7DRL: Bane of the Living

This looks interesting. I especially like the clean interface:


Kharne's current interface is still much too cluttered. :-(

Should the minimal view (below) be the default one?

Kh

Interface Improvements in the next version

The next version will feature an overhaul of the interface. I want to bring the interface more into line with the traditional roguelike capability of being able to control everything as much as possible via the keyboard (as well as using the mouse).

Hence, 0.0.4 will allow you to examinem wear, wield, drop and use (drink/eat) items via keyboard commands. Now that multi-item tiles have been implemented, I'll also allow multi-drop, and enable mouse-over item hints on items.

And of course, 0.0.4 will be released under the MPL with the source code repository on googlecode.

Improving the AI

I've noticed the following situation quite a lot:

...where the player can see the monster but the monster cannot see the player (and thus is still asleep) This is because the player FoV is calculated using Recursive Shadowcasting, and lacking a working noise model, monsters initially use a simple implementation of Bresenham's line algorithm to calculate if they are aware of the player or not.

In an ideal world, the monsters would either use a noise system or recursive shadowcasting of their own to find the player, but in the meantime, I need to think of a better way to make monsters active. I'm proposing that, for now, if a monster is in the FoV of the player, but cannot directly see the player, then that is equivalent to having direct line of sight (via Bresenham) to the player, and the monster will awaken and then move in a random direction to try and achieve direct line of sight.

And to answer some questions I've had about screen resolution, here is the main window maximised on my laptop running at 1366 x 768 and with the main display minimised, giving a tile display of 112 x 22 using Bitstream Vera Sans Mono, 11 pt. text (click to zoom in to see at full resolution):

The mininum (default) size is 900 x 730.

New Font

I really like the Bitstream Vera Sans Mono font.

Fullscreen vs not Fullscreen and other UI questions

• Should Kharne start maximised to the full screen size
• What screen resolutions should Kharne support? (and should it be optimised for any of them?)
• What fonts should Kharne use? (and what size should they be?)
• Would you like to see any of the current screens and displays rearranged in any way? And if so, how?
• Should I get rid of the Splash Screen?
  
• Are there any other UI enhancements you'd like to see?
  

Zoom!

One of the last things left on the UI to do is to implement a real-time zoom:

Ideally, I'd like this to be controllable via the Scroll-Wheel of the mouse as well as with keyboard shortcuts.

Making the most of the screen

In the next release, you will be able to minimise the information window by pressing F1:

And restore the standard view by pressing F2:

This works even if the screen is resized. But what information should be displayed along the top of the screen in the full view?

0.03 Preview #4 - Monster Health Bars

Towards a Unified UI in 0.03

Here is a glimpse of the new frontscreen of Alpha 0.03. It will do away with extraneous forms and be a single window application (effectively a good approximation of a DOS/Console App). The refactoring out of the character creation and such like is proving to be a bit of a pain, as it was written originally in a seperate DLL. A different type of DLL Hell, indeed.

Mental Note to Self

Mental Note to Self: for the next release, take the time and effort to fix the speedbuttons and menus along the top edge of the screen so that they actually work (and are also context sensitive).

Sudden Random Brain Impulse: do I actually need them anyway? If they disappeared, would anyone care? Here's a mock-up of what the game would look like without them (maximum retro-console goodness, surely):

New UI

This is the result of the tinkering I've been doing over the last few days. Good old Courier font.

I do have a question though: does displaying the amount of damage that the player or monsters do add any value to the game? Not many roguelikes display this amount of combat detail. Should Kharne?

The New Inventory

This is the new inventory UI. It is still drag-and-drop, but now when you mouse-over an item, its full details and description (if known) are displayed. Also if you mouse over an item in the backpack, the appropriate slot on the equipped list is highlighted. To drop an item, drag it onto the drop icon on the bottom right (I'm not quite satisfied with this being the only way to drop items as it currently is, so I'll probably implement a 'drop' command).

The Orange Item is an Artifact. Artifacts are the most powerful items in the game. Standard non-magical items are white, minor magical items (if known) are green, more powerful ones are blue and then purple. Unidentified items will always appear in white. Potions have a colour scheme of their own. Cursed items (if known) are red.

Yes, the colour scheme is very World of Warcraft-ey. It works. Why not use it?

The New UI

The new UI.

Yes, it is very Crawl-ey. That's deliberate. If anyone connected with Crawl is reading this, consider it in the spirit its given: a homage; a compliment of the highest order.

Screen Usage

Minimising and Maximising now work. This is the default size - 792 x 995 pixels:

In comparison, this is the main window maximised on my widescreen monitor, to a resolution of 1440 x874:

Like any proper Windows Application, it can be ran at any resolution in-between too. Even though I'll have to sacrifice some space, I'd like to get it working with 800x600 too.

More on Screen Sizes

Following on from my last post, and the comments therein, the main window of Kharne is now much smaller - with dimensions of 792x725. With the optional minimap and monster view displayed, this is what it looks like on a monitor with a resolution of 1280x768:

Without any additional windows displayed, this is what it looks like:

To do this, I've had to simplify the main window considerably and change the information that is always visible. I think I prefer the newer look - its more streamlined and less distracting.

Eventually I hope to get the main window down to less than 800x600 so it can be run on this lower resolution in extremis.