Nethack For Gp32

[retrobits]

Some kind of alphabetical menu? Like when you select a letter, a list of the commands starting with that letter appears... of course, you may need to make several pages of them to fit all the Nethack commands.

I see what you are getting at, and I agree that type of interface would help you to get playing as fast as possible. However, I think in the long run it would slow you down.

For example, how would you "select a letter". How many joystick moves would it take to locate the letter of choice? Would it be possible to have your finger muscles "memorize" those keystrokes to select the letter 'Q' verses the letter 'H'. After that, how many clicks to select your command of choice? With my interface the goal is "the fewest clicks to the most common commands".

Its like a QWERTY keyboard. The designers did not lay out a standard keyboard according to alphabetical order. This was on purpose. The most common letters are arranged in the most convenient positions. This causes you to have to memorize where the keys are, but once you get over the learning curve, you can really crank along as you touchtype. When I play nethack on the GP32, I want to think "Kick" or "Search", and my fingers just respond with the pattern. I don't even want to think about a menu. Yes it takes some memorization and practice, but this is the interface I want. I admit its not there yet, but anyhow, this is the goal I'm trying to achieve. This is all about maximizing gameplay. Eventually it gets too tedious to hunt through menus.

I like do your idea though. It makes sense to have more of a standard, categorized menu of commands for beginning users, or users that just want to play a little right away without needing to memorize anything. I will add it to my to-do list.

 

[JaqMs]

Yeah, my only problem is it's kind of hard to find the less common commands. Otherwise, I think your interface is great for the common commands.

 

[retrobits]

Yeah, my only problem is it's kind of hard to find the less common commands.

excellent point. I have the same trouble myself for the seldom used commands.

 

[ufoufo]

Nethack with me where ever I go. This is my dream came true! So great, thanks so much!

 

[starpause]

The text wrapping in the help system annoys me also. I should be able to fix that one up in .2.

Tiles? ... A good set of tiles can make people new to NetHack give it a shot, but I find myself turning them off even when running on a large display.

I'm toying with the idea of chatboard support, but think efforts to improve the on-screen keyboard would probably be higher priority. Chatboard is such a cool little thing, but in the end I find I don't take the time to pull it out (for other emus). When I do, I am really pleased with the results though.

good to hear re: help text!

i prefer the ascii as well ... it juices up your imagination ... ! it's encouraging to hear you will be working to make the ascii version a thing of beauty, ascii is beautiful

no chatboard here ... so improving the on-screen keyboard sounds more exciting to me it seems a little slow to move around the on-screen keyboard?

again, thanks retrobits. .. epic shit!

 

[retrobits]

well, its time to eat some crow...

I had gotten a few emails begging for tiles and had actually started poking around in the tile code (and feeling vaguely guilty too). I was just toying around the other day and realized a fairly simple way to hack the tty interface to add tiles (basically similar to the MSDOS port).

Then one of my kids peeked over my shoulder, saw this, and immediately wanted to play.

After that, the ultimate happened: my wife saw the 32x32 set with the kitty and said "oh cute!, this is like tolkien right?" and walked away with my GP32.

My kids have been watching me play roguelikes for 2 years, my wife for at least 8 or 9. Not once has anyone even asked to play, much less even feigned interest... and now this.

This needs a little more polish before its released to fix a couple of minor clipping niggles. I'd also like to implement a 50% zoom and be able to toggle quickly between a few different tilesets and ascii.

Until I get my GP32 back from my wife, I'll be in the emulator...

-ascii forever,
retrobits

(This set at least is a bit more to my taste...)

 

[Alex.]

Nice to see such great progress take place in such a short period of time! I like the second tileset best, followed by the third set. Sure, ASCII has its charm and unique (read: l33t ) feel, but tiles are a sure bait to attract new users. Once again, thank you very much for your efforts!

- Alex

PS: Do you think that toggling tiles/ASCII on start-up would be feasible?

 

[retrobits]

PS: Do you think that toggling tiles/ASCII on start-up would be feasible?

Yep, thats the plan.

Your defaults.nh will control whether the tiles or ascii appear at startup (OPTIONS=tiled_map). Toggling between tiles and ascii is available at anytime while playing also. After that you can specify a set of up to 3 tilesets that can be quickly toggled between (OPTIONS=tile_files:filea,fileb,filec) without having to browse for a specific file. Finally, I'm planning to be able to add a zoom function (i.e. 25%, 50%, 100%, 200%) so that you can fit more tiles on the screen and then zoom in for detail if desired. Probably I should add a startup option for this too (OPTIONS=tile_zoom:50%). I'm thinking that Left-Trigger+Start will take you to the tile/video config popup. After that, left/right will toggle tilesets & ascii mode, up/down will toggle zoom)... hopefully everything effective immediately and interactively.

 

[Mirrorhead]

I'm new to Nethack, but I`ll defitnitely give this version with tiles a try once it`s avalable. It`s great to see that people are still doing stuff for the GP32. I wish I would have the time to get into programming myself.

 

[slaanesh]

Then one of my kids peeked over my shoulder, saw this, and immediately wanted to play.

This tile set reminds me of Rogue on the Atari ST! That was the first time I saw a Rogue/Nethack/Moria type game on any computer.

Maybe it's the kid in me but I also had a sudden urge to play Nethack when I saw this tileset!