A week of work on the ADOM UI

Hi everyone!

After being a bit spammy last week, I decided to summarize the progress of this week in one longer blog post (and a second follow-up post will ask a question that bothers me right now quite a bit regarding picking up and dropping items).

But first here's the latest news about the progress of this week:

• The beginning of the week saw more enhancements to the new ASCII dialog system. Specifically I have enhanced the dialogs for casting spells or invoking mindcraft (when some spells or powers have been quick-marked). Both dialogs now show a lot more information to the player so that his selection process becomes easier:

• Jochen enhanced the saved game restoration dialog in several respects:
• It now sports paging so that you can see all saved games even with longer lists.
• You now can decide to delete saved games directly from the list.
• The graphical representation sports the same features but also has a beautiful scrollbar that works very nicely.

• Otherwise Team ADOM is busy catching up with all the ASCII enhancement (and Krys actually is taking a short and well-deserved vacation break).
• I started playing ADOM by mouse (exclusively). As I usually am a hardcore keyboard player I never paid much attention to the mouse based UI but I feel that the time has come (for me) to finally enjoy ADOM by mouse. Playing it with mouse exclusively quickly shows a lot of challenges and our "Ease of UI" milestone is growing in tickets because of it. Nonetheless I want the next release to be a release with a decent (if not excellent) mouse interface which does not surprise new players in a bad way. Improvements include:
• Shooting at monsters by mouse has been greatly simplified.
• Movement by mouse becomes more effective (but other tickets are still open to more correctly map the ASCI experience to a modern graphical UI experience).
• Skill selection now only offers the obvious choices.
• Other miscellaneous improvements include:
• Better noticeable new class powers.
• Simplified inventory navigation.
• More bug fixes and graphical improvements.

Internally Team ADOM also had some discussions on how to best handle mouse clicks. We still are pretty divided on whether and how to use mouse double clicks (and let's not mention that I learned that right double clicks obviously are such a strange thought that SDL doesn't even support them...). We are trying out different things to see what works and what not. The current implementation reacts to mouse clicks like this:

• Left-clicking once on your position either will execute on the actions eat, drink, pick up, handle, enter/descend or (if more than one is possible) offer a context menu to make a choice.
• Left-clicking once on any other position will move you towards that position. By one step if hostile monsters or other disturbances are around you or by as many steps as required if nothing disturbs you.
• Left-clicking once on an adjacent door BTW will try to open it now.
• Left-clicking twice on your position activates explore mode (as if you pressed '0'). This seems to be a nice shortcut to move around quickly.
• Left-clicking twice on adjacent spaces will move there (otherwise you easily can be confused when fighting pits, vaults and other monster hordes).
• Left-clicking twice on spots more than one space apart from you activates a configurable ranged command (default: shoot, others can be configured as the new default via ':x'). This e.g. by default allows shooting monsters with your equipped missile weapon by left double-clicking on them as long as they not standing next to you.
• Right-clicking once on your position opens a context menu with lots of options (and I'm still working on making that list shorter and more relevant to the specific context).
• Right-clicking once on any other position opens a much shorter context menu with options (e.g. kick, open, unlock when adjacent to a locked door).
• Right-clicking twice does not have any function as the underlying SDL library does not seem to send any events for that.

In the end I want the next release to be very comfortably playable by mouse, as stated above. I BTW in the past usually tried to play with trackpad but have almost given up on that as - despite my love for trackpads - gaming with mouse just seems to work much better. What's your impression or preference?

If you have more ideas for improving mouse-based play please submit them now.