Monday, November 24, 2014

Latest ASCII enhancements: New message statistic modes and Team ADOM page

As the title says we are ramping up for the first Steam release and doing so includes finishing some more UI enhancements. First of all ADOM has two new configurations for displaying statistics and messages:

The first new mode groups all data at the top:


The idea is to need to look into but one place for everything. I'm not yet 100% happy with it. I guess I will color the statistics bar in dark gray to have a better contrast to the messages. I have not yet grown accustomed to this mode but I can see the benefits.

The second new mode abbreviates statistics at the top and introduces and endless scrolling message queue at the bottom:


This mode will be truly relevant in tiled display mode (with graphics) and exists in ASCII mostly to keep things similar. In finished tiled mode you will have a modern graphical display for all statistics at the top and the messages will be overlaid with the game graphics at the bottom scrolling upwards (with more than just four lines - probably in a smaller font and with more like 8-10 lines... but we are still working on that).

Sadly there still are some kinks with that mode as the old message code was very hard to configure for these new settings. I'm working on the remaining bugs and hope that this will not steal away too much valuable time from the work for the Steam release.

Finally we have a new "Team ADOM screen" accessible from the main screen that credits all my amazing compatriots:


The graphical version should be a lot more awesome but it just seemed appropriate to also have an ASCII version :-) (the ordering BTW is semi-random and changes with every display in order to give almost everyone a different spotlight each time).

This week I'm on vacation. Work vacation that is. My wife is on a conference and the whole week has been reserved to work on ADOM from he early morning up late into the night to get as much work done as possible. Wish me luck and few bugs ;-)

4 comments:

  1. Good Luck! The scrolling message issue is one of the last big monsters that needs to be tackled to bring the UI into the 21st century, and I'm really excited to see the final result!

    I will note, though, that the simple change you made to nerf summoners has dramatically reduced the amount of message spam I've gotten in recent games. Like, it went from being near-constant to not a huge deal. (though still noticeable) Funny how a small thing like that can dramatically change a player's experience of the game. :)

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  2. Color me intrigued. Excessive more-prompts were the main reason I stopped playing ADOM in the past.

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  3. I like the message buffer improvements. But more than that, I especially like the last paragraph! One week devoted to working on ADOM full-time? I'm sure we'll get awesome stuff. Good luck!

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