skell
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While puzzle mode/view is cool and all, we can make it cooler.

The suggestion:
1. Add a way to open puzzle mode options dialog (Shift+F3 perhaps)
2. The dialog will contain various options for customizing puzzle mode.
3. The options would be saved and each time you use puzzle mode you'd be using the last selected options.

What options? I'd say for starters let's go with slider that allows selecting grid lines thickness, and from then future additions can be kept in separate threads.

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Rabscuttle
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If it's not obvious, separate checkboxes for
* Show gridlines
* Show eye-beams
* Show spiders

Slider for tarstuff transparency.

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New suggestions:

Option to turn off lighting/weather effects.

For red/black/green doors
* Highlight trapdoors
* Highlight tarstuff
* Highlight monsters/unstepped conquer tokens/lit seeding beacons

Some sort of option to differentiate force arrows that can be turned off.

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[Last edited by Rabscuttle at 11-04-2020 10:27 PM]

Rabscuttle
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Movement order. I'm thinking just put everything's movement number over it, similar to right clicking but without square coords or critter name.

Hitting f3 twice (turn on and off) will be more convenient than clicking a bunch of monsters.

In addition, it could be useful if you want to see the total number of monsters in the room (turn it on, look for the biggest number). Would be useful for seeing if you are outpacing the queens, nests and mothers, or for estimating how long the rest of the room will take if you're optimising.

====

Highlight crumbly walls. Mainly useful for room styles where they're hard to see.
Maybe secret walls as well? There are mods for that, but I don't know if it should be part of the main game interface.

Dragon Fogel
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Since sliders are on the table, maybe have one for walls. Options to highlight none, highlight broken (probably this is default), highlight broken and secret. Then people can decide for themselves if they want to cheat on the secret wall hunt.

skell
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Dragon Fogel wrote:
highlight broken and secret.

I will never again turn off puzzle mode.

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Moo
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The original puzzle view thread has a load of suggestions that are still relevant.

Dragon Fogel
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One thing that comes to mind in looking at that: an option to turn alpha blending off during puzzle mode.

I often turn it off in very dark areas. Being able to press a button to turn it off would be more convenient than going into the options screen every time I want to change it back for atmospheric purposes.

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[Last edited by Dragon Fogel at 11-06-2020 03:50 AM]

Nuntar
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Colour of grid lines.

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skell
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Status update:

- 4 Grid width options + opacity selection (preview)
- Secret wall highlighting - I was considering using the same mechanism that editor uses, but it has a few issues. It only highlights tiles in the center, which wouldn't help with secret walls on room edges. It also isn't very visible in my opinion, which is I went with a color that I don't think is used in the game at all. (preview)
- Toggle spiders visibility
- Toggle evil eye beam visibility
- Toggle reverse evil eye beam visibility (requested here)
- Toggle weather (preview)
- Toggle lighting (preview)

Planned:
- Disable monster animations
- Disable build markers

Let me address the suggestions so far:
- Slider for tarstuff transparency - I won't be implementing this. There is already a tarstuff transparency option in the settings if you want it to be customized and puzzle mode automatically makes tar transparent (exactly like vision token). It's quite a hassle for no real benefit.
? For red/black/green doors... - I don't really understand
? Some sort of option to differentiate force arrows that can be turned off. - any suggestion how it would work and look?
? Movement order - just displaying a subtitle with a number over the monster has a couple of issues: 1. You can only fit numbers up to 99 without them bleeding over to neighboring tiles, so I think the only sensible option is to show the movement order of the first 99 monsters. 2. It will look pretty bad and I fear it might be slow. I'll try it but no promises it will be good.
? broken wall highlighting - I am questioning whether it's really useful. Secret walls sure, but broken? Then again I am speaking from POV of someone who has a fairly decent eyesight so I am certainly biased.
? an option to turn alpha blending off during puzzle mode. - Do you mean alpha blending or just environmental effects + lighting? Because disabling alpha blending also removes opacity from a lot of effects (eg. Aumtlich beams)
- Colour of grid lines. I think the new grid sizes are sufficient, since you can hardly get more contrast than white surrounded by black (especially that DROD does not have that combination used in regular gameplay). Also implementing it would be a pain in the neck which is why if you're happy with the new grids I'd rather not add it.

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[Last edited by skell at 11-06-2020 09:50 AM]

Dragon Fogel
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There is currently an "Alpha Blending" checkbox in Settings so I'm basically suggesting a setting where it's On when puzzle mode is off and Off when puzzle mode is on.

This is a little redundant since there's already an in-game setting for it, but what I'm imagining is that it would allow you to alter it with one button and not leaving the game screen. I guess "toggle lighting" would cover most of what I'd want there, though.

As for broken walls: in low lighting they can be hard to spot, so that would be useful for people who don't want to outright disable lighting effects. Plus they can be covered by tarstuff or certain other objects, so highlighting the tiles could be useful when that happens. There's also just a possibility of overlooking them.

Kalin
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I only recently found out about puzzle mode, and still haven't tried it yet (waiting on this FR).

And so I find it amusing that I'm already using many of these suggestions through the normal settings menu. I do not want fancy visual effects. This is actually one of the main reasons I play DROD.

I am wondering how you could display the reverse eye gazes without being terribly confusing. Dotted lines? Different color?

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skell
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Dragon Fogel - consider me convinced for the broken walls. I'll pass on changing alpha blending and just stick to weather and lighting because of technical reasons.

Kalin - that reminds me I need to make sure my hold works well with all effects disabled. I agree that readability ultimately trumps everything else, but I also like pretty puzzles. As for the linked PR, I definitely want to include it.

As for reverse eye gazes - it's a checkbox you can enable. It just displays the same way as regular beams and I realize it's going to have super niche usage but it was easy enough to implement and was specifically requested.

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skell
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I've added:
- Disabling monster animations
- Disabling build markers
- Highlighting broken walls

And I think at this point that's all I wanted to implement for 5.2 in this feature. Of course feel free to discuss this further here, but until an alpha build of 5.2 is available I won't be touching this feature again.

PR

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[Last edited by skell at 11-08-2020 12:10 AM]

Nuntar
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skell wrote: - Colour of grid lines. I think the new grid sizes are sufficient, since you can hardly get more contrast than white surrounded by black (especially that DROD does not have that combination used in regular gameplay). Also implementing it would be a pain in the neck which is why if you're happy with the new grids I'd rather not add it.

If the grids are being handled as choice between discrete options rather than a slider, would it not be possible to offer thin red lines as one of the options?

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skell
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I guess we if thin red line is on the table I may as well add black and white (as in one colored). I just don't want this slider to suddenly have gazillion options making it hard to chose what you want. Once 5.2 alpha is out I'd like you to check if the exiating options are fine for your uses and if not we can get back to adding those red lines okay?

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mrimer
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skell wrote:
...and if not we can get back to adding those red lines okay?

Having everything in-game is convenient, but also a user has full power to provide additional files in their user Bitmaps directory for piecemeal drop-in sprite replacements. So, we could provide sprite files after the fact with any color lines, etc., without requiring code revs.

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[Last edited by mrimer at 11-08-2020 08:27 PM]

Rabscuttle
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The doors thing is probably only useful for red doors. It's the situation where you can't see the last remaining trapdoor, maybe because it's hidden underneath a monster, or tarstuff or a token, etc.
Similar option for black and green doors aren't as relevant, but I just thought I'd put them out there.


Force Arrows I was originally thinking of changing the colour of the arrows themselves, but I think that's style specific, so I don't think that's a simple option. Maybe a more general solution would be "highlight these sorts of squares" option with radio buttons to choose one sort of thing to highlight. (secret walls or trapdoors or force arrows linked to orbs, etc)

bbb
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In general, it should be possible to find out the full state of the puzzle at any point. examples

Information which MUST be available:

Halph's target and current path. In general, every stored path which is precalculated. (Slayers have them, but they show the wisp, and can be clicked, so that may be enough. I'm not sure about citizens.)

Whatever information is stored regarding the order in which citizens visited relay stations.

Briar patch information. (See the example in Advanced Concepts.)


Information which would be nice to be able to view:
Time clone recording information.


Information which would be nice to have, depending on hold edit permissions:

Viewing current variables.

Viewing current script state.

Rabscuttle
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bbb wrote:
Halph's target and current path. In general, every stored path which is precalculated. (Slayers have them, but they show the wisp, and can be clicked, so that may be enough. I'm not sure about citizens.)

Slayers have hidden precalculated paths similar to Halph when they need to hit an orb/plate to open a door.

I believe citizens have them too, at least when looking for something to build. You can certainly change their target by dancing around in front of them.
They care less about things being in their way when they are going to a station.

skell
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> Halph's target and current path. In general, every stored path which is precalculated. (Slayers have them, but they show the wisp, and can be clicked, so that may be enough. I'm not sure about citizens.)

Given that citizen/halph/slayer/stalwart pathfinding is broken (in that it's impossible to predict what the path will be and stuff not on its way influences it) I am not comfortable exposing this information as of now.

> Whatever information is stored regarding the order in which citizens visited relay stations.

Any suggestions on how to surface this information?

> Briar patch information. (See the example in Advanced Concepts.)

Can you/someone explain?

>Time clone recording information.

Any suggestions on how to surface this information?

> Viewing current variables.

This would require knowing the script to make sense in most cases, so not very valuable.

> Viewing current script state.
Work-to-benefit ratio is close to infinite with this in my opinion, so very much unlikely to be implemented.

Bear in mind that for now I am done with 5.2 changes relating to puzzle mode so unlikely any of those will be implemented, but nothing stops us from ironing out the list for 5.3 or 5.2.1.

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Kalin
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skell wrote:
> Halph's target and current path. In general, every stored path which is precalculated. (Slayers have them, but they show the wisp, and can be clicked, so that may be enough. I'm not sure about citizens.)
Given that citizen/halph/slayer/stalwart pathfinding is broken (in that it's impossible to predict what the path will be and stuff not on its way influences it) I am not comfortable exposing this information as of now.

If you were creating a new element (or game), is there a clearly better way to handle pathfinding? This should probably be a separate thread (maybe on Development).

> Whatever information is stored regarding the order in which citizens visited relay stations.
Any suggestions on how to surface this information?

Left-click a citizen to add numbers to relay stations and buildmarkers based on the room state this turn. We should have a limit on how many targets marked, five is probably enough (also stop numbering if we reach an already marked relay station).

> Briar patch information. (See the example in Advanced Concepts.)
Can you/someone explain?

I assume bbb meant AC2, which I haven't played yet. We already have left-click to highlight an entire briar patch for checking connectedness.

> Viewing current script state.
Work-to-benefit ratio is close to infinite with this in my opinion, so very much unlikely to be implemented.

What about:
Right-click a scripted char to show line number of most recently executed script command, and maybe the Label used in the most recent Goto, Gosub, or Answer. I would limit this to playtesting or beta-testing.


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bbb
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skell wrote:
> Halph's target and current path. In general, every stored path which is precalculated. (Slayers have them, but they show the wisp, and can be clicked, so that may be enough. I'm not sure about citizens.)

Given that citizen/halph/slayer/stalwart pathfinding is broken (in that it's impossible to predict what the path will be and stuff not on its way influences it) I am not comfortable exposing this information as of now.

That is why I think this needs to be exposed. This is similar to move order not being visible in AE.

> Whatever information is stored regarding the order in which citizens visited relay stations.

Any suggestions on how to surface this information?

What exactly is stored?

> Briar patch information. (See the example in Advanced Concepts.)

Can you/someone explain?

If you have two pieces of briar in diagonal, it is impossible to determine if they are part of two patches which happen to be next to each other, or if they are part of the same patch.

>Time clone recording information.

Any suggestions on how to surface this information?

From this point on, I think the easiest solution would be an option to export the current puzzle state to the clipboard or to a file. Doing that would also make it possible to give more concrete suggestions about how to add something to puzzle mode.

> Viewing current variables.

This would require knowing the script to make sense in most cases, so not very valuable.

There is (was?) an option to show (global) variables which change. Showing any state variable which appears in scripts in the room should be enough.

> Viewing current script state.
Work-to-benefit ratio is close to infinite with this in my opinion, so very much unlikely to be implemented.

I think a room state export would be enough for this.

Bear in mind that for now I am done with 5.2 changes relating to puzzle mode so unlikely any of those will be implemented, but nothing stops us from ironing out the list for 5.3 or 5.2.1.

The only one I'd argue about is the Halph target and path. That shouldn't be too hard. Perhaps clicking on Halph would color the door which is to be opened in green, and the path of the current plan in a different color. (Like the slayer wisp is colored in purple.)

skell
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@Kalin
>Left-click a citizen to add numbers to relay st...
While this is fine and dandy in general we really need a better way to display numbers on tiles than using the speech boxes . This could potentially be added in the future once we have something in place for that.

>Right-click a scripted char to show line number of most recently executed script command, and maybe the Label used in the most recent Goto, Gosub, or Answer. I would limit this to playtesting or beta-testing.
Line wouldn't be that hard, but then we would also have to add line numbers to the list of commands which is a bit less trivial. Using flush speech + speech is probably still a better way to debug scripts.

> That is why I think this needs to be exposed. This is similar to move order not being visible in AE.
I disagree, I think those are vastly different. First would be how often they come up. Second would be that seeing the path would not be that useful anyway - they try to take the shortest path to the target, the rest would be a mess of things changing whenever they have to recalculate their path (which happens anytime something blocks their last cached path). Sure, there is value in seeing roughly what the path they take, but the almost-random fluctuations are impossible to predict, so your only option is to try things randomly until they fall into place, maybe.

The only benefit would be to immediately seeing roughly which path is the shortest which, while has a slightly annoying workaround - UU and waiting for a bit, which works for most cases.

> If you have two pieces of briar in diagonal, it is impossible to determine if they are part of two patches which happen to be next to each other, or if they are part of the same patch.
That does sound like something that would be nice to have and I may come back to this at a later stage before 5.2's release.


@bbb
> From this point on, I think the easiest solution would be an option to export the current puzzle state to the clipboard or to a file.
That sounds like a lot of work (now and with future maintenance) for very little gain. Anyone can get the sources and make a debug build of the game if they feel they need it for architecture, but this is the first time I've heard anyone coming close to needing this for gameplay. If there is some specific information you're missing do mention it (beyond what we're currently discussing).

>What exactly is stored?
I don't really know, someone else who knows citizen rules better can explain, or alternatively here is their source code.

> There is (was?) an option to show (global) variables which change.
Ctrl+F7, which works during playtesting or when playing a regular hold that you currently have permissions to edit

> The only one I'd argue about is the Halph target and path. That shouldn't be too hard.
I spent 20 minutes trying to figure out how to say it nicely and I can't so I'll be blunt - that comment rubs me the wrong way. The source code is on github and we welcome any and all help here, but among hundreds of requests and bugfixes to be done, what matters more is the value-cost ratio. And in my opinion this has very low value and enough cost to not want to implement it.

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Nuntar
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skell wrote: I disagree, I think those are vastly different. First would be how often they come up. Second would be that seeing the path would not be that useful anyway - they try to take the shortest path to the target, the rest would be a mess of things changing whenever they have to recalculate their path (which happens anytime something blocks their last cached path). Sure, there is value in seeing roughly what the path they take, but the almost-random fluctuations are impossible to predict, so your only option is to try things randomly until they fall into place, maybe.

The only benefit would be to immediately seeing roughly which path is the shortest which, while has a slightly annoying workaround - UU and waiting for a bit, which works for most cases.

Some puzzles require getting Halph to calculate a path, then interrupting it at a precise moment so that he recalculates a new path at a particular time. For these, it is a great help to be able to see exactly what his current path is.

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skell
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> Some puzzles require getting Halph to calculate a path, then interrupting it at a precise moment so that he recalculates a new path at a particular time. For these, it is a great help to be able to see exactly what his current path is.

That sounds scary, but with these is it really the case that you need to interrupt his path in the open space and make him sway his path by a tile or two, or need to block a 1-tile-wide corridor he's planning to use, which causes him to take a completely different path? Because while I agree seeing the path would be useful, it's still a pretty niche function.

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bbb
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I was referring to arguing that it would be very helpful. Not arguing that you have to do it if you don't want to.

The issue came up following a level of Entry Point. Yes. Those rooms are scary. The really critical issue is not the path itself, but to know if Halph has a goal.

And as Nuntar said, seeing the path would be helpful for interrupting it, more than for predicting it.

Nuntar
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skell wrote: That sounds scary, but with these is it really the case that you need to interrupt his path in the open space and make him sway his path by a tile or two, or need to block a 1-tile-wide corridor he's planning to use, which causes him to take a completely different path? Because while I agree seeing the path would be useful, it's still a pretty niche function.

Interrupting Halph's path does not make him sway it by a tile or two; it makes him recalculate from scratch. In particular, if a door is opened by two orbs, A and B, and Halph is closer to A but is blocked off from it, he will of course go to B. If something then unblocks A, Halph will ignore it and continue on his determined path -- unless that path is interrupted.

(This doesn't absolutely require two different orbs; similar effects can happen with multiples paths to the same orb.)

This can be scary, but it can also be used to make excellent puzzles that are really clear and don't feel fiddly or awkward at all, provided the underlying mechanic has been understood -- see Floating Friendship Facility for lots of examples.

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			case M_HALPH: case M_HALPH2:
			{
				static const SURFACECOLOR Orange = {255, 165, 0};
				//Show Halph's stored path
				const CHalph *pHalph = DYN_CAST(const CHalph*, const CMonster*, pMonster);
				for (UINT wPathIndex=0; wPathIndex<pHalph->GetStoredPath().GetSize(); ++wPathIndex)
				{
				  UINT wX,wY;
				  pHalph->GetStoredPath().GetAt(wPathIndex,wX,wY);
				  ASSERT(this->pRoom->IsValidColRow(wX, wY));
				  AddShadeEffect(wX, wY, Orange);
				}
				bRemoveHighlightNextTurn = false;
			}
			break;

This should be added to the CRoomWidget::HighlightSelectedTile function.

This colors Halph's path orange when he is going to open a door, and when he is returning home. It does not color his path when he is following Beethro, since it is apparently not stored.

In addition to this:

(a) Halph.h should be included in this file.

(b)

virtual CCoordStack GetStoredPath() const {return this->pathToDest;}

Should be added to CHalph to make the protected pathToDest available.

You should consider just making this field in CMonster public, since showing a stored path is always useful. (Then there would also be no reason to cast the CMonster to a CHalph.)

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[Last edited by bbb at 11-25-2020 12:14 PM]

mrimer
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Thanks, bbb and hyperme, for this PR.

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Dragon Fogel
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So I'm watching Alex's developer commentary for Rival Startup, and he's more than once commented that he doesn't like seep fading in and out, in part because it makes it harder to notice where they are.

Maybe there could be a puzzle mode option to have them always visible?