OneMoreNameless
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Allow the player to press a single (rebindable) key that switches on or off 'puzzle view'. When puzzle view is active, a number of UI enhancements are used in order to present puzzle-relevant information in the clearest and most immediate way possible. This view will not necessarily look pretty, but the benefit of implementing it as a single toggleable setting is that it will be both a) very easy for players to switch on and check something in the middle of a puzzle without having to exit out to the options menu or even reach for the mouse and b) equally quick to switch off afterwards and resume viewing all the graphical niceties presented usually.

The following is a possibly incomplete list of UI enhancements that could be included as part of puzzle view. Please keep in mind that with every single case below, the information being provided would be strictly no more than what it is already accessible to the player either directly or by right mouse clicking.

* Tarstuff becomes partially transparent.
* The sight line of evil eyes is shown via red line.
* Spiders are constantly visible.
* Thin grid lines are displayed around each tile, using an opposing colour per tile. (White for pits, red for water etc.)
* Secret walls are displayed as functionally identical broken walls.
* Hide the (future) overhead image layer and weather effects, and increase lighting for all tiles to a reasonable minimum.

Now, not every player will desire to use every one of those enhancements. For this reason, I suggest an additional category of options located underneath 'Graphics and Sound' that lists each included enhancements and the choice for each to either a) never use b) use when puzzle view is active or c) always use.

DROD is a game of forward thinking and logical puzzles. This UI feature would allow the player to always jump straight into solving while reducing tedious actions (struggling to judge exact distance over water, scanning for cracks etc.) and still show the game world at its prettiest for the vast majority of play time.

slimm tom
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This would be great, I fully support the idea.

What I think would be another worthy addition is a distance counting tool that can be used while in this mode. Maybe have that bound to the left or right mouse button, and calculate shortest distance between two clicked tiles. It might allow a Ctrl-click or Shift-click to select multiple waypoints that you want on the route.

navithmastero
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Although some of these are good ideas (gridlines for example), I think that some of them are unnecessary, mainly because that feature already exits in the game, and if they are necessary* (like visibility of spiders, transparent tarstuff or evil-eye line of sight visibility) then a vision token should already be in the room. It is nothing more than bad architecture (in mine, and, I expect, many other people's opinion) that rooms are made horribly tedious by the fact that there isn't a visibility token present in the room.

As for the secret wall viewer, I think this defeats the object of secrets. If someone wants to make a secret room easily found, for any reason, they won't have a secret wall there, perhaps a broken wall, but not a secret one.

Unless I'm thinking of someone else (which I might be ) you are someone who doesn't like the secret hunts in the game. Well, I do, and I think other people do too. Secrets are part of the game, and by making the secrets easy to find, you are defeating the object of secret walls, once someone finds all of the secrets, they may get a sense of achievement, and by taking that away, you are making mastery, or at least finding all secrets, less of an achievement.

-nm

*the room is tedius/horrible without them.

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[Last edited by navithmastero at 05-02-2013 01:24 PM]

slimm tom
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navithmastero wrote: Secrets are part of the game, and by making the secrets easy to find, you are defeating the object of secret walls, once someone finds all of the secrets, they may get a sense of achievement, and by taking that away, you are making mastery, or at least finding all secrets, less of an achievement.

I don't think using a tool to find secret walls necessarily results in mastery being a lesser achievement. While finding secret rooms may take some time, there's absolutely no thought involved. For me, 99% of mastery is actually solving the (often more difficult) secret rooms, and the remaining 1% is finding the secrets. A notable exception is when secret rooms are reached by other means, for example by beating a room in a different way, or by arranging things to get access. (Gigantic Jewel Lost!)

OneMoreNameless
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A few of these enhancements are already present as standard options in DROD's latest engine, true, but being able to toggle them with a single key ingame would be more convenient than exiting out to the settings menu and therefore more likely to be remembered and used when helpful. Additionally, the ease of switching eg. weather effects back on would encourage players to still experience the atmospheric bonus from it between rooms even if they would normally leave those effects off while solving puzzles.

While you may say that other enhancements are unnecessary because vision tokens exist, I would argue that relying on hold architects to place convenient vision tokens and then crossing them during the puzzle should be unnecessary when their only purpose is to alter the UI in a manner which should really already be an option! It is not bad architecture that makes, for example, a room based around avoiding evil eye gazes frustrating - it is strictly bad UI. The point at which enhancing the UI with evil eye lines (and currently, a puzzle-irrelevant token) becomes helpful rather than needless visual clutter is clearly subjective, and that decision should be left in the hands of each player using it, not the architect.

I strongly disapprove of secret walls in DROD for multiple reasons that I've ranted about quite enough before now.

Schik
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Quite enough indeed.

We talked about this briefly in the dev board yesterday, and something like this will probably happen. All the details are TBD.

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Tim
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As I've said before in the Links! thread, I think this feature request is like this:



EDIT: I'm not approving or disapproving this yet. Need to think about it more.

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[Last edited by Tim at 05-02-2013 02:39 PM]

Schik
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Ah, what a brilliant puzzle that was, finding and memorizing all the hidden blocks in Mario.

I anxiously await your, um, decision.

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silver
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A workaround for secret walls exists, in that you can do a graphics mod to make them Super Easy to see.

Thus we can split citizens into (at least) three groups:

1) like the secret hunting, don't use such a mod
2) hate the secret hunting, use such a mod and find secrets easily
3) hate the secret hunting, and don't know or don't understand how to do the mod to make it stop

Why advantage group 2 over group 3?

(other groups I thought of
4) like the secret hunting usually, but have an OCD streak and some bad holds have less well-placed secret doors and they normally wouldn't want to do the mod, but want to for some holds, and that's a bunch of fiddlery
5) are really apathetic about secret hunting
6) don't even know secret hunting exists because they've never actually discerned a secret door
7) might not mind secret hunting, but their screen is too small or too something-or-other and they can't actually see the normal secret graphics...
)


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[Last edited by silver at 05-02-2013 03:28 PM]

hyperme
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if good UI options kill you have you tried not using them? I'm mean unless you're some kind of wacky DROD-elitist how exactly does other people finding rooms via 'Puzzle Vision' hurt you?


Also most old games are terrible at puzzles. 'Oh man bomb/mash you face against every wall' is stupid game design. Legend of Zelda was neat but seriously like half the second quest entrances are random unmarked whatevers.

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stigant
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I'm mean unless you're some kind of wacky DROD-elitist how exactly does other people finding rooms via 'Puzzle Vision' hurt you?

The option to make secret walls visible is (as currently proposed) tangled with the options to make other things apparent. So suppose I like hunting for secret walls, and I'm solving a room that has some tar with evil eyes and water with lots of corners. So I want all the other GUI enhancements (grid lines, transparent tar, EE LOS etc). But I still want to be able to deduce the location of the secret walls (perhaps there's some logical way to figure out where they should be). If I flip on GUI++ to solve the room, the puzzle of where the secret walls are will be inadvertently spoiled for me.

This is different from UU (for example, since that's the main feature where we've been saying "if you don't like it, don't use it"). Firstly, if you don't want to use UU, you can turn it off, and you'll never accidentally use it. Secondly, even if you accidentally used UU when you didn't want to, you can reasonably fix the situation (ie go back to where you were before you used UU and then turn it off so you don't accidentally use it again). But if you the player see where the secret walls are, you can't really "unsee" them.

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mrimer
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As I've requested a couple times now, when one is serious about seeing a new UI feature implemented in 5.0 at this point that overrides or somehow modifies historical behavior or expectations, please post a poll for the community at large to weigh in. We'll consider "greenlighting" the proposal if it gains sufficient support.

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[Last edited by mrimer at 05-02-2013 04:25 PM]

hyperme
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stigant wrote:

I'm mean unless you're some kind of wacky DROD-elitist how exactly does other people finding rooms via 'Puzzle Vision' hurt you?

The option to make secret walls visible is (as currently proposed) tangled with the options to make other things apparent. So suppose I like hunting for secret walls, and I'm solving a room that has some tar with evil eyes and water with lots of corners. So I want all the other GUI enhancements (grid lines, transparent tar, EE LOS etc). But I still want to be able to deduce the location of the secret walls (perhaps there's some logical way to figure out where they should be). If I flip on GUI++ to solve the room, the puzzle of where the secret walls are will be inadvertently spoiled for me.

Except the main suggestion also suggest being able to control what GUI++ does. So if secret vision is fully off be default you won't ruin the surprise.

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stigant
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Except the main suggestion also suggest being able to control what GUI++ does. So if secret vision is fully off be default you won't ruin the surprise.

Yes, sorry, I think perhaps a conversational thread went in a different direction that I thought it did. I think it's fine if you allow people to specify what items they want in their GUI++.

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Tim
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Sorry to take this long to post a reply to that picture above. Disclaimer: I'm still intoxicated, and I'm not a native English speaker so the following could be misunderstood.

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It took me a while to re-search what people thought about the design decisions behind secret blocks. According to my notes, the secret blocks in 1-1 is perfectly findable because it was introduced in level 5-1. (If you don't know, level 1-1 of SMB is incredibly well designed. You can probably write a book just about that one level, well, a chapter or two at least.) Obviously not the first time around, but replayability says it doesn't matter.

Does it means it's good in DROD? Well, that depends. The earlier DROD canon holds (KDD, JtRH) actually do this pretty well, but GatEB did secrets very poorly. Almost every secret on that last episode was unfair.

Secret walls can be placed very well, stuff under tar can be done very elegantly with a good architect. The problem is that those ideas have been lost between generations, and now everyone is doing it the wrong way.

If you have played Tunnel Vision, compared the secrets entrances there to the ones in GatEB, and you'll find that all my secret rooms are actually explained somewhere else in the hold (well, not the one with the secret walls, but that one was obvious). While the one in GatEB were all hidden and almost all of them had zero clues.

If no one can actually make good rooms with these elements then perhaps yes, you should reveal them. To be honest I wish people spend more time to design their rooms instead, but if even canon holds can't do it properly then I'm a bit sad.

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Rheb
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Secrets can be done very well. See Gigantic Jewel Lost.

The secrets I like best may be the ones a player can easily note is there, but is very hard to access.

You can hide secrets cleverly as well using basically any elements in different combinations placed around obscured exits; these secrets are rewarding to find. Using only secret walls to do this is definitely the least pleasing option to me, and it rarely feels rewarding to find. (I guess it was cool the first times I found secrets in JtRH, but it kind of loses its charm).

I have absolutely no problem with a puzzle view command for those who do not enjoy the secret walls pixel hunt.

Edit: So now that I have caught up on all the threads dealing with this issue, I can simply say that I couldn't agree more with Schik: http://forum.caravelgames.com/viewtopic.php?TopicID=35500&page=0#353979

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[Last edited by Rheb at 05-03-2013 12:49 PM]

Jacob
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Not sure why the hate is specifically directed against secrets in GateB and why specifically those in the last episode. Pixel hunting for secret walls applies across all holds that use them.

The Akandian Tunnels level had red lights next to each secret wall at the edge of the room, whereas secrets in Inner Chambers (and one in the Padlands) weren't even hidden by secret walls. And one of the secrets in the guards level actually had a road leading up to the secret wall.


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Doom
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..yeah, if anything I'd say GatEB had more hints than the earlier official holds. Not every secret had hints, no, but this is because this topic was not so popular when the game was made. Secrets were hidden in similar ways that people always used, and it usually wasn't a big deal before.

I think it had even more hints than Tunnel Vision. I recall finding all the secrets in that one by analyzing which floor tiles on room edges are reachable. Maybe the hints were too cleverly hidden for me. Sure, that hold shows a few good ways to hide things without crumby walls. Although I'm not sure if secrets that make people post on the forums asking if getting to the secret room is a bug is the best example of what we want to do

Syntax
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I've always used the secret/breakable wall mod because I would always end up finding them eventually except I'd rather play the game than spend an evening looking for cracks. Got a decent screen now so probably not as much of an issue, but yeah... time has always been a constraint

Trickster
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Doom wrote:
I think it had even more hints than Tunnel Vision. I recall finding all the secrets in that one by analyzing which floor tiles on room edges are reachable. Maybe the hints were too cleverly hidden for me. Sure, that hold shows a few good ways to hide things without crumby walls. Although I'm not sure if secrets that make people post on the forums asking if getting to the secret room is a bug is the best example of what we want to do

I was highly disappointed in the lack of secrets in the swamp where I could cleverly get to the edge of the screen.

But this may be because I hate hate hate hate hate edge-boundary walls. Hate. Passionate flames at the sides of my face.

EDIT: For the record I do not like them.

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[Last edited by Trickster at 05-08-2013 09:40 PM]

Trickster
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Syntax wrote:
I've always used the secret/breakable wall mod because I would always end up finding them eventually except I'd rather play the game than spend an evening looking for cracks. Got a decent screen now so probably not as much of an issue, but yeah... time has always been a constraint

Honestly time spent looking for secrets is so much tinier than solving the damnable rooms that it never really bothered me. I kinda like looking for cracks.

I am not a normal person.

Anyway, I've never heard of the "secret/breakable wall mod" prior to reading this thread, but this makes perfect sense to me since it is, after all, a "secret" breakable wall mod.

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Trickster
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Tim wrote:
As I've said before in the Links! thread, I think this feature request is like this:

Not exactly, no. That turns an impossible-to-see feature into a hard-to-see feature. This is requesting that a hard-to-see feature become easy-to-see. It's more like taking bats on a dark background and coloring them neon orange instead.

I think seeing spiders everywhere would be pretty weird and then they would then just be roaches, right? I guess I'm the only delver left who doesn't use Tar-Vision(tm), though, so I'm probably not the best person to mirror.

Anyway, if I haven't said this previously (or someone else in which case I apologize, I'm sort of slamming the forum right now before doing work, like a can of Mountain Dew which is close as I get to energy drinks), I don't think this will change much. It will just cause most architects to come up with more-creative approaches to hiding secrets than ever using breakables.

Some of those already exist. I remember last year I made a bug report that turned out to be a secret-hiding mechanism people had already taken advantage of in published holds. (Unfortunately, it wasn't the platform bug I was planning to use as a feature.)

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[Last edited by Trickster at 05-08-2013 09:47 PM]

The spitemaster
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I just wish spiders invisibility worked on stalwarts. It doesn't btw.

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Moo
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Well, this has made its way partially into 5.0... Let's see...

* Tarstuff becomes partially transparent. (This happens, but perhaps the level of transparency could be increased. It's still hard to see through.)
* The sight line of evil eyes is shown via red line.
* Spiders are constantly visible.
* Thin grid lines are displayed around each tile, using an opposing colour per tile. (White for pits, red for water etc.) (All white, but that's good enough I think)
* Secret walls are displayed as functionally identical broken walls. (No)
* Hide the (future) overhead image layer and weather effects, and increase lighting for all tiles to a reasonable minimum. (I didn't check overhead images, but the others don't happen)

The secret walls one is perhaps controversial...
But I would like the last one. Perhaps disable completely any darkness and weather (but not lights?).
One thing I would like added to the list is disabling of monster animation. It feels like they fidget far more now than they once did, and any movement on screen can be distracting when trying to concentrate. Also the strobing of seep (use fixed alpha, or even just fully opaque), and the invisibility potion strobing.

To avoid a lot of work (settings screens etc), how about further puzzle-mode type functions be added to Ctrl-F3 and Alt-F3? This could be for things that people may not want included in the main F3-view (the two in red, and maybe the animation?). The current (undocumented!) Ctrl-F3 function (which reloads graphics, as with F3 in the editor) could be moved to Ctrl-F2 in game, giving two more "obvious" keys for view options. Further options could even be added to less-obvious keys, like perhaps individual toggles for each thing (so you could, for example, have eye lines or visible spiders without affecting anything else).

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[Last edited by Moo at 07-03-2014 11:11 PM]

bwross
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Yeah, I'd definitely like to see at least something from that last one. Shallow water can be hard to tell in some styles, and reflected clouds just makes it harder. Although I often mistake shallow water for deep even without the clouds... maybe more contrast between the two would help, but then coloured lighting effects can always make water look weird, which is something else that puzzle mode should do something about.

As for multiple modes... a simple way would be just to have repeated F3 flip though a list of different settings (saves remembering the chords for what you want... shift or ctrl F3 could be used for turning it off, and F3 from there would go to the last setting, not the next one). I know that I'd be interested in flexibility (turning on puzzle mode for the eye lines right now doesn't work so well... the added grid makes things too busy that I end up squinting to see them... maybe eye lines should be thicker and more prominent in puzzle mode?). That sort of flexibility doesn't work so well if you have to keep going out to the settings menu to do it. Another option would be having shift F3 bring up a window with checkboxes so you could toggle things easily during play.

And as useful as the grid is... I find that it doesn't really help that much because I often want it to check diagonals (orthogonal alignment is easy to see, but the grid is good for distance, but still using the mouse for the co-ordinates is better than counting squares in that grid). What I'd really like is to have a chequerboarding effect, instead of the grid.

stigant
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All white, but that's good enough I think

I just tried the grid in a room with large regions of oremites (actual room secreted to avoid spoilers: ) and it's pretty much invisible and thus useless. I don't know if I actually need the grid in this room, but if I do, too bad.

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Moo
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It may be better for the lines, instead of being white or some other solid colour, were rendered in "invert", so they would appear light on dark backgrounds, dark on light backgrounds, and hopefully easy to see colours on things like oremites.
Also, currently puzzle view causes noticeable slowdown too, presumably the grid... Are the lines being drawn individually?

Trickster
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Moo wrote:
It may be better for the lines, instead of being white or some other solid colour, were rendered in "invert", so they would appear light on dark backgrounds, dark on light backgrounds, and hopefully easy to see colours on things like oremites.

I agree. This is what I assumed the lines would be drawn in, though that may slow down graphics unless it's implemented the right way.

It still wouldn't work well in cases of random noise, but oremites aren't this. They're consistently patterned and lean toward one point on the spectrum. I don't think there are any DROD elements where inverted lines would not show up.

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Jatopian
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Maybe grayscaled and inverted?

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Dischorran
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You really want to make puzzle view awesome? Add drawing tools! Something like putting an eight-color palette and line/freehand/rectangle tools over in the free space on the left. With snap to grid at the corners and center of tiles. And maybe some draggable numbers like the forum screenshots have.

And a shrubbery. One that looks nice. And not too expensive.

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