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Wednesday, June 28, 2017

Communication bubbles in ADOM

Hi everyone!

Today I'm particularly proud to present a masterpiece of ASCII art (*cough*, *cough* - bare with me - without Krys my artistic abilities are somewhat rudimentary ;-) ).

For a long time (and especially with the new graphical mode) people rightfully complained about dialogs with NPCs and monsters and the texts uttered by them were not very well readable.

I have taken these complaints to heart and proudly present the new ADOM speech bubble mechanism I implemented:



These bubbles adjust in size, in theory the text contained can be pageable and ADOM tries to position them smartly so that neither the involved speakers nor the nearby context gets obscured. There yet has to be a lot of testing to see if this works well in all instances (prerelease testers, you'll get work in the nearer future :-) ) but I am very happy with the current mechanism. And I find it remarkably beautiful for ASCII art :-)

Let me know what you think!
(and as usual my dear compatriots in crime [Team ADOM] are under pressure to catch up graphically with my ASCII designs ;-) )

9 comments:

  1. Would be interesting to see how this system looks with y/N dialog prompts (or Thrundaar's dialog).

    Please make sure ENTER skips through all paged dialog (same as it did with "(more)" prompts).

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  2. Can these be turned on/off? I'm kinda liking the other popup interfaces but this might be too much for me.

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  3. I like it. All for having the game present dialogue and other non combat/action related text in an easy to read format, and not have to take eyes off the 'main screen' to read everything in the little status text lines. (Maybe I am assuming too much but I hope with this enabled it won't show there, (but still in the message history log))

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  4. Looks like a great improvement over existing messages in status bar. Dunno how would this for in-game atmosphere though. White pop-up in deep dark sinister dungeon might look weird unless you're talking to Kelly. But I'd rather try it before complaining :)

    Will these popups appear in case chat isn't initiated by you, e.g. when you enter Rehetep's room he speaks as soon as he spots you. Will it be a chat as well? What about other, more complex, edge cases, e.g. what if a frog jumps out of the pool and says that you're kinda boring? What will happen to Mad Ministrel, I assume no changes? What if you use blessed ring of djinni summoning and he asks you about your wish?

    Grond also raised a valid question - it would be nice to see dialog with Thrundaar, Y/N prompts, other prompts, e.g. skill trainer questions and samples of very long speech, e.g. when a new quest is assigned.

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  5. Dark sage numbing? Responses from mobs after giving items or offering peace? No pop-up for arena noise? Interactions with shopkeeper? Skill uses as haggling and ventriloquism?

    How would you paint a voice in PC's head that BOOMS? E.g. when wishing, sacrificing, or praying?

    What do you if character is unable to see the speaker because of being blind, speaker being in darkness?

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  6. For new players who play in ADoM like as boring kind or hack and slash style(i see monster i want kill monster) maybe pretty good(for a new audience).
    For old school players i think that don't matter(I already know what it says).It's just a wrapper,right?!
    No more blowing smoke please!Concentrate better on new quests and bug fixes...it's hard?!But i believe in your success...;)Or for example maybe add more ways of getting experience or improve them effectiveness or where in the game at least one chest or hatch(maybe idk that ways or where it all is...but...
    Well...with passionate hate and understanding...with great joy and doom...AlLoYtSiM

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  7. Like it! When next release happens?

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  8. I love how this looks, and all of the other UI improvements you've been teasing us with lately. Can't wait for the next release!

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