at the time Angband was created

Actually, right now I'm thinking that a two-thread approach with message passing might be the most feasible way to achieve the separation.

EDIT: I didn't mean to dis the original Angband authors... of course they *couldn't* have know that this is the way things would evolve. It's just that that's what happened and now we hate them .

[Nick]

These tears we're shedding. They're tears of joy right?

I've been looking for an excuse to post the entire Prophecy of the North, and you've just given it to me:

Tears unnumbered ye shall shed; and the Valar will fence Valinor against you, and shut you out, so that not even the echo of your lamentation shall pass over the mountains. On the House of Fëanor the wrath of the Valar lieth from the West unto the uttermost East, and upon all that will follow them it shall be laid also. Their Oath shall drive them, and yet betray them, and ever snatch away the very treasures that they have sworn to pursue. To evil end shall all things turn that they begin well; and by treason of kin unto kin, and the fear of treason, shall this come to pass. The Dispossessed shall they be for ever.

Ye have spilled the blood of your kindred unrighteously and have stained the land of Aman. For blood ye shall render blood, and beyond Aman ye shall dwell in Death's shadow. For though Eru appointed to you to die not in Eä, and no sickness may assail you, yet slain ye may be, and slain ye shall be: by weapon and by torment and by grief; and your houseless spirits shall come then to Mandos. There long shall ye abide and yearn for your bodies, and find little pity though all whom ye have slain should entreat for you. And those that endure in Middle-earth and come not to Mandos shall grow weary of the world as with a great burden, and shall wane, and become as shadows of regret before the younger race that cometh after. The Valar have spoken.

Now you may see what you're up against

[AnonymousHero]

Now you may see what you're up against

Pffft. Valar... what do they KNOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!11111one!?

[MattB]

Long live the King!

Ditto!

Can I also say a huge *thank_you* to Takkaria for all his hard work and excellent decisions over the last several years? Sad to see you go, sir!

[AnonymousHero]

Can I also say a huge *thank_you* to Takkaria for all his hard work and excellent decisions over the last several years? Sad to see you go, sir!

Seconded! It's a thankless job, but at least we can thank you, Takkaria, when it's over!

[bio_hazard]

I've been looking for an excuse to post the entire Prophecy of the North, and you've just given it to me:


Now you may see what you're up against

This made me think about the last half of this clip:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PeyiU3uWJ8

Thanks to all devs and maintainers, past, present and future!

[takkaria]

Ditto!

Can I also say a huge *thank_you* to Takkaria for all his hard work and excellent decisions over the last several years? Sad to see you go, sir!

I accept all of the praise and none of the blame. Anyway, I resigned as maintainer ages ago and the throne has been empty for a while.

[dos350]

I accept all of the praise and none of the blame. Anyway, I resigned as maintainer ages ago and the throne has been empty for a while.

ur forum tag disagrees ~

[ekolis]

I'm not adding it as an option, either

edit: oh, THAT tag...

[TJS]

I thought I'd join in and say I think the plan sounds ace.

This is probably an ignorant question, but what would be needed to get the base UI and display library to be portable to mobiles as well? Do you think this is something worth considering when redesigning the code?

I'd play Angband and variants all day if they'd work on tablet as well.

[Nick]

This is probably an ignorant question, but what would be needed to get the base UI and display library to be portable to mobiles as well? Do you think this is something worth considering when redesigning the code?

Far from ignorant - sensible mobile play is a decent chunk of the motivation. Rather than porting the UI and display library, though, I think the plan would probably be to write a new one. In fact, the main aim of the redesign is to separate the UI from the game core, so that it's possible to write a new UI that actually makes sense for the platform it's on rather than mimicking a terminal.

[TJS]

Far from ignorant - sensible mobile play is a decent chunk of the motivation. Rather than porting the UI and display library, though, I think the plan would probably be to write a new one. In fact, the main aim of the redesign is to separate the UI from the game core, so that it's possible to write a new UI that actually makes sense for the platform it's on rather than mimicking a terminal.

Yes I guessed that would be the case, I sorta was getting at whether the new display and UI libraries be written so they could be exported to mobile without having to rewrite them using a different engine.

So there's one library that works on mobile as well as the old systems.

[Nick]

Yes I guessed that would be the case, I sorta was getting at whether the new display and UI libraries be written so they could be exported to mobile without having to rewrite them using a different engine.

So there's one library that works on mobile as well as the old systems.

I'm sure a lot of the existing code will survive into any new UI/display, but I think being in principle not tied to any of it is a good idea. For example, touch-screen phones would have trouble fitting in any decent amount of map in a readable way, so a port would have to make creative use of zooming and sliding; I have the feeling that the existing UI/display makes assumptions that would make trying to do that very difficult.

I also think that a big restructure is a great time to remove things that were done to satisfy constraints that no longer exist.