[Poschengband] Displaying whacky feature tiles in ASCII

[chris]

This is from a character dump which I've moved to a forum post so it won't get lost

Lastly, I've finally started messing around in dungeons besides 'Camelot' and 'Icky cave,' though 'Orc cave' gives me a headache from both having a bad color scheme and being difficult to parse as to whether or not that mountain is actually a trap--or vice versa. Is there a way to get rid of the mountains in it without recompiling, because seriously, it really does give me a headache to look at an 'Orc cave' level.

Actually, yes, though it took me quite a while to track down how to do this. First of all, the mountains that display like traps (^) are defined as features in f_info.txt:

N:97:MOUNTAIN
E:mountain chain
G:^:o:LIT
W:5
K:UNPERM:*INNER*
F:REMEMBER | TUNNEL | WALL | PERMANENT | MOUNTAIN | TELEPORTABLE |
F:PLACE | CAN_FLY | AVOID_RUN

N:98:MOUNTAIN_WALL
E:mountain chain (wall)
G:^:o:LIT
M:MOUNTAIN
W:5
K:UNPERM:*INNER*
F:REMEMBER | TUNNEL | WALL | PERMANENT

I'm not sure which of these is actually the one being used, but the ASCII display is, at the first level, controlled by the G: line. The first field defines the display character (^) while the second defines the color. There are standard one character color abbreviations defined at the top of the file:

# D - Black        w - White          s - Gray          o - Orange
# r - Red          g - Green          b - Blue          u - Brown
# d - Dark Gray    W - Light Gray     v - Violet        y - Yellow
# R - Light Red    G - Light Green    B - Light Blue    U - Light Brown

So your first option is to change the character and or color used for display, say to # like other walls. Except, at least on windows, ASCII graphics does not use the # character for normal walls, so you may not like the results. This leads to the second option, which is the giant wall display hack on Windows. It is controlled in the file font-win.prf. If you add the following lines ...

# Mountain (umber / solid block)

F:97:7/127:LIT
F:98:7/127:LIT

...then the mountain features will display as walls just like everything else. The first field of the F: line is the feature unique identifier which we just found in f_info.txt. The second field is color/ascii char, and the 127 magic number is not a valid ASCII display character but is used as a hack for the drawing code to display walls specially on Windows. The 7 is the color to use, and I picked 7 just on my preferences. It is "umber" which looks slightly different then the other wall characters in ASCII so you can, for example, tell the difference between a mountain (which cannot be dug through) and a granite wall (which can be dug through).

Sorry for the delayed response as it took me a few hours to figure the system out and find the correct pref files to use.

As an aside, if you don't like the colors on your system, well, you can change those too. Take a look in user-win.prf.

[chris]

By "yes", I mean you can fix up the display of mountain features without recompiling. You can also, as you originally requested, remove the use of mountains from The Orc Caves. Take a look at d_info.txt:

N:3:Orc cave
D:a dark tunnel leading to an Orc Cave
P:45:30
W:10:23:5:3:18:200:75:20:0x0031:0x006d
L:DIRT:70:GRASS:30:FLOOR:0:14
A:GRANITE:70:MOUNTAIN_WALL:30:FLOOR:0:GRANITE:GRANITE:MAGMA_VEIN:QUARTZ_VEIN
F:FINAL_GUARDIAN_373 | FINAL_OBJECT_132 | CAVE | WATER_RIVER | CAVERN
F:LAKE_TREE | DESTROY | BIG
F:MONSTER_DIV_32
M:ORC | R_CHAR_koO | ANIMAL

Simply replace the MOUNTAIN_WALL reference in the A: line with GRANITE. Again, no need to recompile. You'll probably want to change the other dungeons that use mountains while you are in this file.

Of course, anytime you change a pref file you will (probably) need to restart the game for your change to take effect.

[clouded]

You can edit the edit files but there's actually an in game way to modify monster, object and terrain glyphs. Press %, and then you want to select one of the visual modes. Look at the terrain one. If you change grass, dirt, swamp, flower and brake to look the same as 'open floor' and then change mountain chains to look similar to walls, that's a large percentage of the weird terrain in dungeons. The other stuff that appears often are trees, dark pits, shallow/deep water/lava, they all act like floor but actually have gameplay affects, so you do want to be able to distinguish them.

Even if you just want to remove the terrain from the game (a valid choice) you should go through the monster list and make uniques stand out from the rest of the monsters on that glyph.

Save to name.prf and then always create your game with that name to autoload the prf, you can change the characters name afterwards and then save it to whatever you've changed to.

[mewmew]

I personally think their problem was with the console fonts because usually that dungeon looks pretty decent.