Why do people prefer ascii?

[James Bulgin]

Now that the survey is more or less complete, it's quite clear that most of you
out there prefer to play your roguelikes in ascii. I was quite honestly very
surprised by this result. I was origionally asking to see if I should bother
putting an optional ascii mode in my graphic roguelike if anybody would
actually use it. Yet it turns out that most of you would rather that than a
graphical mode at all. And this raises the question of why.

I know that some of you gave reasons for this when you responded to the survey,
however I'd like to ask the question in a little more detail. Nowadays, I
seriously doubt this is because any of you play on computers that cannot
support graphics at all due to technial limitations. Therefore, it is
reasonable to assume that it is because you enjoy it more for some reason. It
just seems to me that tilesets can be much more effective than ascii for many
purposes. I'll ignore asthetics for the moment, and focus purely on function.

First there is the issue of recognizibility. A graphical representation of an
object is often more immediatly informative than a symbol arbitrarily chosen to
represent it. A picture of a potion will be identifiable as a potion
immediatly, however it might take a little time to get used to ! being a
potion, or that + is a book. This probably isn't too big a concern, however, as
it doesn't take too long to get used to a symbol set, and there are plenty of
times where you might also need to look up additional details about an object
with tile graphics. Upon your first sighting of it, you might be able to tell
that a certain creature is some form of lizard, for example, but might need
more details than that before you know if it's more than you can handle or not.
(Such as the difference between a basilisk or a gecko, for example :) )

Next, and more importantly, there is the fact that one can (and usually does)
have many more different tiles than there are ascii characters, allowing you to
differentiate more things. Since one ascii character often refers to an entire
class of objects, you frequenty have to examine tiles to see what kind of
object it is. You might be able to tell at a glance that there is a wepon on
the floor, but it could potentially be an axe, mace, sword, bow, ect. While
most tilesets will use different tiles for these items so that you can tell
this information at a glace. Makes it quicker if you're only interested in
picking up ranged weapons, for example. Even worse, sometimes two vastly
different monsters might be represented with the same symbol (+color
combination, if implemented) This is probably a bad design decision more than
anything else, but it's something that would be more easily avoidable with a
larger symbol set.

Then there's the issue of easy memorization. Perhaps I have more trouble with
this than most people, but I often have a harder time remembering which ascii
symbol represents what rather than what tile represents what. Even if I had to
examine the tile at first to figure it out (as you almost certain had to do
with the ascii), I tend to remember it easily the next time I see it while I'm
quite liable to forget the ascii repeatedly. It's just that the tile (no matter
how poorly drawn) resembles the represented object much more than a letter, and
thus a connection is easier to draw, even if some prompting was needed the
first time around.

Also, you can more clearly represent additional information about an object or
map tile with a graphical system as opposed to ascii. With ascii, you can only
put exactally a single character per tile, but with tilebased graphics
(assuming a reasonably large tile size) one can also overlay other information,
such as whether a creature is poisoned, asleep, aware of you, ect. without
having to specifically examine the creature to find this out. Also, it's easy
to represent the fact that there might be items on the space a monster is
standing on, or stairs beneath that item (a fact that might sometimes be missed
without actually stepping on the tile) Again more information at your
fingertips without having to go out of your way to get it.

Another fact is that a purely text based display preclude the possibility of any
gui elements which could make the user interface often much easier to use.
(This is also usually the case with graphical ones as well since they were
built directally upon the origional ascii interface) It seems that with the
large number of commands in most roguelikes (many of which are rarely used and
easily forgotten), it would be much more user friendly if there was sort of
menu system for these. Instead of always looking up a command in a reference
list, then typing it in, one could simply click on an button for the command.
Not a huge thing, perhaps, but it still makes things run that little extra bit
smoother.

And of course, while I have ignored visual appeal until now, it is obviously a
factor in any game. I find graphics much nicer to look at than ascii, even if
they are very simple, and the game feels somehow more engaging. I suppose this
is a matter of opinion, though, and I have hear people say that they find ascii
somehow more emmersive. I'm curious, do you (especially those who hold this
view) play many other graphical games? Is it just that most of the available
tilesets for roguelikes are rather simplistic?

Well, this has certainly been a LONG post. I just sat down to write a quick
question and came up with all of this. There's probably more points that I ment
to mention, but I think that's quite enough for now. I look forward to reading
people's responses.

[Kostatus]

Post by James Bulgin
Now that the survey is more or less complete, it's quite clear that most
of you out there prefer to play your roguelikes in ascii. I was quite
honestly very surprised by this result. I was origionally asking to see
if I should bother putting an optional ascii mode in my graphic
roguelike if anybody would actually use it. Yet it turns out that most
of you would rather that than a graphical mode at all. And this raises
the question of why.

[snip]

Post by James Bulgin
And of course, while I have ignored visual appeal until now, it is
obviously a factor in any game. I find graphics much nicer to look at
than ascii, even if they are very simple, and the game feels somehow
more engaging. I suppose this is a matter of opinion, though, and I have
hear people say that they find ascii somehow more emmersive. I'm
curious, do you (especially those who hold this view) play many other
graphical games? Is it just that most of the available tilesets for
roguelikes are rather simplistic?

I prefer graphical tiles when they look like graphics, when I can tell the
difference between each pictures and I don't have to squint my eqes to make
out what's going on - which seems to be extremely rare in roguelikes (no
need to squint in mine, YAY). So if good graphics are available, I'll use
them. Otherwise I'm already used to ASCII so I don't mind them, but most
people are put off from roguelikes _because_ of ASCII (speaking from
experience) - they seem to either think that the games are primitive
because they see primitive early 1980s graphics.

Even if I somehow manage to convince someone to give rogueliks a real go
(trying to ignore the quality of the graphics after that), they come
whining back to me because (quote) "other roguelikes are a mess" and
(quote) "how can anyone even play a game with such hideous ASCII graphics
or those hideous tiles?!". This is sad, because it has nothing to do with
roguelike gameplay - they enjoy playing around with my project (which is
still in its early stages), even asking me to hurry up and finish.

From what I know, I'm assuming that that's what puts people off from
roguelikes. So if you're planning to make a roguelike at least have an
option for graphics.

Post by James Bulgin
Well, this has certainly been a LONG post. I just sat down to write a
quick question and came up with all of this. There's probably more
points that I ment to mention, but I think that's quite enough for now.
I look forward to reading people's responses.

[ABCGi]

Post by James Bulgin
Now that the survey is more or less complete, it's quite clear that most of you
out there prefer to play your roguelikes in ascii. I was quite honestly very
surprised by this result. I was origionally asking to see if I should bother
putting an optional ascii mode in my graphic roguelike if anybody would
actually use it. Yet it turns out that most of you would rather that than a
graphical mode at all. And this raises the question of why.

You may be interested in Thomas Biskup's number 1 determining factor of
a RogueLike;

http://www.adom.de/adom/roguelike.php3
"1. There are two major differences to roguelike games though: most
roguelike games do not use any graphics but rather rely on the ASCII
character set to display their surroundings.
While this might sound horrible to you, you will be surprised how
quickly you start to enjoy this "primitive" type of display. Your
imagination quickly will take over and you'll no longer miss those ugly
hand-drawn graphical tiles that do not resemble your picture of a dragon
at all. But in your imagination, that blue D will soon become the most
horrible and frightening ice wyrm you can imagine. Try it out. You won't
be disappointed.
A side effect of this "graphical style" is that you won't need to
download much. Roguelike games are pretty small because most of their
code is concerned with a very intense sort of gameplay and not some ugly
graphics quickly becoming out of date. In that respect many roguelike
games are far superior to commercial roleplaying games (did I forget to
mention that? Most roguelike games are available for free!)"

However, as I have said before, if you only intend on your graphics
being tiles (with no special cases) then you would be much faster
developing your game is ASCII and writing a nice modular separate tile
overlay (see the Nethack code). You may also find that your focus is
more appropriately targeted on gameplay in the early stages, which is a
major area in which RL's compete and often trounce commercial games.

You would then meet the needs of 94% [1] of your target audience and
also not be slowed by the development of graphics which you could work
on (or plug in tile sets) at any time during development. Using H-World
currently I am labouring on a lot of graphical stuff, and apparently
only targeting 30% of the market! :(

[1]
*Prefer ascii: 21 (64%)
*Prefer tiles: 10 (30%)

But it's kinda fun playing with graphics (in a frustrating kind of
way!), so if that is the reason you have a hard-on for graphics, admit
that to yourself and get on with it! Most ppl write the RL they have
always wanted themselves anyway.

I smell procrastination (and I'm speaking from experience, off the
pedestal, no insult intended).

[Hansjoerg Malthaner]

Post by ABCGi
You would then meet the needs of 94% [1] of your target audience and
also not be slowed by the development of graphics which you could work
on (or plug in tile sets) at any time during development. Using H-World
currently I am labouring on a lot of graphical stuff, and apparently
only targeting 30% of the market! :(
[1]
*Prefer ascii: 21 (64%)
*Prefer tiles: 10 (30%)

This survey was made among RL enthusiasts only.

I think there are more potential players out there. Quite a lot of
those are used to graphics, and like good graphics. Just think of the
Diablo player crowd, and all the(C)RPG players.

OTOH H-World is heavy on graphics because I like graphics. IMO it's
important to like your own projects, otherwise they'll die soon. I.e. I
usually enjoy creating the images, and only rarely consider it wasted
time. Thus part of the fun is doing the images, and that's important :)
OTOH I sometimes wish I could speed up things, but that means mostly to
find more efficient ways to create high quality graphics (same for coding).

I have got a set of rendered letters from Iso-Angband that you can use,
if you don't want the graphics :)

c.u.
Hajo

[Bateau]

_.--""--._ On
." ". Mon, 10 May 2004 05:08:20 +0000 (UTC)
| . ` ` | in
\( )/ rec.games.roguelike.development,
\)__. _._(/ James Bulgin
// >..< \\ spoke
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|l `--'--'--' |l of
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Post by James Bulgin
Now that the survey is more or less complete, it's quite clear that most of you
out there prefer to play your roguelikes in ascii. I was quite honestly very
surprised by this result. I was origionally asking to see if I should bother
putting an optional ascii mode in my graphic roguelike if anybody would
actually use it. Yet it turns out that most of you would rather that than a
graphical mode at all. And this raises the question of why.

I don't take part in surveys but I think most people like ascii because
when developers use tiles they always fuck it up so it's hard to tell
what's what and it slows their game down to a crawl.
--
.-'`-.
/ | | \
/ | | \
|___|_|__ |
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| `--' |
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.-' \ / | |`-.
.-' `. /| | \
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|_____ | | L
.-' ___ `-. F F | | ||`-.___
.'.-' | `-. `. J J / | || _.>
/ /| | |`. \ | | |/ | ||_.-'
/ / | | | `. `. F F | |==============================
J / | | | \ L J J | | `:::::::. `:::::::.
FJ | | | |L J/ / | \ :::::::. :::::::\
J |() | () | () | () | J L/ | | ::::::: :::::::L
| F | .-'_ \ | | LJ | / L :::::::: :::::::J
| L | / \\ | | | L | | :::::::: ::::::::L
| L || ):|| | | | /| L :::::::: ::::::::|
J | ||:._.'::|| | | |----' | | :::::::: ::::::::| .---.
J | |J:::::::|| | | | _/\ | :::::::: ::::::::| /(@ o`.
LJ | \:::::/ | | | |---'\ | | :::::::: ::::::::| | /^^^
J L | `-:-' | | | F | \ | J :::::::: ::::::::| \ . \vvv
LJ()| () | () | () | F F | \ \--._L :::::::: ::::::::| \ `--'
J \ | | | | J J \ | | :::::::: ::::::::| \ `.
\ \| | | | / / | | | :::::::: ::::::::| L \
\ \ | | |/ /| | | .-'| :::::::: ::::::::| | \
`.`. | | .'.' | | |/ /`L :::::::: ::::::::| | L
| `.`-.____|.-'.-' | | | <`. \ :::::::: ::::::::| | |
| | `-.______.-' | \| |_`::\ `. :::::::: ::::::::| F |
| J\ | | | | /: \::. \:::::::: ::::::::F / |
| L\|--| | _.--|:: `::\ `.:::::: .:::::::J / F
J J |\\|-.____ |__.-' |: \::. \:::: ::::::::F .' J
L \| >|| `--' J |' .`::\ `.:' .::::::::/ .' F
J |//JJ | L |---. .--\::. \---. .---. <---< J
L |< |J |\=/| ( _ \=/ _ `::\ `. \=/ _ \=/ _ \ /
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\ |--|J |//\\ / //\ //`::\ `./\ //\ / .'
\| |L ` )/ )` `' '|`---// `---// `\::. \ `---// `---' .'
VK________| L_\ ' /___/ ' | |___//______//_____`::\ |___//_________.'_________
F F J`` -'| | | | | \:_|
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`-.-' K I N G O F T H E M O N S T E R S

[Falk W.]

Post by James Bulgin
Another fact is that a purely text based display preclude the possibility of any
gui elements which could make the user interface often much easier to use.
(This is also usually the case with graphical ones as well since they were
built directally upon the origional ascii interface) It seems that with the
large number of commands in most roguelikes (many of which are rarely used and
easily forgotten), it would be much more user friendly if there was sort of
menu system for these. Instead of always looking up a command in a reference
list, then typing it in, one could simply click on an button for the command.
Not a huge thing, perhaps, but it still makes things run that little extra bit
smoother.

I never have problems with forgetting keys, but I sure would have a
problem with some annoying menu (like you can use in the nethack port
for windows). When I play a roguelike, my hands are on the keyboard. Why
would I want to grab the mouse, navigate through a menu, just to finally
click on the wanted option, if I could do the same thing just with the
press of a key (or two)? And if I really did forget a key, pressing '?'
and look through a short list of commands is far less work to do than
moving my hand over to the mouse to search through a menu. Well, unless
you have such help system like angband. ;)

[James Bulgin]

Post by Falk W.
I never have problems with forgetting keys, but I sure would have a
problem with some annoying menu (like you can use in the nethack port
for windows). When I play a roguelike, my hands are on the keyboard. Why
would I want to grab the mouse, navigate through a menu, just to finally
click on the wanted option, if I could do the same thing just with the
press of a key (or two)? And if I really did forget a key, pressing '?'
and look through a short list of commands is far less work to do than
moving my hand over to the mouse to search through a menu. Well, unless
you have such help system like angband. ;)

I guess this is a matter of personal taste. However, would it really be a bad
thing to incorperate a clean and effective gui interface into a roguelike while
still allowing all things to potentially be done through the keyboard as well?
I just think that while keyboard shortcuts are quicker and easier if there are
a few commonly used ones, they tend to become more cumbersome the more commands
you have to learn and remember. Also, certain commands might be combined into a
single dialog. For example, many roguelikes have a number of different commands
that effectively reduce to looking at a particular aspect of the character's
status. Perhaps something like this could be unified into a single command
which opened something akin to a tabbed dialog, with a tab for each section?

I just feel that roguelike interface design is the way it is primarily because
it's the way it always was. Pre-gui programs almost always operated with an
inordinately long list of keyboard shortcuts that you had to memorize as there
were no other options. Just compare an old version of word perfect (or another
word processor of your choice) to a new one. The modern version will still
likely have keyboard shortcuts available for most actions, but it doesn't force
you to learn them all at once, and has a more user-friendly interface in
general

[Ray Dillinger]

Post by James Bulgin
I just feel that roguelike interface design is the way it is primarily because
it's the way it always was. Pre-gui programs almost always operated with an
inordinately long list of keyboard shortcuts that you had to memorize as there
were no other options. Just compare an old version of word perfect (or another
word processor of your choice) to a new one. The modern version will still
likely have keyboard shortcuts available for most actions, but it doesn't force
you to learn them all at once, and has a more user-friendly interface in
general

There are two things to consider here. The first is ease of
learning. GUI systems are easier to learn. Picking commands
off menus allows menu exploration to find the commands, and
newbies can do it. "Menus" are a way to keep all that extra
information about what commands are available, out of your
face while you're trying to work with the information in the
main application.

The second issue, which is frequently at odds with the first,
is ease of USE. An expert user, who knows exactly what he
wants to do, must not be forced to navigate menus -- he doesn't
need the "what can I do?" information that menus are there to
reveal, he already knows. He especially doesn't mice to force
him to take his eyes off the game or menus to obscure his
view of the dungeon with a bunch of information about commands
he's *not* using at the moment. Keyboards allow direct entry
of commands at a rate much faster, and with less cognitive
load, than reading and picking them off menus. And they
don't interrupt flow of thought by changing the appearance
or obscuring parts of the scene or requiring someone to take
eyes off the screen to find the mouse. So ease of USE is
best achieved by direct entry of commands from the keyboard.

Now, which category does the Roguelike player fall into? Hint:
The games are hard. People can (and do) play them for *YEARS*
before logging their first win. By the time your player sees
the middle level of the game s/he has probably had hundreds at
least, and possibly thousands, of hours using the interface.
If s/he is still picking commands off menus at that point,
it's hard to imagine his/her learning curve. At that point the
only "menus" s/he ought to be seeing are lists that answer
specific questions like "what monsters are in the room" or
"what is in inventory now" or the like - information that
changes during the game.

You can make a game newbie-friendlier, I think, by adding
command menus. You can make it easier to *start* playing.
But the newbie who uses the command menus will expend more
total work learning the game -- s/he must first learn the
command menus, and then learn the keyboard commands for
ease of use. A player who starts with keyboard commands
learns the method first that, in the long run, has greater
ease of use. Either way, your menus will not be used at
all (unless you force it by having some commands available
only through menus) after the first few days of play.

Bear

[ABCGi]

Post by Ray Dillinger
There are two things to consider here. The first is ease of
learning. GUI systems are easier to learn. Picking commands
off menus allows menu exploration to find the commands, and
newbies can do it. "Menus" are a way to keep all that extra
information about what commands are available, out of your
face while you're trying to work with the information in the
main application.
The second issue, which is frequently at odds with the first,
is ease of USE. An expert user, who knows exactly what he
wants to do, must not be forced to navigate menus -- he doesn't
need the "what can I do?" information that menus are there to
reveal, he already knows. He especially doesn't mice to force
him to take his eyes off the game or menus to obscure his
view of the dungeon with a bunch of information about commands
he's *not* using at the moment. Keyboards allow direct entry
of commands at a rate much faster, and with less cognitive
load, than reading and picking them off menus. And they
don't interrupt flow of thought by changing the appearance
or obscuring parts of the scene or requiring someone to take
eyes off the screen to find the mouse. So ease of USE is
best achieved by direct entry of commands from the keyboard.
The games are hard. People can (and do) play them for *YEARS*
before logging their first win. By the time your player sees
the middle level of the game s/he has probably had hundreds at
least, and possibly thousands, of hours using the interface.
If s/he is still picking commands off menus at that point,
it's hard to imagine his/her learning curve. At that point the
only "menus" s/he ought to be seeing are lists that answer
specific questions like "what monsters are in the room" or
"what is in inventory now" or the like - information that
changes during the game.
You can make a game newbie-friendlier, I think, by adding
command menus. You can make it easier to *start* playing.
But the newbie who uses the command menus will expend more
total work learning the game -- s/he must first learn the
command menus, and then learn the keyboard commands for
ease of use. A player who starts with keyboard commands
learns the method first that, in the long run, has greater
ease of use. Either way, your menus will not be used at
all (unless you force it by having some commands available
only through menus) after the first few days of play.

Totally agree with you Bear, very good points, except maybe for the
implications of the last part. It is easier for a newbie to learn
shortcuts written next to menu commands than to lookup a text file all
the time (at least make this file as accessible as possible, not as a
help sub topic). This way the newbie makes the transition to keyboard
shortcuts at their pace, which will be slower than a keyboard only
interface, but at least we didn't force them and they can't complain
because they have the best of both worlds. Plus we remove a barrier to
entry which turns off a few players.

A good test for any interface is to disconnect the mouse and ask can the
advanced user do everything with the keyboard? Does it suck? Is it the
quickest with the least keystrokes you can design? Every expert user of
Windows products always uses the keyboard, when they can, the mouse is
far too slow for them. The keyboard design that is an afterthought of
the gui is doomed...

[Gerry Quinn]

Post by ABCGi
quickest with the least keystrokes you can design? Every expert user of
Windows products always uses the keyboard, when they can, the mouse is
far too slow for them.

That last statement is nonsense, in my opinion. I use the mouse
extensively with MS Office software, development tools, and other
Windows software.

While I don't think it slows me down in any way compared to some
obsolete keyboard methods, even if it did I have to ask: why would a
slight optimisation of the speed of entering data be important? I
rarely do tasks so stupid and mindless that typing speed is
all-important.

- Gerry Quinn

[ABCGi]

Post by Gerry Quinn

Post by ABCGi
quickest with the least keystrokes you can design? Every expert user of
Windows products always uses the keyboard, when they can, the mouse is
far too slow for them.

That last statement is nonsense, in my opinion. I use the mouse
extensively with MS Office software, development tools, and other
Windows software.

Oh ok, I might of generalised a bit here - I wasn't thinking of MS
products at the time I posted this, but I realise my statement was too
broad.

When we design business products for Windows to be used in an office,
and I go and analysis the people in the office that have worked there
for some time: they all do the functions on the system via keyboard, and
complain about an interface that forces them to use the mouse because it
slows them down. This is not just for data entry (as I initially
thought), the more advanced the user, the more they want to use the
keyboard only across as much as the system as possible.

Post by Gerry Quinn
While I don't think it slows me down in any way compared to some
obsolete keyboard methods, even if it did I have to ask: why would a
slight optimisation of the speed of entering data be important? I
rarely do tasks so stupid and mindless that typing speed is
all-important.

Sure, I guess games are not as mission critical as business apps. I'm
guessing many advanced RL users will prefer not to be forced to use the
mouse however. I find the choice of some keyboard short cuts in Windows
annoying though, but since many accept text they can't use as many 1
stroke short cuts as RL's can.

[Ray Dillinger]

Post by James Bulgin
Now that the survey is more or less complete, it's quite clear that most of you
out there prefer to play your roguelikes in ascii. I was quite honestly very
surprised by this result. I was origionally asking to see if I should bother
putting an optional ascii mode in my graphic roguelike if anybody would
actually use it. Yet it turns out that most of you would rather that than a
graphical mode at all. And this raises the question of why.

When I find graphics in a roguelike, my first thought is that the
effort went to the pictures instead of the gameplay -- it's a
warning sign. Roguelikes are no fun unless truly obsessive attention
has been paid to the gameplay. Pictures say that the author wasn't
completely obsessed with gameplay. Okay, that's prejudicial, I
know. It's forming an opinion before I try the game. But it's
always there in my head, and at least according to my (perhaps
biased) perceptions, it's frequently correct.

When someone uses a standard terminal-control library like curses,
frequently the code can move across to a different machine (or even
a different operating system) with just a recompile. Since one of
my boxes uses a 64-bit sun CPU, that makes me happy. When you
start tying into graphics, and especially when you start tying into
a windowing system, moving a game over to any machine that isn't
just like the one where it got developed becomes a big pain in
the butt -- frequently so daunting a piece of work that no one
ever does it.

It's very easy for me to tell ascii characters apart. It's very
easy for me to distinguish the colors and backgrounds on a
standard curses display. Although the same letter may be used
many times, most authors are very careful to avoid using the
same letter/color pair more than once. With about 100 printable
characters in ascii and 16 colors, there is more than enough
for everything to get its own combination in most games. In
games where the same character/color pair is used more than
once, usually the game authors are very careful to have that
happen only for substantially similar things so that the
consequences of getting them momentarily confuzzled are minimal.

Also, colored letters give us a fairly obvious "index" -- they are
members of a crisp, ordered, set of discrete entities, and we can
put them in order in our notes, easily look them up in help files,
refer to them directly in a keyboard interface (by just typing them),
ask for help about them in text-only usenet posts, and otherwise
treat them as an orderly representation. It's far easier to
formulate keyboard UI for asking "what's the 'p'?" or even "what
are all the 'p's on this screen?" than to formulate UI for asking,
"that little robed figure with the white robe and green trim,
who's blond... yeah, him. What's he?" So the letters give us
a way to talk about/think about/query/organize our knowledge
about the stuff in the dungeon; tiles don't.

While there is also an obvious way to designate a particular tile
(using the mouse), Roguelikes are games that get played in a very
intense fashion; moving a hand to the mouse requires the player
to take their eyes off the screen, and disrupts the player's flow
of thought. This may seem trivial, but a good Roguelike is nothing
short of hypnotic; using the mouse is an interruption of flow state.
As such it jangles my nerves and distracts me, and it takes a while
to get worked back into the game. So I want to be thinking in terms
of symbols I don't have to leave the keyboard to designate.

This is also important because, I think YAWPing is an important
and satisfying part of the culture. If your screen is characters,
you can cut-and-paste directly from your win into your YAWP. No
hassles about webspace, URL's, etc. No people irritated at you
and bringing down your fun for a "binary" post in a "text" group.
And what you post actually looks like what you played.

Finally, there's the point Biskup made. Your graphic tiles, no
matter how cool, are no match for the player's imagination. If
you *show* him what it looks like, he's not allowed to *imagine*
what it looks like, and he would probably have liked his
imagination better. So you immediately lose a chance to draw
him into the game as cocreator of the world he's in.

Bear

[Hansjoerg Malthaner]

Post by Ray Dillinger
Finally, there's the point Biskup made. Your graphic tiles, no
matter how cool, are no match for the player's imagination. If
you *show* him what it looks like, he's not allowed to *imagine*
what it looks like, and he would probably have liked his
imagination better. So you immediately lose a chance to draw
him into the game as cocreator of the world he's in.

This is true for some people but not all people.

See the old debate about comics and books, it's very similar. Still
there are lots of comics (premade images) sold, and lots of books
(images from your own imagination).

There are different people and there will be media accomplishing the
needs of the different people.

IMO the number of successful games using graphics shows, that there are
enough people who either like or at least don't mind premade images.

Finally, nowadays, there are very few storytellers around, but movie
theatres attract many people.

Post by Ray Dillinger
Bear

c.u.
Hajo

[Mylon]

Post by Hansjoerg Malthaner

Post by Ray Dillinger
Finally, there's the point Biskup made. Your graphic tiles, no
matter how cool, are no match for the player's imagination. If
you *show* him what it looks like, he's not allowed to *imagine*
what it looks like, and he would probably have liked his
imagination better. So you immediately lose a chance to draw
him into the game as cocreator of the world he's in.

This is true for some people but not all people.
See the old debate about comics and books, it's very similar. Still
there are lots of comics (premade images) sold, and lots of books
(images from your own imagination).

I buy manga because that's pretty much the only form the storylines I'm
after are written in. If there are anime novels, I certainly haven't seen
any translated. I do enjoy fanfiction, however.

So not all comic sales show a preference towards pre-made images. Well,
besides that anime is a cutesy, easygoing style anyway, at least.

Aside from people that prefer tiles, I'm not sure if there is any advantage
to using them. Ascii has plenty of options available (52 possible "classes"
of monsters, using letters alone), allows imagination, is quicker to
impliment, is more portable, often is more clear than many tiles, is
generally easy to read, and more.

[Glen Wheeler]

Post by Mylon

Post by Hansjoerg Malthaner
This is true for some people but not all people.
See the old debate about comics and books, it's very similar. Still
there are lots of comics (premade images) sold, and lots of books
(images from your own imagination).

I buy manga because that's pretty much the only form the storylines I'm
after are written in. If there are anime novels, I certainly haven't seen
any translated. I do enjoy fanfiction, however.
So not all comic sales show a preference towards pre-made images. Well,
besides that anime is a cutesy, easygoing style anyway, at least.
Aside from people that prefer tiles, I'm not sure if there is any advantage
to using them. Ascii has plenty of options available (52 possible "classes"
of monsters, using letters alone), allows imagination, is quicker to
impliment, is more portable, often is more clear than many tiles, is
generally easy to read, and more.

I wasn't going to get involved, but must perk up a little. I hear plenty
of argumentation *for* ascii, and the main point against graphical tiles is
their illegibility. Which is actually a ridiculous point. If I made an
ascii tileset will every monster as an 'm', then this would be equivalent.
Bad design. Not a problem inherent to tiles.

There are many points for graphical tiles which (to my frustration) I
haven't seen people arguing for ascii note. The argument is almost
cookie-cutter in it's form; ascii is good for x1,x2,...,xn, tiles are bad
for y1,y2,...,yn. Usually the latter consists only of the above.

Where is the objectivity? Tiles have many obvious advantages over ascii.
Ascii has advantages over tiles. But answer me this; is not a set of
graphical tiles a superset of ascii? Given the prerequisite of equal skill
in design (this includes choice of colour and character for ascii, and
choice/composition of picture in graphical tiles) I am finding it hard to
agree with the pro-ascii argument. Not in theory.

Just a little frustrated. Nothing personal. Ascii is good. Tiles are,
in theory, better. Poor execution will wreck anything. My opinion...

[ABCGi]

Post by Glen Wheeler
I wasn't going to get involved, but must perk up a little. I hear plenty
of argumentation *for* ascii, and the main point against graphical tiles is
their illegibility. Which is actually a ridiculous point. If I made an
ascii tileset will every monster as an 'm', then this would be equivalent.
Bad design. Not a problem inherent to tiles.
There are many points for graphical tiles which (to my frustration) I
haven't seen people arguing for ascii note. The argument is almost
cookie-cutter in it's form; ascii is good for x1,x2,...,xn, tiles are bad
for y1,y2,...,yn. Usually the latter consists only of the above.
Where is the objectivity? Tiles have many obvious advantages over ascii.
Ascii has advantages over tiles. But answer me this; is not a set of
graphical tiles a superset of ascii? Given the prerequisite of equal skill
in design (this includes choice of colour and character for ascii, and
choice/composition of picture in graphical tiles) I am finding it hard to
agree with the pro-ascii argument. Not in theory.
Just a little frustrated. Nothing personal. Ascii is good. Tiles are,
in theory, better. Poor execution will wreck anything. My opinion...

I played Hajo's (unfinished) Isoband recently. A good compromise until
it crashed on me and I had to go back to an old save :(;

http://www.simugraph.com/simutrans/iso_angband/index.html

Its graphical, but the monsters are almost all graphical ASCII
characters that look prettier than regular ASCII characters - and better
than trying to make a small tile look like a complex monster.

[David Damerell]

Post by Glen Wheeler
I wasn't going to get involved, but must perk up a little. I hear plenty
of argumentation *for* ascii, and the main point against graphical tiles is
their illegibility. Which is actually a ridiculous point. If I made an
ascii tileset will every monster as an 'm', then this would be equivalent.
Bad design. Not a problem inherent to tiles.

I'm not sure it isn't. For starters, a good tileset demands greater skill;
ASCII comes with a set of highly distinct characters for free. Secondly,
the need for tiles to look like something constrains their
distinctiveness; NH-style @ (humans), h (dwarves and mindflayers), V
(vampires), L (liches), o (orcs), G (gnomes), H (giants), etc. must all
look sort of humanoid in a tile system.

Post by Glen Wheeler
Ascii has advantages over tiles. But answer me this; is not a set of
graphical tiles a superset of ascii?

I think "tiles" implies "representational" in this debate; manifestly the
set of tiles which _are_ ASCII characters is not the one normally referred
to.

[That said, there exists a set of tiles for NH which consists of the
various ASCII characters with multiple colours and trimmings - the tiger
is a stripy f, the mumak is a q with tusks, etc. Nifty.]

[Mylon]

Post by Glen Wheeler
I wasn't going to get involved, but must perk up a little. I hear plenty
of argumentation *for* ascii, and the main point against graphical tiles is
their illegibility. Which is actually a ridiculous point. If I made an
ascii tileset will every monster as an 'm', then this would be equivalent.
Bad design. Not a problem inherent to tiles.
There are many points for graphical tiles which (to my frustration) I
haven't seen people arguing for ascii note. The argument is almost
cookie-cutter in it's form; ascii is good for x1,x2,...,xn, tiles are bad
for y1,y2,...,yn. Usually the latter consists only of the above.
Where is the objectivity? Tiles have many obvious advantages over ascii.
Ascii has advantages over tiles. But answer me this; is not a set of
graphical tiles a superset of ascii? Given the prerequisite of equal skill
in design (this includes choice of colour and character for ascii, and
choice/composition of picture in graphical tiles) I am finding it hard to
agree with the pro-ascii argument. Not in theory.
Just a little frustrated. Nothing personal. Ascii is good. Tiles are,
in theory, better. Poor execution will wreck anything. My opinion...

I will admit, tiles can be better, and I found Diablo to be a great, fun to
play game, and I don't think it could have had anywhere near the same feel
with only ASCII. However, look at the team that worked only on graphics.
Team! Most RL games are made by a single person. Trying to have one person
make their own tiles generally means the tiles come out cruddy or something
else in the game hasn't had enough time spent on it.

Yes, tiles are in theory better, but ASCII is much easier to do and it only
takes half of a brain to _not_ fall into the "everything is represented by
an m" kind of design you mentioned above.

As for small tiles, I'd dare say Age of Wonders had adequate tiles to
represent units, but you still have the problem in that a team probably did
their graphics.

[Hansjoerg Malthaner]

Post by Mylon
Aside from people that prefer tiles, I'm not sure if there is any advantage
to using them. Ascii has plenty of options available (52 possible "classes"
of monsters, using letters alone), allows imagination, is quicker to
impliment, is more portable, often is more clear than many tiles, is
generally easy to read, and more.

In my early Angband days, I had serious trouble figuring out what the
moster descriptions wanted to tell me. My englisch skills had been bad,
also was my dictionary.

I.e. White icky thing:
"It is a smallish, slimy, icky creature."

(I understood white, small, slimy. Icky wasn't in my dictionary.)

First, when it touched me, I thought it'd be a nice, friendly creature
welcoming me. Unless I saw that each touch reduced one hit point I was
almost dead! I didn't intent to kill nice creatures. The description
doesn't say it is harmful. And I still think they ought to be friendly.

I'm not sure if tiles really could change that, but I think that a well
made image tells more about the creature, and it tells it faster than
letters like a small, white 'i' and a description like the one above!

I agree that better descriptions can help a lot. I also agree that 8x8
or 16x16 pixel tiles cannot show a lot of detail, and therefore letters
might be better. The situation changes of we talk about 32x32 or bigger
tiles.

<rant>
I guess I don't play Angband anymore because my imagination was so far
off from that what the creators wanted to create. I admit some of the
effects that I know from source diving scare me to death and I'm happy
none of my PCs got far enough to have to suffer from such evilness.
</rant>

c.u.
Hajo

[ABCGi]

Post by Hansjoerg Malthaner
In my early Angband days, I had serious trouble figuring out what the
moster descriptions wanted to tell me. My englisch skills had been bad,
also was my dictionary.
"It is a smallish, slimy, icky creature."
(I understood white, small, slimy. Icky wasn't in my dictionary.)
First, when it touched me, I thought it'd be a nice, friendly creature
welcoming me. Unless I saw that each touch reduced one hit point I was
almost dead! I didn't intent to kill nice creatures. The description
doesn't say it is harmful. And I still think they ought to be friendly.

This is *very* funny!

hehe - "hello and welcome, I'm your local monster guide, where can I
show you in the dungeon today?"

[David Damerell]

ITYM e.g.

Post by Hansjoerg Malthaner
First, when it touched me, I thought it'd be a nice, friendly creature
welcoming me. Unless I saw that each touch reduced one hit point I was
almost dead! I didn't intent to kill nice creatures. The description
doesn't say it is harmful. And I still think they ought to be friendly.

Angband's documentation should make it explicit that there are no
friendlies.

[Hansjoerg Malthaner]

Post by David Damerell
ITYM e.g.

I don't know ITYM, but I assume you want to say I did something wrong
and e.g. is the right thing to write instead?

So far I thought I.e. = in example

When to use e.g. and when to use i.e. ?

c.u.
Hajo

[Arthur J. O'Dwyer]

Post by Hansjoerg Malthaner

Post by David Damerell
ITYM e.g.

I don't know ITYM, but I assume you want to say I did something wrong
and e.g. is the right thing to write instead?

Yup. "I think you mean..."

Post by Hansjoerg Malthaner
So far I thought I.e. = in example
When to use e.g. and when to use i.e. ?

This, on the other hand (OTOH :) is not English but Latin, which
means you should know it to communicate in just about any Romance
language, or English, or German, or whatever. "I.e." == "id est,"
"that is." "E.g." == "exempli gratia," "for example."

Boring generic examples, because it's late:

X, i.e., Y. (Y is the same as X.)
X, e.g., Y. (Y is an example of X, but there are other X too.)

-Arthur

[Hansjoerg Malthaner]

Post by Arthur J. O'Dwyer

Post by Hansjoerg Malthaner
When to use e.g. and when to use i.e. ?

This, on the other hand (OTOH :) is not English but Latin, which
means you should know it to communicate in just about any Romance
language, or English, or German, or whatever. "I.e." == "id est,"
"that is." "E.g." == "exempli gratia," "for example."

Thanks a lot :)

Post by Arthur J. O'Dwyer
-Arthur

c.u.
Hajo

[Manny Swedberg]

Post by James Bulgin
And of course, while I have ignored visual appeal until now, it is obviously a
factor in any game. I find graphics much nicer to look at than ascii, even if
they are very simple, and the game feels somehow more engaging. I suppose this
is a matter of opinion, though, and I have hear people say that they find ascii
somehow more emmersive. I'm curious, do you (especially those who hold this
view) play many other graphical games? Is it just that most of the available
tilesets for roguelikes are rather simplistic?

Simplistic can be fine. But ugly is not. Show me a pretty set of
roguelike tiles and I might consider using them.

One point in especial to consider: if you're designing graphics for a
dungeon, make the dungeon look pretty. Don't fall into the trap of
making everything gray and bleak. Falcon's Eye for Nethack is one of
the worst offenders here. Figure out a way to make the goddamn
dungeon sparkly and candy-colored!!! As always Old Man Murray says it
best:

http://www.oldmanmurray.com/longreviews/48.html

Finally, filtering out noise is an issue. Roguelike screen invariably
cover a lot of territory, and it can be difficult to separate
significant from non-significant information. An orc wizard should
stand out more than a patch of floor.

[Courtney Campbell]

Post by James Bulgin
First there is the issue of recognizibility. A graphical representation
of an object is often more immediatly informative than a symbol arbitrarily
chosen to represent it. A picture of a potion will be identifiable as a potion
immediatly, however it might take a little time to get used to ! being a
potion, or that + is a book. This probably isn't too big a concern,
however, as it doesn't take too long to get used to a symbol set, and there are
plenty of times where you might also need to look up additional details about an
object with tile graphics. Upon your first sighting of it, you might be able to
tell that a certain creature is some form of lizard, for example, but might
need more details than that before you know if it's more than you can handle
or not. (Such as the difference between a basilisk or a gecko, for example :) )

The symbols aren't arbitrarily assigned, or did you think it was a
coincidence that all molds are represented by a 'm'? or ants by an 'a'?
or zombies by a 'z'? How is this arbitrary?

This argument is diffused by the multi-windowed mode of play. You have
your roguelike screen, and then another screen for messages, and a third
for monster memory, another for inventory, and one last one that lists
all the monsters.

It's my preferred way to play. I don't every have to look at anything,
because there's a window that tells me what it is. When I hit or target
something it's description is right there below the main window. Using
an object from inventory - you can see your whole inventory, and no need
to push any keys to scan the last 20 odd lines of msg text.

There is no tile that communicates more information then the name and
description of the monster I just hit.

you could of course do the same with tiles. But the fact is, if a tile
is the same size as an ASCII character then it is hard to distinguish
them from each other. Whereas, it's easy to distinguish ASCII from
father away. Easier on the eyes. If you run larger tiles, then there's
no room for other information, and you can't see as large an area of the
board.

It is also worth noting that many rougelike games share ! for potions
and other similar ASCII characters - I don't remember them sharing many
tiles though. I don't play with tiles so I could be wrong.

Post by James Bulgin
Next, and more importantly, there is the fact that one can (and usually
does) have many more different tiles than there are ascii characters, allowing
you to differentiate more things.

Each monster you make, you have to do another tile. All I do is pick an
ASCII character and a color and I'm good to go. Using the alphabet and
16 colors I have over 800 characters available. How many games have 800
different tiles for monsters?

How many tile games have 800+ monsters?

(I am not saying more monsters makes a better game)

Post by James Bulgin
Since one ascii character often refers to an
entire class of objects, you frequenty have to examine tiles to see what kind of
object it is. You might be able to tell at a glance that there is a wepon
on the floor, but it could potentially be an axe, mace, sword, bow, ect.

Well, in *band (which I'm most familar with because that's what I write
a variant of) you _can_ tell the difference between /(Axe and mace),
|(Sword), }(bow, x-bow), etc.

Again you could make an items viewable window, or combine it with the
monster window, or use a different character to represent stacks.

Post by James Bulgin
While most tilesets will use different tiles for these items so that you can
tell this information at a glace. Makes it quicker if you're only interested
in picking up ranged weapons, for example.

IMHO, and I know people feel otherwise, It's much easier for me to parse
the screen for a '}', then somone's 32x32 idea of what a bow or any of
the other different pictures for other bows look like.

Post by James Bulgin
Even worse, sometimes two vastly
different monsters might be represented with the same symbol (+color
combination, if implemented) This is probably a bad design decision more
than anything else, but it's something that would be more easily avoidable
with a larger symbol set.

Yes, it's a shame we don't have an ASCII cross-platform standard higher
than the first 64 characters. (or is it 128 I forget).

What modern roguelike _doesn't_ implement color combination with ASCII?

Post by James Bulgin
Then there's the issue of easy memorization. Perhaps I have more trouble
with this than most people, but I often have a harder time remembering which
ascii symbol represents what rather than what tile represents what.

I don't know dude. This is pretty specious. I mean, come on, what's this
'-' represent? or wait, how about this '>'. or maybe this one '@'? You
already used '!' and '+'. It just doesn't seem that hard to me. *shrug*
How many times does it take to remember what it is? Oh, I might mention
it's a lot easier to remember when you have something like
@:The player
k:A chicken (x24)
k:Chicken Little
A:Alien pod

off to the side of the screen..

Post by James Bulgin
Even if I had to
examine the tile at first to figure it out (as you almost certain had to do
with the ascii), I tend to remember it easily the next time I see it
while I'm quite liable to forget the ascii repeatedly. It's just that the tile (no
matter how poorly drawn) resembles the represented object much more than a
letter, and thus a connection is easier to draw, even if some prompting was needed
the first time around.

Memory is unreliable. And I'm not talking about you remembering the
tiles or ASCII - I'm talking about your data sample. If you believe that
tiles are better, you will be more likely to forget or gloss over
instances of having to examine titles because you forgot what they
meant. Give me a double blind study of the number of examine tries using
tiles vs. ascii, and we can talk about this point.

Anything else will just be is too/is not till the cows come home.

Post by James Bulgin
Also, you can more clearly represent additional information about an
object or map tile with a graphical system as opposed to ascii. With ascii, you can
only put exactally a single character per tile, but with tilebased graphics
(assuming a reasonably large tile size) one can also overlay other
information, such as whether a creature is poisoned, asleep, aware of you, ect.
without having to specifically examine the creature to find this out.

This is true, if one is unwilling to create a key, or a viewable
characters window.

Post by James Bulgin
Also, it's
easy
to represent the fact that there might be items on the space a monster is
standing on, or stairs beneath that item (a fact that might sometimes be missed
without actually stepping on the tile) Again more information at your
fingertips without having to go out of your way to get it.

This is true, however then it becomes a question of wether this
additional information is worth the screen real estate you give up for
tiles that can communicate all these things clearly.

Post by James Bulgin
Another fact is that a purely text based display preclude the possibility
of any gui elements which could make the user interface often much easier to
use.

Um, anything that takes my fingers off their roguelike homerow _does_
_not_ make my UI easier to use. I don't see how ever making me take my
hands off the keys is something that could enhance my game experience in
any conceivable way. I mean, If you can tell me how it's going to make
my interface 'easier to use' let me know.

I suppose you could define 'easier to use' as 'a pain in the ass' you
could make that argument. :-)

Post by James Bulgin
large number of commands in most roguelikes (many of which are rarely
used and easily forgotten), it would be much more user friendly if there was sort
of menu system for these.

hengband has a nifty and _easily_ portable menu system. So I guess no
one else prints out a sheet with all the commands on it? In Hengband you
hit the enter key, and up pops a menu with everything you can do. Look,
ma, no mouse!

Post by James Bulgin
Instead of always looking up a command in a reference
list, then typing it in, one could simply click on an button for the
command. Not a huge thing, perhaps, but it still makes things run that little
extra bit smoother.

<enter><scan list><a><enter>

or

<Take hand off keyboard to grab mouse><move mouse to menu><Click
menu><find item in menu><select item><Put hand back on keyboard>

There is _no_ doubt that it's quicker to hit <enter><a><enter> Then to
take your hand off the keyboard. hands off the keyboard _bad_. _+*BAD*+_.

Post by James Bulgin
And of course, while I have ignored visual appeal until now, it is
obviously a factor in any game. I find graphics much nicer to look at than ascii,
even if they are very simple, and the game feels somehow more engaging. I suppose
this is a matter of opinion, though, and I have hear people say that they find
ascii somehow more emmersive. I'm curious, do you (especially those who hold
this view) play many other graphical games? Is it just that most of the
available tilesets for roguelikes are rather simplistic?

The most important factor, is that in the 127th hour of Disgaea, or my
72nd game of CIV II this year, or my millionth game of Heros III, or my
umpteenth game of Steamband I don't give a shit what the graphics look
like. I wouldn't care if they were colored squares. Dots. Whatever.
Little nifty animations? A time cost to active the power is all that
represents. If you removed every picture from those games and had blue
boxes with a letter or two to represent stuff, it would be just as fun.
The game takes place in my head.

I don't understand this at all really. I mean, I _know_ people like
graphics, I just can't for the life of me figure out why. I mean, I
really have played a lot of CIV. At this point, I don't really care at
all what the latest settler looks like, I'm just interested in finding
out as quickly as possible where it is.

As for graphics much nicer to look at than ASCII, well, I'd much rather
look at my books then tv. In fact, I don't even watch TV. I do however
read quite frequently. ASCII just seems good enough for all those books,
but then maybe I really do need a movie of Tolkien's middle earth,
because all that ASCII in the books just wasn't as nice to look at.

There have been studies that show engagement levels while reading versus
watching a film. I'll let you guess which was more 'engaging'.

It doesn't matter how nice your tiles are - I still won't give a damn
about them in my 5000ths game. I'd rather you spent the time making sure
the gameplay kicked ass. If you have an artist, I'd rather _he_ spend
time making the gameplay kick ass.

Post by James Bulgin
Well, this has certainly been a LONG post. I just sat down to write a
quick question and came up with all of this. There's probably more points that
I ment to mention, but I think that's quite enough for now. I look forward to
reading people's responses.

I generally try to get along with everyone and play nice, but not today.

This ASCII vs. Graphics thing is a holy war, and the fridge along with
the bathroom is over here on our side. God would be on this side too if
he weren't a total fiction of control freaks.

Look, you can find a shitload of games where someone thought that if
they had a good enough 3d engine, well then gameplay would magically
spring from their ass while they were implementing it. It didn't; so I
don't play those games.

You want to know why people like ASCII? No one wasted any time doing any
shit that doesn't matter during the course of a randomly generated
dungeon crawl.

Your list of things above, is a list full of stuff that ASCII can do in
your roguelike with a modicum of thought barring the possible exception
of conveying covered item state information. I don't know how easy this
would be to do in any case. (remember, we're talking about _tiles_ here,
not real time rendered graphics or that jazz).

Tiles are the sign of a bad roguelike.

This thread is entirely pointless. Everyone will shout back and forth
what they believe. Half of the people won't even read the posts, and
everyone will go away pissed off, convinced that they are right, cause
let me tell you, no one is likely to change their mind. Everyone thinks
what they think, and you just have to learn to adapt to people who lcak
the ability to think critically. It's surprisingly easy once you get the
hang of it.

It wasn't very nice of you to post a message that would lead to this
result, especially since you can just google groups it and be
entertained all the times it's happened in the past (as well as
answering your own question, but I guess you prefer to ask for help
without trying to answer the question for yourself)? :-)

me? I would have asked in irc. Less disruption than something like this
causes on usenet.

That's enough. I'm going to stop before I start to weaken my own
arguments.
-Campbell

[Hansjoerg Malthaner]

Post by Courtney Campbell
The symbols aren't arbitrarily assigned, or did you think it was a
coincidence that all molds are represented by a 'm'? or ants by an 'a'?
or zombies by a 'z'? How is this arbitrary?

Giants get a 'P' (not a 'g'), snakes a 'J' (not an 's'), demons a 'u'
(not a 'd') ... it isn't so straightforward as you want to tell :-(

Post by Courtney Campbell
How many tile games have 800+ monsters?

I remember Dungeon Master (~1990) to be a good game, and it had about 10
different monsters.

IMO the number of monsters isn't directly linked to the quality of a
game. Often quantity != quality

I.e. a lot of people played Doom, and they liked it much, despite it had
less than 20 monster types.

We could even say Angband is good despite the number of monsters :P

Post by Courtney Campbell
Well, in *band (which I'm most familar with because that's what I write
a variant of) you _can_ tell the difference between /(Axe and mace),
|(Sword), }(bow, x-bow), etc.

It could but most waepons are just white, and therefore 5 or so are
mapepd on one symbol/color combination.

In theory symbol+color would be sufficient to tell most of them apart,
in practise too many items are mapped onto the same combination :(

Post by Courtney Campbell
IMHO, and I know people feel otherwise, It's much easier for me to parse
the screen for a '}', then somone's 32x32 idea of what a bow or any of
the other different pictures for other bows look like.

I consider this an expression of personal preference. I definitely
favour the pictures, unless they are as small as the 8x8 tile set of old
Angband versions on the Amiga.

Post by Courtney Campbell

Post by James Bulgin
Even worse, sometimes two vastly
different monsters might be represented with the same symbol (+color
combination, if implemented) This is probably a bad design decision more
than anything else, but it's something that would be more easily avoidable
with a larger symbol set.

Yes, it's a shame we don't have an ASCII cross-platform standard higher
than the first 64 characters. (or is it 128 I forget).

If you use letters only and 15 colors you have 56*15=840 distinguishable
combinations.

There are about 95 useable letter in ASCII IIRC. (=1450 combinations)

The first 32 of the 128 cannot be output on all terminals, and space is
a bad symbol for an item/monster usually :-)

Post by Courtney Campbell
-Campbell

c.u.
Hajo

[Courtney Campbell]

Post by Hansjoerg Malthaner

Post by Courtney Campbell
The symbols aren't arbitrarily assigned, or did you think it was a
coincidence that all molds are represented by a 'm'? or ants by an 'a'?
or zombies by a 'z'? How is this arbitrary?

Giants get a 'P' (not a 'g'), snakes a 'J' (not an 's'), demons a 'u'
(not a 'd') ... it isn't so straightforward as you want to tell :-(

'P' is for giant 'P'eople, versues normal 'p'eople. J is the shape of a
snake, 's' stands for skeleton. u is the shape of a demon's horns.

Post by Hansjoerg Malthaner

Post by Courtney Campbell
How many tile games have 800+ monsters?

I remember Dungeon Master (~1990) to be a good game, and it had about 10
different monsters.
IMO the number of monsters isn't directly linked to the quality of a
game. Often quantity != quality
I.e. a lot of people played Doom, and they liked it much, despite it had
less than 20 monster types.
We could even say Angband is good despite the number of monsters :P

Ok, listen. This sentence, you know, the one that addressed this point
that you cut the f**k out of this message? :-)

Post by Hansjoerg Malthaner
(I am not saying more monsters makes a better game)

means that _I am not saying that more monsters makes a better game_.
only that I can add 800 different unique ascii monsters by deciding to,
and anyone who uses graphics has to create at least one tile for every
monster they create.

Be careful not to delete something I wrote, and then argue agains it pls.

Post by Hansjoerg Malthaner

Post by Courtney Campbell
Well, in *band (which I'm most familar with because that's what I write
a variant of) you _can_ tell the difference between /(Axe and mace),
|(Sword), }(bow, x-bow), etc.

It could but most waepons are just white, and therefore 5 or so are
mapepd on one symbol/color combination.

uh, I'm not going to print the *band item list here. By most, I'm
assuming you mean 51% or more? I promise White doesn't make over 50% of
the item list. sorry.

Post by Hansjoerg Malthaner
In theory symbol+color would be sufficient to tell most of them apart,
in practise too many items are mapped onto the same combination :(

[V] does a good job of mapping colors to items.

Post by Hansjoerg Malthaner

Post by Courtney Campbell
IMHO, and I know people feel otherwise, It's much easier for me to parse
the screen for a '}', then somone's 32x32 idea of what a bow or any of
the other different pictures for other bows look like.

I consider this an expression of personal preference. I definitely
favour the pictures, unless they are as small as the 8x8 tile set of old
Angband versions on the Amiga.

picking '}' out of a screen of ascii, versus picking out a bow picture
is a piece of quantifiable data. Since that is the case, it _cannot_ be
a matter of personal prefrence which takes longer.

Post by Hansjoerg Malthaner

Post by Courtney Campbell

Post by James Bulgin
Even worse, sometimes two vastly
different monsters might be represented with the same symbol (+color
combination, if implemented) This is probably a bad design decision more
than anything else, but it's something that would be more easily avoidable
with a larger symbol set.

Yes, it's a shame we don't have an ASCII cross-platform standard higher
than the first 64 characters. (or is it 128 I forget).

If you use letters only and 15 colors you have 56*15=840 distinguishable
combinations.
There are about 95 useable letter in ASCII IIRC. (=1450 combinations)
The first 32 of the 128 cannot be output on all terminals, and space is
a bad symbol for an item/monster usually :-)

Oh. So even more than I thought. letters and 15 colors is more accurate
than 16. I want to go to 256.

Post by Hansjoerg Malthaner

Post by Courtney Campbell
-Campbell

c.u.
Hajo

-Campbell

[James Bulgin]

Post by Courtney Campbell
'P' is for giant 'P'eople, versues normal 'p'eople. J is the shape of a
snake, 's' stands for skeleton. u is the shape of a demon's horns.

While all of these connections _do_ make sense, are they really something that
someone would draw without serious examination? They certainly don't spring to
mind immediatly. You can't possible claim that when you first saw a 'u' chasing
you, you thought it looked like demon horns and therefore must be a demon.
However, a large threatening horned creature with bat wings would probably
cause that reaction whether you'd seen that particular tile before or not.

[ABCGi]

Post by James Bulgin

Post by Courtney Campbell
'P' is for giant 'P'eople, versues normal 'p'eople. J is the shape of a
snake, 's' stands for skeleton. u is the shape of a demon's horns.

While all of these connections _do_ make sense, are they really something that
someone would draw without serious examination? They certainly don't spring to
mind immediatly. You can't possible claim that when you first saw a 'u' chasing
you, you thought it looked like demon horns and therefore must be a demon.
However, a large threatening horned creature with bat wings would probably
cause that reaction whether you'd seen that particular tile before or not.

Well you never would guess what any character meant the absolute first
time you saw it anyway, you'd always have to 'l'ook first and learn the
class of association. The associations are kind of clever, and once
learned they do work.

Important for us developers to maintain the monster class lettering
standards across games as much as possible!

[Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes]

Post by ABCGi

Post by James Bulgin

Post by Courtney Campbell
'P' is for giant 'P'eople, versues normal 'p'eople. J is the shape of a
snake, 's' stands for skeleton. u is the shape of a demon's horns.

While all of these connections _do_ make sense, are they really something that
someone would draw without serious examination? They certainly don't spring to
mind immediatly. You can't possible claim that when you first saw a 'u' chasing
you, you thought it looked like demon horns and therefore must be a demon.
However, a large threatening horned creature with bat wings would probably
cause that reaction whether you'd seen that particular tile before or not.

Well you never would guess what any character meant the absolute first
time you saw it anyway, you'd always have to 'l'ook first and learn the
class of association. The associations are kind of clever, and once
learned they do work.
Important for us developers to maintain the monster class lettering
standards across games as much as possible!

With tile art, you don't even have to ask the game what it is, unless
you want more information. You see a big green humanoid, you know it's
an Ork. You see that he's carrying a staff instead of a sword, and you
know he's probably an Ork Wizard. In ASCII roguelikes, you have to
remember which color is a normal Ork and which is a Wizard... If you've
ever seen them before. If you haven't, it means *nothing* until you
look at it. Worse, if you misremember, you have a completely wrong idea
of what's in the dungeon with you, and it eats you.

Graphics give you an immediate emotional reaction, so you can suspend
your disbelief and become more immersed in the game world. ASCII
requires you to keep dropping out of immersion to figure out what the
interface is trying to show. It's like reading a book in a foreign
language that you barely understand, having to look up a word from every
sentence.

ASCII was fine (cutting-edge, even) when Rogue had @, walls, room and
corridor floors, doors, a few item types, and 26 kinds of monsters, all
of whose names started with the letter that represented them. It's
really very hard to remember the dozens of types of things by letter and
color in later ASCII roguelikes.

Anyone considering ASCII should ask themselves two questions: A) Do
you care about immersion? B) Do you want anyone but the roguelike
diehards to ever play your game? If the answers to both are "No", then
ASCII will be fine. If either answer is "Yes", then you need to at
least provide optional graphics.

It's not like anyone is insisting on full-motion 3D graphics. That's
the current professional standard in the games industry, and static tile
art is hopelessly obsolete; only the Sims and amateur games still use
tile art. Good basic tile art is free, too.

[ABCGi]

Post by Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes

Post by ABCGi

Post by James Bulgin

Post by Courtney Campbell
'P' is for giant 'P'eople, versues normal 'p'eople. J is the shape of a
snake, 's' stands for skeleton. u is the shape of a demon's horns.

While all of these connections _do_ make sense, are they really something that
someone would draw without serious examination? They certainly don't spring to
mind immediatly. You can't possible claim that when you first saw a 'u' chasing
you, you thought it looked like demon horns and therefore must be a demon.
However, a large threatening horned creature with bat wings would probably
cause that reaction whether you'd seen that particular tile before or not.

Well you never would guess what any character meant the absolute first
time you saw it anyway, you'd always have to 'l'ook first and learn the
class of association. The associations are kind of clever, and once
learned they do work.
Important for us developers to maintain the monster class lettering
standards across games as much as possible!

With tile art, you don't even have to ask the game what it is, unless
you want more information. You see a big green humanoid, you know it's
an Ork. You see that he's carrying a staff instead of a sword, and you
know he's probably an Ork Wizard. In ASCII roguelikes, you have to
remember which color is a normal Ork and which is a Wizard... If you've
ever seen them before. If you haven't, it means *nothing* until you
look at it. Worse, if you misremember, you have a completely wrong idea
of what's in the dungeon with you, and it eats you.

True, note that I voted Tiles in the survey, I was just making a point.
In H-World the overlays work really well so that any monster can be
holding any weapon, and you get good information from just looking at
them, and they look pretty. I can have a team of Dwarfs all with
variations to armour and weapons and they look like a horde rather than
a host of mirror images.

Post by Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes
Graphics give you an immediate emotional reaction, so you can suspend
your disbelief and become more immersed in the game world. ASCII
requires you to keep dropping out of immersion to figure out what the
interface is trying to show. It's like reading a book in a foreign
language that you barely understand, having to look up a word from every
sentence.

As long as it isn't crappy tiles, then the emotional reaction is *groan*

Post by Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes
corridor floors, doors, a few item types, and 26 kinds of monsters, all
of whose names started with the letter that represented them. It's
really very hard to remember the dozens of types of things by letter and
color in later ASCII roguelikes.
Anyone considering ASCII should ask themselves two questions: A) Do
you care about immersion? B) Do you want anyone but the roguelike
diehards to ever play your game? If the answers to both are "No", then
ASCII will be fine. If either answer is "Yes", then you need to at
least provide optional graphics.

A) Yes
B) Yes

Post by Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes
It's not like anyone is insisting on full-motion 3D graphics. That's
the current professional standard in the games industry, and static tile
art is hopelessly obsolete; only the Sims and amateur games still use
tile art. Good basic tile art is free, too.

I'm finding doing my own art for Beyond H-World very slow and tedious
and it still comes out sucking. But this is my fault for sucking. I'm
also sick of every bloody game being 3D - I hate game designers who make
decisions in the wrong order! Reminds me of Hollywood executives...

[The Sheep]

Post by Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes
With tile art, you don't even have to ask the game what it is, unless
you want more information. You see a big green humanoid, you know it's
an Ork. You see that he's carrying a staff instead of a sword, and you
know he's probably an Ork Wizard. In ASCII roguelikes, you have to
remember which color is a normal Ork and which is a Wizard... If you've
ever seen them before. If you haven't, it means *nothing* until you
look at it. Worse, if you misremember, you have a completely wrong idea
of what's in the dungeon with you, and it eats you.

There's one simple problem here.
When it's animals, mythological creatures, common fantasy creatures -- the
graphics is usually sufficient to distinguish them (provided it's accurate
enough).

But then, how do you distinguish a daeomon and a devil?
How do you distinguish Barlog from any other daemon?

How do you tell this is fruit bat and that's a vampire bat?

Then, it gets really hard when you're moving farther away with your
fantasy.

Suppose you want to make a game in the world of Dune. How do you
distinguish Sardaukars, Sand Troopers and Harkonen?

The `large green humanoid is surely ork' rule is not always right.
In most japanese fantasy games, for example, when there are orks, they
look rather like pig-men (or boar-men) in armor, and are not even a
bit green. If I were to include orks in my game, I would make them
look that way. Green would be for goblins and zombies.

And how are you supposed to distiguish ork wizard and ork hero?
(both would have some nice clothes on)

[Courtney Campbell]

Post by Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes
With tile art, you don't even have to ask the game what it is, unless
you want more information. You see a big green humanoid, you know it's
an Ork. You see that he's carrying a staff instead of a sword, and you
know he's probably an Ork Wizard. In ASCII roguelikes, you have to
remember which color is a normal Ork and which is a Wizard... If you've
ever seen them before. If you haven't, it means *nothing* until you
look at it. Worse, if you misremember, you have a completely wrong idea
of what's in the dungeon with you, and it eats you.

Again, I suppose your talking about a case where it doesn't show a red
'o: Orc Wizard' Right next to the main display? Granted, if the tiles
are large and clearly made, then they will work fine. Note that large
tiles have the side effect of reducing the amount of information you can
display on the screen. This is a trade-off between the size of the
tiles, and the amount of dungeon you can fit on the screen. IMHO,
1024x768 is not large enough to have detailed tiles and show enought of
the dungeon to not be frustrating.

Post by Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes
Graphics give you an immediate emotional reaction, so you can suspend
your disbelief and become more immersed in the game world.

This is fallicous resoning. An 'immediate emotional reaction' does _not_
allow you to suspend your disbelief. We'll leave the 'become more
immersed in the game world' out for the moment because it's terms may
possibly be poorly defined. (i.e. you may mean something different when
you say that than I would if I said it.)

I will grant that the first time you see a tile you have a reaction to
it. It is also true that the first time you see a new ascii character
you also have a reaction to it. The reactions differ, with the tile it's
a moment of study to determine if that green thing is wearing armor or
wielding a sword or etc. Since it's still a roguelike, if I haven't seen
the monster before I still e'x'amine or 'l'ook at it to see if the text
tells me what it can do. If I'm using an ASCII display my stomach
usually drops ;-) and then I do the same thing as on a tile system, I
get the description.

I will then note, that you will not have this same reaction the second
time you see the tile - but you _will_ be able to parse an ASCII
character more quickly than a tile when it next appears.

Post by Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes
ASCII
requires you to keep dropping out of immersion to figure out what the
interface is trying to show.

here is where we differ in definations. For you, a little 32x32 or even
64x64 blob of color is 'immersive'. It pulls you into the game. Nothing
on that scale is going to match anything close to the picture of that I
have in my mind, which is really where the 'immersion' in the game takes
place. All the ASCII interface is showing is a marker for where the
monster is.

And after my 5th game (the point where graphics start to get old) I much
prefer to locate that marker using ASCII because the process, due to
physiological reasons, is faster.

Post by Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes
It's like reading a book in a foreign
language that you barely understand, having to look up a word from every
sentence.

How long you been playing roguelikes buddy? ;-p I mean, after a dozen
games or so most of these things become very familar. Pick any roguelike
I've never played before, and set me down in front of an ASCII display
of a random dungeon simulation, and I would bet even money that I could
pin down correctly more than 80% of the symbols on the screen. I have no
doubt the same would be true of you.

Since this is a visual language we are all familar with, I fail to see
how your analogy applies for any but the beginning learner.

Post by Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes
corridor floors, doors, a few item types, and 26 kinds of monsters, all
of whose names started with the letter that represented them. It's
really very hard to remember the dozens of types of things by letter and
color in later ASCII roguelikes.

yes, I'll grant you there are more monsters, but still only about 50+
_classes_ of monsters. And those classes of monsters are usually quite
limited in their abilities.

Post by Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes
Anyone considering ASCII should ask themselves two questions: A) Do
you care about immersion? B) Do you want anyone but the roguelike
diehards to ever play your game? If the answers to both are "No", then
ASCII will be fine. If either answer is "Yes", then you need to at
least provide optional graphics.

Entertaining, but no.

First of all, I'm going to have to define 'immersion' to address this
point, so I'll use webster. the noun form as you used it is defined as
"baptism by complete submersion of the person in water", so lets assume
a high attention level, i.e. most (51% or more) of the processing of
data that your body is doing is related to a roguelike game.

Now, I contend that you immerse parts of your mind and brain, using your
imagination, that you would not otherwise use say, looking at someone
else's very tiny visual representation of said object. YMMV.

I _can_ say that adding ASCII will not destroy the immersive potential
of the game, for a number of reasons. Personal direct experience: I feel
immersed in a roguelike and I use ASCII only. Statistical data: Nethack
and Angband are very popular games - people often talk about how
immersive they can be - and the majority of those players use and
strongly prefer ASCII. I'm certain you've read some of the very recent
posts about the inherent superiority of ASCII to tiles.

To address the second point, if [noone] ' but the roguelike diehards'
(Who I'm going to define as people who play roguelikes as an active
hobby, on a 3 or more times weekly basis) ever play my game, how come
nearly every person (barring a few exceptions) that hangs out in
#angband is younger than me? I'm in my late 20's, and most of the
channel has people about to graduate high school. Some of these dudes
weren't even _alive_ when rogue was written. Hell, maybe _I_ wasn't even
alive when it was written. The roguelike community is gaining new
players all the time, the majority of which IMHE are pro-ASCII.

So in using ASCII, there is available empirical data that clearly shows
that it will not keep away anyone but 'roguelike diehards'. My game is
ASCII only and I know plenty of people who play it infrequently. .: if
my answer to A and B are YES, then it does NOT follow that I should not
use ASCII.

Post by Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes
It's not like anyone is insisting on full-motion 3D graphics. That's
the current professional standard in the games industry, and static tile
art is hopelessly obsolete; only the Sims and amateur games still use
tile art. Good basic tile art is free, too.

How come, every time they come out with a game I really like on the
console, there's always a little section saying 'users may be
intimidated by the "outdated" graphics', I mean, I've spent over 300+
hours on Disgaea, and it uses bitmaps, and static pictures and
cutsceens. Wizadry:Tales of the Forsaken land? 2-d static pics of
characters and shoddy text box dialogue. From a PS2 game, funny, I can't
stop playing it!

The 'de facto' standard games I've played? Mafia, Terrible story, and
boring crap gameplay where aiming is hard and the only thing you can do
is try not to screw up, that's how you win, by making long runs where
you don't make any mistakes. Not fun. Red Dead Revolver? Nice dead eye
system (which is .bmp pixels over the 3-d model) but again, crap
gameplay. Funny how I've played more of the sims than any of these 3-D
actioner/platformer games combined.

You say that 'static tile art is hopelessly obsolete' - I don't see how
this is the case being 1)computers can still display tiles (or ASCII)
2)Tiles (or ASCII) still communicates the same information it always has
and 3) Games still need to convey information.

Obsolescence would indicate that one of the above is no longer true.
-Campbell

[David Damerell]

Post by Courtney Campbell

Post by Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes
It's like reading a book in a foreign
language that you barely understand, having to look up a word from every
sentence.

How long you been playing roguelikes buddy?

Probably not at all, since he never tires of telling us how much he hates
them.

Post by Courtney Campbell
#angband is younger than me? I'm in my late 20's, and most of the
channel has people about to graduate high school. Some of these dudes
weren't even _alive_ when rogue was written. Hell, maybe _I_ wasn't even
alive when it was written. The roguelike community is gaining new
players all the time, the majority of which IMHE are pro-ASCII.

You can't confound him with facts; he'll just pretend you never posted
them. Trust me.

[Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes]

Post by Courtney Campbell

Post by Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes
With tile art, you don't even have to ask the game what it is, unless
you want more information. You see a big green humanoid, you know it's
an Ork. You see that he's carrying a staff instead of a sword, and you
know he's probably an Ork Wizard. In ASCII roguelikes, you have to
remember which color is a normal Ork and which is a Wizard... If you've
ever seen them before. If you haven't, it means *nothing* until you
look at it. Worse, if you misremember, you have a completely wrong idea
of what's in the dungeon with you, and it eats you.

Again, I suppose your talking about a case where it doesn't show a red
'o: Orc Wizard' Right next to the main display?

Which none I've ever seen do. Even if they did, it still breaks
immersion; it's only a slight improvement on making the player hit 'l'.
Immediate emotional reaction means exactly that.

Post by Courtney Campbell
Granted, if the tiles
are large and clearly made, then they will work fine. Note that large
tiles have the side effect of reducing the amount of information you can
display on the screen. This is a trade-off between the size of the
tiles, and the amount of dungeon you can fit on the screen. IMHO,
1024x768 is not large enough to have detailed tiles and show enought of
the dungeon to not be frustrating.

Well, you're wrong, on a realistic modern monitor (at least 17"). If
you even want a complete dungeon map to be visible at all times, which
is highly unrealistic, you can easily show the immediate surroundings in
high detail, with the rest of the dungeon map in a mini-map. That's a
standard game interface that appears in thousands of other games which
have been very successful.

Post by Courtney Campbell

Post by Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes
Graphics give you an immediate emotional reaction, so you can suspend
your disbelief and become more immersed in the game world.

This is fallicous resoning. An 'immediate emotional reaction' does _not_
allow you to suspend your disbelief. We'll leave the 'become more
immersed in the game world' out for the moment because it's terms may
possibly be poorly defined. (i.e. you may mean something different when
you say that than I would if I said it.)

It is standard terminology from film, art, and other media. An
immediate visual or auditory reaction sucks an audience in in a way that
text does not. Encrypted text like in roguelikes isn't even on the same
scale.

Post by Courtney Campbell
I will then note, that you will not have this same reaction the second
time you see the tile - but you _will_ be able to parse an ASCII
character more quickly than a tile when it next appears.

Unless, as I already said, you forget what it means, and with hundreds
of character/color combinations, you *WILL* forget. Then it eats you.

Post by Courtney Campbell

Post by Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes
It's like reading a book in a foreign
language that you barely understand, having to look up a word from every
sentence.

How long you been playing roguelikes buddy? ;-p

22, 23 years. I played a Rogue clone on the Apple II about then.
Then Temple of Apshai on TRS-80 when that came out. Another Rogue clone
on the Atari 8-bit. I've played dozens more since. Few of them have
the same characters for anything past walls, floors, and doors.

Half of the early roguelikes had real graphics, too, and nobody
complained. It's only in the last decade or so that the roguelike world
split into two: some became modern CRPGs, and others curled up in a dark
corner with ASCII graphics and permadeath and complained about anything
different from themselves.

Post by Courtney Campbell
I mean, after a dozen
games or so most of these things become very familar. Pick any roguelike
I've never played before, and set me down in front of an ASCII display
of a random dungeon simulation, and I would bet even money that I could
pin down correctly more than 80% of the symbols on the screen. I have no
doubt the same would be true of you.
Since this is a visual language we are all familar with, I fail to see
how your analogy applies for any but the beginning learner.

On the one hand, being used to reading a substandard display does not
make that display better. And on the other hand, I want the games I
write to be played by more than 5 people in the world. So in both
cases, ASCII is unacceptable.

Post by Courtney Campbell

Post by Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes
Anyone considering ASCII should ask themselves two questions: A) Do
you care about immersion? B) Do you want anyone but the roguelike
diehards to ever play your game? If the answers to both are "No", then
ASCII will be fine. If either answer is "Yes", then you need to at
least provide optional graphics.

Entertaining, but no.

That's not entertaining, it's very serious. You're saying your
answers are A) No, and B) No. Great. Stick to what you know, then.
Your game will be played by maybe 5 people, but whatever works for you.
But other people have more inclusive goals.

Post by Courtney Campbell
First of all, I'm going to have to define 'immersion' to address this
point, so I'll use webster.

Try taking a film studies class instead. The term's more widely used
than that, but film offers a century of academic study and language for
discussing this sort of art.

Post by Courtney Campbell
immersed in a roguelike and I use ASCII only. Statistical data: Nethack
and Angband are very popular games - people often talk about how

They're very popular, as ASCII roguelikes go. They're not even on the
radar of any other kind of game.

Post by Courtney Campbell
immersive they can be - and the majority of those players use and
strongly prefer ASCII. I'm certain you've read some of the very recent
posts about the inherent superiority of ASCII to tiles.

Self-selected groups are not statistically representative. Most of
the people who read this group are those who've played roguelikes
despite their primitive interfaces for years. Sit an average person
down in front of a roguelike, and they'll think you're crazy.

[Antony Sidwell]

Post by Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes

Post by Courtney Campbell

Post by Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes
Anyone considering ASCII should ask themselves two questions: A)
Do you care about immersion? B) Do you want anyone but the
roguelike diehards to ever play your game? If the answers to
both are "No", then ASCII will be fine. If either answer is
"Yes", then you need to at least provide optional graphics.

Entertaining, but no.

That's not entertaining, it's very serious. You're saying your
answers are A) No, and B) No.

Come on now, you can tell quite easily that he isn't saying the answers
to both questions are No. He's saying your point is invalid, containing
as it does conclusions about the matter being discussed in a form which
makes it impossible to give simple yes or no answers which can't be
interpreted by you as conceding the point(s). "Have you stopped beating
your wife?"

If you really were in doubt, you could have read any of the next couple
of paragraphs (which you snipped) which included the useful clue: "if my
answer to A and B are YES, then it does NOT follow that I should not use
ASCII." as a conclusion to some clear and coherent reasoning to show the
flaws in your "not entertaining" and "very serious" point.

Post by Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes
Great. Stick to what you know, then.
Your game will be played by maybe 5 people, but whatever works for
you. But other people have more inclusive goals.

He also noted (again, you snipped this, but I assume you read it
beforehand) that in his experience, and mine I might add, there are new
roguelike players coming along all the time and high proportions of them
prefer ASCII interfaces, just as with "established" players.

I'm not hugely convinced that it is more "inclusive" to have roguelike
gameplay with a graphical display than roguelike gameplay with an ASCII
display. Who are you the people you are including and excluding with
each choice? I'm assuming I'm not going to get an answer like "I'm
including people with an ounce of sense and artistic appreciation,
they're only including diehard freaks who'd play my game anyway." :)

Post by Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes

Post by Courtney Campbell
Nethack and Angband are very popular games - people often talk
about how

They're very popular, as ASCII roguelikes go. They're not even on
the radar of any other kind of game.

Post by Courtney Campbell
immersive they can be - and the majority of those players use and
strongly prefer ASCII. I'm certain you've read some of the very
recent posts about the inherent superiority of ASCII to tiles.

Self-selected groups are not statistically representative. Most of
the people who read this group are those who've played roguelikes
despite their primitive interfaces for years. Sit an average person
down in front of a roguelike, and they'll think you're crazy.

So you're saying that people who play roguelikes currently must find
them immersive with ASCII interfaces, and so aren't statistically
relevant? And that in the population at large, people don't find them
immersive with ASCII interfaces?

I think I'd prefer to take the point being offered and which you
apparently agree with, which was that ASCII interfaces can be at least
as immersive in the context of a roguelike game as a graphically tiled
interface. The evidence for this is that there are relatively
large numbers of people who find it to be the case currently, even when
a choice of interfaces is available.

This seems to be a more accurate conclusion to draw than one apparently
based on estimations of sales of unrelated games in different genres
which are then extrapolated to something akin to "the reasons average
people don't like roguelikes are that they are not the same as games
which sell well".

Anyway, my apologies for posting to a subthread which is already aflame,
I should know better. At least I can console myself that no one is
reading it any more, so no harm done. :)

[ABCGi]

Post by Antony Sidwell

Post by Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes

Post by Courtney Campbell

Post by Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes
Anyone considering ASCII should ask themselves two questions: A)
Do you care about immersion? B) Do you want anyone but the
roguelike diehards to ever play your game? If the answers to
both are "No", then ASCII will be fine. If either answer is
"Yes", then you need to at least provide optional graphics.

Entertaining, but no.

That's not entertaining, it's very serious. You're saying your
answers are A) No, and B) No.

Come on now, you can tell quite easily that he isn't saying the answers
to both questions are No. He's saying your point is invalid, containing
as it does conclusions about the matter being discussed in a form which
makes it impossible to give simple yes or no answers which can't be
interpreted by you as conceding the point(s). "Have you stopped beating
your wife?"
If you really were in doubt, you could have read any of the next couple
of paragraphs (which you snipped) which included the useful clue: "if my
answer to A and B are YES, then it does NOT follow that I should not use
ASCII." as a conclusion to some clear and coherent reasoning to show the
flaws in your "not entertaining" and "very serious" point.

Post by Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes
Great. Stick to what you know, then.
Your game will be played by maybe 5 people, but whatever works for
you. But other people have more inclusive goals.

He also noted (again, you snipped this, but I assume you read it
beforehand) that in his experience, and mine I might add, there are new
roguelike players coming along all the time and high proportions of them
prefer ASCII interfaces, just as with "established" players.
I'm not hugely convinced that it is more "inclusive" to have roguelike
gameplay with a graphical display than roguelike gameplay with an ASCII
display. Who are you the people you are including and excluding with
each choice? I'm assuming I'm not going to get an answer like "I'm
including people with an ounce of sense and artistic appreciation,
they're only including diehard freaks who'd play my game anyway." :)

Post by Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes

Post by Courtney Campbell
Nethack and Angband are very popular games - people often talk
about how

They're very popular, as ASCII roguelikes go. They're not even on
the radar of any other kind of game.

Post by Courtney Campbell
immersive they can be - and the majority of those players use and
strongly prefer ASCII. I'm certain you've read some of the very
recent posts about the inherent superiority of ASCII to tiles.

Self-selected groups are not statistically representative. Most of
the people who read this group are those who've played roguelikes
despite their primitive interfaces for years. Sit an average person
down in front of a roguelike, and they'll think you're crazy.

So you're saying that people who play roguelikes currently must find
them immersive with ASCII interfaces, and so aren't statistically
relevant? And that in the population at large, people don't find them
immersive with ASCII interfaces?
I think I'd prefer to take the point being offered and which you
apparently agree with, which was that ASCII interfaces can be at least
as immersive in the context of a roguelike game as a graphically tiled
interface. The evidence for this is that there are relatively
large numbers of people who find it to be the case currently, even when
a choice of interfaces is available.
This seems to be a more accurate conclusion to draw than one apparently
based on estimations of sales of unrelated games in different genres
which are then extrapolated to something akin to "the reasons average
people don't like roguelikes are that they are not the same as games
which sell well".
Anyway, my apologies for posting to a subthread which is already aflame,
I should know better. At least I can console myself that no one is
reading it any more, so no harm done. :)

I read it ! No consolation for you :) I like the "Have you stopped
masturbating? YES/NO" example of why lawyers suck, I'll be using that.

[Hansjoerg Malthaner]

[number of monsters]

Post by Courtney Campbell
Ok, listen. This sentence, you know, the one that addressed this point
that you cut the f**k out of this message? :-)

I'm sorry. I probaly didn't read the message well enough. I apologize.

Post by Courtney Campbell

Post by Hansjoerg Malthaner

Post by Courtney Campbell
Well, in *band (which I'm most familar with because that's what I write
a variant of) you _can_ tell the difference between /(Axe and mace),
|(Sword), }(bow, x-bow), etc.

It could but most waepons are just white, and therefore 5 or so are
mapepd on one symbol/color combination.

uh, I'm not going to print the *band item list here. By most, I'm
assuming you mean 51% or more? I promise White doesn't make over 50% of
the item list. sorry.

If it's so it's good. I once made a graphical tileset for Angband 2.8.0
and I've used recolorable images. Editing the item list I foudn only one
non-white blade, an executioners sword, the rest all were white IIRC.

If the maintainers have improved this since then, it's good. I didn't
seriously play Angband since a very long time ... actually 2.8.2 was the
latest version I really played.

Post by Courtney Campbell

Post by Hansjoerg Malthaner
In theory symbol+color would be sufficient to tell most of them apart,
in practise too many items are mapped onto the same combination :(

[V] does a good job of mapping colors to items.

No. Almost all blades are white. This list is from 2.9.1:

N:31:& Bastard Sword~
G:|:W

N:32:& Scimitar~
G:|:W

N:33:& Tulwar~
G:|:W

N:34:& Broad Sword~
G:|:W

N:35:& Short Sword~
G:|:W

N:36:& Blade~ of Chaos
G:|:v

N:37:& Two-Handed Sword~
G:|:W

N:38:& Main Gauche~
G:|:W

N:39:& Cutlass~
G:|:W

N:40:& Executioner's Sword~
G:|:r

N:41:& Katana~
G:|:W

N:42:& Long Sword~
G:|:W

N:43:& Dagger~
G:|:W

N:44:& Rapier~
G:|:W

N:45:& Sabre~
G:|:W

N:46:& Small Sword~
G:|:W

N:47:& Broken Sword~
G:|:D

16 Blades, 1 red, 1 violet, 2 grey, 12 white.

This is definitely more than 50% if the blades mapped to the same color.
If this improved in recent versions it's ok, but in the versions that
I've played, the problem existed for sure, and at least until 2.9.1 it
wasn't changed.

Post by Courtney Campbell

Post by Hansjoerg Malthaner

Post by Courtney Campbell

Post by James Bulgin
Even worse, sometimes two vastly
different monsters might be represented with the same symbol (+color
combination, if implemented) This is probably a bad design decision more
than anything else, but it's something that would be more easily avoidable
with a larger symbol set.

Yes, it's a shame we don't have an ASCII cross-platform standard higher
than the first 64 characters. (or is it 128 I forget).

If you use letters only and 15 colors you have 56*15=840 distinguishable
combinations.
There are about 95 useable letter in ASCII IIRC. (=1450 combinations)
The first 32 of the 128 cannot be output on all terminals, and space is
a bad symbol for an item/monster usually :-)

Oh. So even more than I thought.

Right. No need to map so much items on the same combinations as the old
Angband versions did.

Post by Courtney Campbell
letters and 15 colors is more accurate
than 16. I want to go to 256.

256 colors? Or 256 letters? It's hard to find 256 distinguishabvle
colors i.e. if there is a single item without comparison on screen.

256 letters is doable if you use unicode, but then you can have much
more letters at no additional cost. Greek, hebrew, chinese, all are very
interesting symbols :)

Post by Courtney Campbell
-Campbell

c.u.
Hajo

[Courtney Campbell]

Post by Hansjoerg Malthaner
[number of monsters]
I'm sorry. I probaly didn't read the message well enough. I apologize.

np. :-)

Post by Hansjoerg Malthaner

Post by Courtney Campbell

Post by Hansjoerg Malthaner
It could but most waepons are just white, and therefore 5 or so are
mapepd on one symbol/color combination.

most *weapons* are just white, is the claim you make above.

Post by Hansjoerg Malthaner

Post by Courtney Campbell

Post by Hansjoerg Malthaner
In theory symbol+color would be sufficient to tell most of them apart,
in practise too many items are mapped onto the same combination :(

[V] does a good job of mapping colors to items.

Well, this is a selection of the _swords_ avaiable, there are other
types of weapons available. How do the others stack up? I guess I'll go
check.

Post by Hansjoerg Malthaner
16 Blades, 1 red, 1 violet, 2 grey, 12 white.

10 Blunt weapons, 7 dark grey, 1 blue, 1 violet, 1 brown, 1 yellow
13 polearms/axes, 11 light grey, 1 red, 1 yellow, 1 dark grey
5 bows, none are white. (3 light grey x-bows, 2 brown bows)

Now, out of all the weapons (<-your statement) most of them (>51%) are
white? 12 white, versus 32 non-white? That's my count at any rate.

Post by Hansjoerg Malthaner

Post by Courtney Campbell
letters and 15 colors is more accurate
than 16. I want to go to 256.

256 colors? Or 256 letters? It's hard to find 256 distinguishabvle
colors i.e. if there is a single item without comparison on screen.
256 letters is doable if you use unicode, but then you can have much
more letters at no additional cost. Greek, hebrew, chinese, all are very
interesting symbols :)

I am aware of the above and would like to do both. :-)

Post by Hansjoerg Malthaner

Post by Courtney Campbell
-Campbell

c.u.
Hajo

-Campbell

[Hansjoerg Malthaner]

Post by Courtney Campbell

Post by Hansjoerg Malthaner

Post by Courtney Campbell

Post by Hansjoerg Malthaner
It could but most waepons are just white, and therefore 5 or so are
mapepd on one symbol/color combination.

most *weapons* are just white, is the claim you make above.

Post by Hansjoerg Malthaner

Post by Courtney Campbell

Post by Hansjoerg Malthaner
In theory symbol+color would be sufficient to tell most of them apart,
in practise too many items are mapped onto the same combination :(

[V] does a good job of mapping colors to items.

[16 blade weapons snipped]

Post by Courtney Campbell
Well, this is a selection of the _swords_ avaiable, there are other
types of weapons available. How do the others stack up? I guess I'll go
check.

Post by Hansjoerg Malthaner
16 Blades, 1 red, 1 violet, 2 grey, 12 white.

10 Blunt weapons, 7 dark grey, 1 blue, 1 violet, 1 brown, 1 yellow
13 polearms/axes, 11 light grey, 1 red, 1 yellow, 1 dark grey
5 bows, none are white. (3 light grey x-bows, 2 brown bows)
Now, out of all the weapons (<-your statement) most of them (>51%) are
white? 12 white, versus 32 non-white? That's my count at any rate.

You got me by wording. But I still think it's bad that in each category
so much entries are mapped onto the same symbol+color

I mean, the start of our discussion was that symbol+color is easy to
look up by the player, at least easier than graphical tiles. I wanted to
say that this might be true in theory, but is not true in the Angband
versions that I've played.

Seeing that in each category of weapons many ambiguous entries exist, I
still feel my point being valid even if my initial claim for "white" and
"weapons" was wrong.

There are 12 of 16 blade weapons that look the same to the player, 7 of
10 blunt weapons, 11 of 13 polearms. I think this is bad enough, even if
they are all weapons and some not white.

Anyways, everyone needs to make his own decision. I think it's badly
done, while the idea in theory might be good (1450 distinguishable
combination, I think were calculated, and the number was not challenged
so far).

So if you claim that graphical tiles are hard to look up for the player
(= tell me that my games are player unfriendly) I point out, that -
despite which concept is superior in theory - in practise at least the
display of the ancestor of your game is also ambiguous and thus hard to
look up for the player.

So I think we both can now go and improve our games. I'll try to make
the graphical tiles as clear and recognizeable as I can, and you'll go
solving the ambiguities of the symbol+color codes in Angband/Steamband.

**

If we are talking about the ease of looking up symbol+color combinations
I want to point out that this concept exists in my - graphical - games, too.

I.e. all potions use the same symbol, but different colors, just as they
do in traditional RL games. The only difference is that my symbol isn't
a '!' but a bottle image. The same applies to scrolls.

In case of weapons and monsters, I think it's better to have different
images for different stuff, yet I have 'giant red mushrooms' and 'giant
grey mushrooms' which exercise the recoloring feature for monsters, too.

I think, the proposed ease of symbol+color isn't bound to ASCII symbols,
but holds for graphical symbols as well. So I think I get teh benefits
of this approach as well as all the benefits that graphical tiles do have.

If you think, the tiles are hard to recognize, please tell me which one
in my project you think are hard to to recognize, and I'll go upgrading
them.

http://h-world.simugraph.com

I agree with your point that working on the graphics needs time, that is
withdrawn from work on the games core.

I disagree with your conclusion that this means creating a worse game.
IMO it just means the project will progress slower, because more work
has to be done.

Post by Courtney Campbell
-Campbell

c.u.
Hajo

[Courtney Campbell]

Post by Hansjoerg Malthaner
So I think we both can now go and improve our games. I'll try to make
the graphical tiles as clear and recognizeable as I can, and you'll go
solving the ambiguities of the symbol+color codes in Angband/Steamband.

Agreed. :-) sadly I am but a poor self-tought coder who will never reach
the heights of clarity that my forefathers have set down. I sure will
try though. :-)

**

Post by Hansjoerg Malthaner
http://h-world.simugraph.com
I agree with your point that working on the graphics needs time, that is
withdrawn from work on the games core.
I disagree with your conclusion that this means creating a worse game.
IMO it just means the project will progress slower, because more work
has to be done.

I will readily agree to this.

Post by Hansjoerg Malthaner

Post by Courtney Campbell
-Campbell

c.u.
Hajo

-Campbell

[Michael Blackney]

Post by Courtney Campbell
Well, this is a selection of the _swords_ avaiable, there are other
types of weapons available. How do the others stack up? I guess I'll
go check.

Post by Hansjoerg Malthaner
16 Blades, 1 red, 1 violet, 2 grey, 12 white.

10 Blunt weapons, 7 dark grey, 1 blue, 1 violet, 1 brown, 1 yellow
13 polearms/axes, 11 light grey, 1 red, 1 yellow, 1 dark grey
5 bows, none are white. (3 light grey x-bows, 2 brown bows)
Now, out of all the weapons (<-your statement) most of them (>51%) are
white? 12 white, versus 32 non-white? That's my count at any rate.

You're pretty hostile, given that your evidence shows 100% of crossbows
and somewhere between 78-84% of polearms are the same colour. This
would be sensible if all weapons shared the same symbol, thereby
grouping the weapon types by colour, but we all know that they don't.

[Courtney Campbell]

Post by Michael Blackney

Post by Courtney Campbell
Well, this is a selection of the _swords_ avaiable, there are other
types of weapons available. How do the others stack up? I guess I'll
go check.

Post by Hansjoerg Malthaner
16 Blades, 1 red, 1 violet, 2 grey, 12 white.

10 Blunt weapons, 7 dark grey, 1 blue, 1 violet, 1 brown, 1 yellow
13 polearms/axes, 11 light grey, 1 red, 1 yellow, 1 dark grey
5 bows, none are white. (3 light grey x-bows, 2 brown bows)
Now, out of all the weapons (<-your statement) most of them (>51%) are
white? 12 white, versus 32 non-white? That's my count at any rate.

You're pretty hostile, given that your evidence shows 100% of crossbows
and somewhere between 78-84% of polearms are the same colour. This
would be sensible if all weapons shared the same symbol, thereby
grouping the weapon types by colour, but we all know that they don't.

Look, all I'm saying is that _he_ said 'all weapons are white' and that
is _clearly_ not true. It's all rather perhiphreal to the actual debate,
and no one is saying that you _don't_ have to look at ASCII graphics to
determine which is a short bow or long bow.

I should note that there are only minor difference between the weapons
that share a symbol and a color, all those weapons share the same ego
types.

I'm not hostile about this at all. :-)
-Campbell

[The Sheep]

Post by Courtney Campbell
Look, all I'm saying is that _he_ said 'all weapons are white' and that
is _clearly_ not true.

There are different shades of white ^^))))

[Gerry Quinn]

Post by Hansjoerg Malthaner
I remember Dungeon Master (~1990) to be a good game, and it had about 10
different monsters.

More like 20. But it was a great game.

Let me try to remember:
Screamers
Mummies
Worms
Green Tentacle Thing
Blue Ghosts
Rock Monsters
Flying lizard thingies
Skeletons
Wasps
Transparent Ghosts
Thieves
Golems
Rats
Aquators (didn't work!)
Poison monks
Scorpions
Knights
Orbs with DNA-like streamers
[Immobile black fountains/fires - not a real monster, I guess]]
Two-headed demon
Dragon
Lord Black

I probably forgot some, it's more than a decade since I played...

- Gerry Quinn

Post by Hansjoerg Malthaner
IMO the number of monsters isn't directly linked to the quality of a
game. Often quantity != quality

[James Bulgin]

Post by Courtney Campbell
The symbols aren't arbitrarily assigned, or did you think it was a
coincidence that all molds are represented by a 'm'? or ants by an 'a'?
or zombies by a 'z'? How is this arbitrary?

Not arbitrary as in no connection at all, but arbitrary as in there are multiple
symbols which could have been used which all are about as relevant. For
example, a kitten might use 'c' for cat or 'f' for feline. So, when you're
playing a new roguelike, is that 'f' is a feline or a fighter? Hence, moderatly
arbitrary.

Post by Courtney Campbell
This argument is diffused by the multi-windowed mode of play. You have
your roguelike screen, and then another screen for messages, and a third
for monster memory, another for inventory, and one last one that lists
all the monsters.
It's my preferred way to play. I don't every have to look at anything,
because there's a window that tells me what it is. When I hit or target
something it's description is right there below the main window. Using
an object from inventory - you can see your whole inventory, and no need
to push any keys to scan the last 20 odd lines of msg text.

This is quite a good idea, and something along the lines of what I was
suggesting. My argument was not just tiles over ascii, but at least some
interface features more advanced than a single screen text only system
harkening back to the early 80's. As long as the needed information is
available with as little switching between screens and commands as possible,
the interface is probably effective.

Post by Courtney Campbell
Well, in *band (which I'm most familar with because that's what I write
a variant of) you _can_ tell the difference between /(Axe and mace),
|(Sword), }(bow, x-bow), etc.

Hadn't played Angband. This is an improvement over some, anyway.

Post by Courtney Campbell
IMHO, and I know people feel otherwise, It's much easier for me to parse
the screen for a '}', then somone's 32x32 idea of what a bow or any of
the other different pictures for other bows look like.

I'm not really sure how badly drawn a picture of a bow would have to be for
someone to not be able to recognize it as a bow, but oh well....

Post by Courtney Campbell
Memory is unreliable. And I'm not talking about you remembering the
tiles or ASCII - I'm talking about your data sample. If you believe that
tiles are better, you will be more likely to forget or gloss over
instances of having to examine titles because you forgot what they
meant. Give me a double blind study of the number of examine tries using
tiles vs. ascii, and we can talk about this point.

I agree that generally one does tend to find more evidence to support one's
claim than refute it, however I'm not going into this with a great deal of
prejudice. I know what I personally prefer, however I am genuinly interested in
other people's opinions and find the discussion quite informative. And for the
record, I've only re-examined a tile once (and it was a really, really awful
tile at that)

Post by Courtney Campbell
hengband has a nifty and _easily_ portable menu system. So I guess no
one else prints out a sheet with all the commands on it? In Hengband you
hit the enter key, and up pops a menu with everything you can do. Look,
ma, no mouse!

When I said menu system, I didn't mean it _had_ to be a mouse driven menu.
However, I havn't really played a roguelike that really had much of a menu
system at all (admittedly, I haven't played too many)

Post by Courtney Campbell
The most important factor, is that in the 127th hour of Disgaea, or my
72nd game of CIV II this year, or my millionth game of Heros III, or my
umpteenth game of Steamband I don't give a shit what the graphics look
like. I wouldn't care if they were colored squares. Dots. Whatever.
Little nifty animations? A time cost to active the power is all that
represents. If you removed every picture from those games and had blue
boxes with a letter or two to represent stuff, it would be just as fun.
The game takes place in my head.

Well, if graphics don't matter to you _at all_, why would you mind a roguelike
being graphical? By your own admission, you just ignore it anyway and things
would end up more or less the same.

Post by Courtney Campbell
As for graphics much nicer to look at than ASCII, well, I'd much rather
look at my books then tv. In fact, I don't even watch TV. I do however
read quite frequently. ASCII just seems good enough for all those books,
but then maybe I really do need a movie of Tolkien's middle earth,
because all that ASCII in the books just wasn't as nice to look at.

Well, I think that's quite a different matter altogether. I'm referring only to
the use of ascii as a graphical overview. Descriptive text, as in a novel, is
not using characters to provide a quick representation of a scene, but using
words to weave together a world. I happen to be a very prolific reader, and
enjoy fantasy novels greatly. I also write, so I do have some perspective on
this matter. I just think that simply because they both use text characters,
their style and use of these is far too different to even compare.

Post by Courtney Campbell
I generally try to get along with everyone and play nice, but not today.
This ASCII vs. Graphics thing is a holy war, and the fridge along with
the bathroom is over here on our side. God would be on this side too if
he weren't a total fiction of control freaks.
Look, you can find a shitload of games where someone thought that if
they had a good enough 3d engine, well then gameplay would magically
spring from their ass while they were implementing it. It didn't; so I
don't play those games.

I'm also personally quite against graphics before gameplay, and I've seen many
games which looked nice but played awful and I couldn't stand them either.
However, there is nothing inherint in good graphics that preclude good
gameplay.

Post by Courtney Campbell
Your list of things above, is a list full of stuff that ASCII can do in
your roguelike with a modicum of thought barring the possible exception
of conveying covered item state information. I don't know how easy this
would be to do in any case. (remember, we're talking about _tiles_ here,
not real time rendered graphics or that jazz).
Tiles are the sign of a bad roguelike.

Why is this neccessarily true in and of itself??

Post by Courtney Campbell
This thread is entirely pointless. Everyone will shout back and forth
what they believe. Half of the people won't even read the posts, and
everyone will go away pissed off, convinced that they are right, cause
let me tell you, no one is likely to change their mind. Everyone thinks
what they think, and you just have to learn to adapt to people who lcak
the ability to think critically. It's surprisingly easy once you get the
hang of it.

Well, actually, so far you seem to be the only person whose really getting
pissed off.....

Post by Courtney Campbell
It wasn't very nice of you to post a message that would lead to this
result, especially since you can just google groups it and be
entertained all the times it's happened in the past (as well as
answering your own question, but I guess you prefer to ask for help
without trying to answer the question for yourself)? :-)

Wasn't nice of me? I'm not trying to incite a riot, only a discussion. Nothing I
said in and of itself should be provokotive. Can't people discuss their
opinions and the reason for those opinions without insulting people? Perhaps I
SHOULD have searched for past threads, but I didn't think about it this time.
And I think your last statement is both unfair and untrue, but there's no point
in arguing about accusations. I'm not trying to provoke anyone or assert that
my point of view is more important or legitimate than anyone else's and I'm
sorry if anyone got that impression.

[Courtney Campbell]

Post by James Bulgin
Well, if graphics don't matter to you _at all_, why would you mind a roguelike
being graphical? By your own admission, you just ignore it anyway and things
would end up more or less the same.

Post by Courtney Campbell
As for graphics much nicer to look at than ASCII, well, I'd much rather
look at my books then tv. In fact, I don't even watch TV. I do however
read quite frequently. ASCII just seems good enough for all those books,
but then maybe I really do need a movie of Tolkien's middle earth,
because all that ASCII in the books just wasn't as nice to look at.

They get in the way. If a game has graphics, that's time spent not on
gameplay. Cute animations cost time. With tiles or graphics you can fit
less clear information on a page. I don't care about graphics, I just
wish they'd go away.

Post by James Bulgin
Well, I think that's quite a different matter altogether. I'm referring only to
the use of ascii as a graphical overview. Descriptive text, as in a novel, is
not using characters to provide a quick representation of a scene, but using
words to weave together a world. I happen to be a very prolific reader, and
enjoy fantasy novels greatly. I also write, so I do have some perspective on
this matter. I just think that simply because they both use text characters,
their style and use of these is far too different to even compare.

yes, the argument was a specious strawman. ;-p

Post by James Bulgin

Post by Courtney Campbell
Tiles are the sign of a bad roguelike.

Why is this neccessarily true in and of itself??

The fact that graphics are a large enough time investment that if they
are around from the beginning gameplay suffers, (not to mention they
often require a mouse, that's a roguelike killer right there)

Post by James Bulgin

Post by Courtney Campbell
This thread is entirely pointless. Everyone will shout back and forth
what they believe. Half of the people won't even read the posts, and
everyone will go away pissed off, convinced that they are right, cause
let me tell you, no one is likely to change their mind. Everyone thinks
what they think, and you just have to learn to adapt to people who lcak
the ability to think critically. It's surprisingly easy once you get the
hang of it.

Well, actually, so far you seem to be the only person whose really getting
pissed off.....

Just IMHE.

Post by James Bulgin

Post by Courtney Campbell
It wasn't very nice of you to post a message that would lead to this
result, especially since you can just google groups it and be
entertained all the times it's happened in the past (as well as
answering your own question, but I guess you prefer to ask for help
without trying to answer the question for yourself)? :-)

Wasn't nice of me? I'm not trying to incite a riot, only a discussion.
Nothing I said in and of itself should be provokotive. Can't people discuss their
opinions and the reason for those opinions without insulting people?
Perhaps I SHOULD have searched for past threads, but I didn't think about it this
time. And I think your last statement is both unfair and untrue, but there's no
point in arguing about accusations. I'm not trying to provoke anyone or assert
that my point of view is more important or legitimate than anyone else's and
I'm sorry if anyone got that impression.

No, I've just been here and seen this before. It's been discussed to
death. My first reaction on needing to know anything is usually to see
if it's been talked about before. I don't see why expecting someone to
do a little research before they ask a question is unfair, and I don't
know what's untrue about it. I also didn't accuse you of anything. I
made a statement of opinion, noted that you could refrence a thread just
like this in google groups, noted that it would answer your question,
and noted that you didn't use this resource to answer the question for
yourself.

It seems to me that if you view this as an accusiation, perhaps there's
some truth in what I said. I don't see where I insulted anyone.
-Campbell

[Gerry Quinn]

Post by Courtney Campbell
They get in the way. If a game has graphics, that's time spent not on
gameplay. Cute animations cost time. With tiles or graphics you can fit
less clear information on a page. I don't care about graphics, I just
wish they'd go away.

That's like saying that if you buy a meal in a restaurant (or otherwise
are fed), and the plates are not cracked and dirty, too much time and
resources have been spent on buying / washing plates rather than on
cooking food, so the food must be inferior.

- Gerry Quinn

[ABCGi]

Post by Gerry Quinn

Post by Courtney Campbell
They get in the way. If a game has graphics, that's time spent not on
gameplay. Cute animations cost time. With tiles or graphics you can fit
less clear information on a page. I don't care about graphics, I just
wish they'd go away.

That's like saying that if you buy a meal in a restaurant (or otherwise
are fed), and the plates are not cracked and dirty, too much time and
resources have been spent on buying / washing plates rather than on
cooking food, so the food must be inferior.

hehe - fairer to say a meal with lots of garnish and fancy preparation
that was cooked crap was too much time spent on looks.

Let me confirm (like we don't know!) by recent Beyond H-World experience
that graphics is very labourous, and I'm not even trying to a decent
job. Ideally, if one is going to do good graphics, one needs a dedicated
artist - this is what I had in my Max Payne mod team and it was great.
Even if some of your graphics are reused;

* Programmers are rarely good artists
* It takes us longer than artists
* It removes a bottleneck = parallel development
* Feels good to programmer (ask for something and then it 'magically'
appears!)
* Feels good to artist (gets to see their creations running around the game)

Of course there are never enough artists, and they are all lazy
bohemians :) (joke)

[The Sheep]

Post by ABCGi
Of course there are never enough artists, and they are all lazy
bohemians :) (joke)

How true.
It's funny. I find it easier to get to work on my program
than to work on graphics, even when I enjoy doing graphics
much more. Split personality, or something?

[Hansjoerg Malthaner]

Post by The Sheep

Post by ABCGi
Of course there are never enough artists, and they are all lazy
bohemians :) (joke)

How true.
It's funny. I find it easier to get to work on my program
than to work on graphics, even when I enjoy doing graphics
much more. Split personality, or something?

Difficult things can be quite enjoyable, I see nothing strange here.
I rather tend to think that easy things tend to get boring quicly :)

c.u.
Hajo

[ABCGi]

Post by Hansjoerg Malthaner

Post by The Sheep

Post by ABCGi
Of course there are never enough artists, and they are all lazy
bohemians :) (joke)

How true.
It's funny. I find it easier to get to work on my program
than to work on graphics, even when I enjoy doing graphics
much more. Split personality, or something?

Difficult things can be quite enjoyable, I see nothing strange here.
I rather tend to think that easy things tend to get boring quicly :)

Sheep did a nice angel for me, and I've asked him to do Van Helsing's
body, I hope that email finds its way to the right personality :)

[Courtney Campbell]

Post by Gerry Quinn

Post by Courtney Campbell
They get in the way. If a game has graphics, that's time spent not on
gameplay. Cute animations cost time. With tiles or graphics you can fit
less clear information on a page. I don't care about graphics, I just
wish they'd go away.

That's like saying that if you buy a meal in a restaurant (or otherwise
are fed), and the plates are not cracked and dirty, too much time and
resources have been spent on buying / washing plates rather than on
cooking food, so the food must be inferior.

a buying/washing plates != graphics creation. One is done on plate use,
the other is done once and intergrated with the code.

Graphics (ones that are 'good') are a _substantial_ time investment
similar to code. Note that none of this is relevant if you hire a bunch
of artists. But we all know how many rl programmers do that.

Post by Gerry Quinn
- Gerry Quinn

-Campbell

[Glen Wheeler]

Post by Courtney Campbell
[..]
There is no tile that communicates more information then the name and
description of the monster I just hit.

Wrong. A tile may communicate clearly and succinctly that a human is not
only a mage, but old and haggard. He may look weak. This implies he has
low hitpoints.
What if the mage in a roguelike was not a weak fighter? Then the tile
could represent this clearly.
A textual description is not sent to the message buffer after every hit,
and thus does not count. Unless of course your `viewable monsters' window
contains descriptions.
Or are you arguing that the monster description window (also an option in
*bands) nullifies this? I would retort that it is a completely seperate
feature to ascii.

Post by Courtney Campbell
you could of course do the same with tiles. But the fact is, if a tile
is the same size as an ASCII character then it is hard to distinguish
them from each other. Whereas, it's easy to distinguish ASCII from
father away. Easier on the eyes. If you run larger tiles, then there's
no room for other information, and you can't see as large an area of the
board.

Tiles should be made large. I am using 64x64 for my tiles.
The game board is large enough. This is a matter of design regardless; if
you design your game to require a large board then either use a larger
resolution or smaller tile size. If the tile size approaches 16x16 then use
ascii.

Post by Courtney Campbell

Post by James Bulgin
While most tilesets will use different tiles for these items so that you can
tell this information at a glace. Makes it quicker if you're only interested
in picking up ranged weapons, for example.

IMHO, and I know people feel otherwise, It's much easier for me to parse
the screen for a '}', then somone's 32x32 idea of what a bow or any of
the other different pictures for other bows look like.

How laughable. My 7 year old sister could draw a picture of a bow and a
crossbow and you could tell the difference. But nobody can tell the
difference between } and } without `l'.

Post by Courtney Campbell

Post by James Bulgin
Also, it's
easy
to represent the fact that there might be items on the space a monster is
standing on, or stairs beneath that item (a fact that might sometimes be missed
without actually stepping on the tile) Again more information at your
fingertips without having to go out of your way to get it.

This is true, however then it becomes a question of wether this
additional information is worth the screen real estate you give up for
tiles that can communicate all these things clearly.

It is not a difficult task to place a monster and a potion in the same
square, and uses the exact same number of pixels.

Post by Courtney Campbell

Post by James Bulgin
Another fact is that a purely text based display preclude the possibility
of any gui elements which could make the user interface often much easier to
use.

Um, anything that takes my fingers off their roguelike homerow _does_
_not_ make my UI easier to use. I don't see how ever making me take my
hands off the keys is something that could enhance my game experience in
any conceivable way. I mean, If you can tell me how it's going to make
my interface 'easier to use' let me know.
I suppose you could define 'easier to use' as 'a pain in the ass' you
could make that argument. :-)

I am currently deciding whether or not to include mouse support for my
game. We have implemented drop-down menus from the ui, which are
roll-your-own style, and do not look anything like any GUI I've seen before.
Because they are a gameplay device. I plan on using the mouse in a variety
of commands.
One hand on the keypad/mouse and one on the keyboard. Press 'l', click on
square. Need to know inventory? Click on the + next to inventory. What
about spells? Click the +. Skills? Same deal.
You are ignoring the essence of good design. If one designs for these
features then they are not poor. If one designs for the mouse to be useless
and a `pain in the ass' then it will be. But if not, then why not let it
augment play?

Post by Courtney Campbell

Post by James Bulgin
Instead of always looking up a command in a reference
list, then typing it in, one could simply click on an button for the
command. Not a huge thing, perhaps, but it still makes things run that little
extra bit smoother.

<enter><scan list><a><enter>
or
<Take hand off keyboard to grab mouse><move mouse to menu><Click
menu><find item in menu><select item><Put hand back on keyboard>
There is _no_ doubt that it's quicker to hit <enter><a><enter> Then to
take your hand off the keyboard. hands off the keyboard _bad_. _+*BAD*+_.

There is also no doubt that upon first play of the game you don't know of
that feature. Did you read all the help files first? Will every one of
your users read it?
What is the great evil in letting a user get a context menu above a tile
letting them know what they can do to it? With the keyboard shortcut
highlited, this would be a very inviting feature for the game.

Post by Courtney Campbell
The most important factor, is that in the 127th hour of Disgaea, or my
72nd game of CIV II this year, or my millionth game of Heros III, or my
umpteenth game of Steamband I don't give a shit what the graphics look
like. I wouldn't care if they were colored squares. Dots. Whatever.
Little nifty animations? A time cost to active the power is all that
represents. If you removed every picture from those games and had blue
boxes with a letter or two to represent stuff, it would be just as fun.
The game takes place in my head.

Would the game be just as fun the first time you played it? Would it have
been as clear? If everything was a different RGB colour of dot? Would you
take a screenshot, examine the colour of the pixel in a picture editor, then
consult a table?
Hey, you opened the door.

Post by Courtney Campbell
I don't understand this at all really. I mean, I _know_ people like
graphics, I just can't for the life of me figure out why. I mean, I
really have played a lot of CIV. At this point, I don't really care at
all what the latest settler looks like, I'm just interested in finding
out as quickly as possible where it is.

Right. You've played ALOT of civ. So have I. But the first time I
played, that little image of a wagon told me that it was something
settler-like. Once I realised what it was, a substitution occurs in the
players mind that contains more information, such as it's atk/def/mov values
and possible orders one can give it. But it's the initial exposure that
counts. If it was a pink dot, I don't think I'd really have played civ very
much.

Post by Courtney Campbell
[..]
It doesn't matter how nice your tiles are - I still won't give a damn
about them in my 5000ths game. I'd rather you spent the time making sure
the gameplay kicked ass. If you have an artist, I'd rather _he_ spend
time making the gameplay kick ass.

The artist is. Gameplay is a function of several variables, immersion
being one of them. Such things as aesthetics and ambience, mood, etc are
all a factor in this `immersion'.
DiabloII would be a good example. I have seen people encounter the bosses
in diabloII for the first time and jump out of their chair. They sweat with
excitement. The boss is large and terrifying. I don't do that with
*Morgoth*. It is much more clinical.
If someone sweats with excitement while playing an ascii based game, then
great. I know I've been excited before, but it had nothing to do with ascii
graphics.
The argument that ascii increases gameplay is a joke. So is the similar
one that graphical tiles decrease gameplay.

Post by Courtney Campbell
[..]
Tiles are the sign of a bad roguelike.

Wow. This is the one statement which made me reply to your post.
In fact, it is a terrible representation of you as a person. Would you
like to amend it? Really, so prejudicial. So much of your argument is
ridiculous fluff as it stands, being the things which I've snipped out, and
you come out with this?
What does a fridge have to do with a holy war? What holy war?

Post by Courtney Campbell
This thread is entirely pointless. Everyone will shout back and forth
what they believe. Half of the people won't even read the posts, and
everyone will go away pissed off, convinced that they are right, cause
let me tell you, no one is likely to change their mind. Everyone thinks
what they think, and you just have to learn to adapt to people who lcak
the ability to think critically. It's surprisingly easy once you get the
hang of it.

So you are thinking critically when you state that ``tiles are the sign of
a bad roguelike.''? Is that your opinion?

Post by Courtney Campbell
[..]
me? I would have asked in irc. Less disruption than something like this
causes on usenet.
That's enough. I'm going to stop before I start to weaken my own
arguments.

Too late. How can you have an argument with sweeping generalisations as
it's basis?

[Courtney Campbell]

Post by Glen Wheeler

Post by Courtney Campbell
[..]
There is no tile that communicates more information then the name and
description of the monster I just hit.

Wrong. A tile may communicate clearly and succinctly that a human is not
only a mage, but old and haggard. He may look weak. This implies he has
low hitpoints.
What if the mage in a roguelike was not a weak fighter? Then the tile
could represent this clearly.
A textual description is not sent to the message buffer after every hit,
and thus does not count. Unless of course your `viewable monsters' window
contains descriptions.
Or are you arguing that the monster description window (also an option in
*bands) nullifies this? I would retort that it is a completely seperate
feature to ascii.

If I were playing in a roguelike, and this was not in the text
description (carrying a sword, old, whatever) than no matter what the
tile showed, I would assume it was wrong.

Post by Glen Wheeler

Post by Courtney Campbell
you could of course do the same with tiles. But the fact is, if a tile
is the same size as an ASCII character then it is hard to distinguish
them from each other. Whereas, it's easy to distinguish ASCII from
father away. Easier on the eyes. If you run larger tiles, then there's
no room for other information, and you can't see as large an area of the
board.

Tiles should be made large. I am using 64x64 for my tiles.
The game board is large enough. This is a matter of design regardless; if
you design your game to require a large board then either use a larger
resolution or smaller tile size. If the tile size approaches 16x16 then use
ascii.

right. Screen real estate is precious.

Post by Glen Wheeler

Post by Courtney Campbell

Post by James Bulgin
While most tilesets will use different tiles for these items so that
you

can

Post by Courtney Campbell

Post by James Bulgin
tell this information at a glace. Makes it quicker if you're only

interested

Post by Courtney Campbell

Post by James Bulgin
in picking up ranged weapons, for example.

IMHO, and I know people feel otherwise, It's much easier for me to parse
the screen for a '}', then somone's 32x32 idea of what a bow or any of
the other different pictures for other bows look like.

How laughable. My 7 year old sister could draw a picture of a bow and a
crossbow and you could tell the difference. But nobody can tell the
difference between } and } without `l'.

"parse the screen of a '}'" means, out of all the characters on the
screen, find the one that is a ranged attack weapon. It is easier for me
to look at an ASCII screen and pick out the '}', then it would be for me
to look at a screen of tiles, and pick out the one that's the bow.

Post by Glen Wheeler

Post by Courtney Campbell

Post by James Bulgin
Also, it's
easy
to represent the fact that there might be items on the space a
monster

is

Post by Courtney Campbell

Post by James Bulgin
standing on, or stairs beneath that item (a fact that might sometimes
be
missed
without actually stepping on the tile) Again more information at your
fingertips without having to go out of your way to get it.

This is true, however then it becomes a question of wether this
additional information is worth the screen real estate you give up for
tiles that can communicate all these things clearly.

It is not a difficult task to place a monster and a potion in the same
square, and uses the exact same number of pixels.

uh, really? with 64x64 tiles? Got a link to a pic?

Post by Glen Wheeler

Post by Courtney Campbell

Post by James Bulgin
Another fact is that a purely text based display preclude the

possibility

Post by Courtney Campbell

Post by James Bulgin
of any gui elements which could make the user interface often much

easier to

Post by Courtney Campbell

Post by James Bulgin
use.

Um, anything that takes my fingers off their roguelike homerow _does_
_not_ make my UI easier to use. I don't see how ever making me take my
hands off the keys is something that could enhance my game experience in
any conceivable way. I mean, If you can tell me how it's going to make
my interface 'easier to use' let me know.
I suppose you could define 'easier to use' as 'a pain in the ass' you
could make that argument. :-)

I am currently deciding whether or not to include mouse support for my
game. We have implemented drop-down menus from the ui, which are
roll-your-own style, and do not look anything like any GUI I've seen before.
Because they are a gameplay device. I plan on using the mouse in a variety
of commands.
One hand on the keypad/mouse and one on the keyboard. Press 'l', click on
square. Need to know inventory? Click on the + next to inventory. What
about spells? Click the +. Skills? Same deal.
You are ignoring the essence of good design. If one designs for these
features then they are not poor. If one designs for the mouse to be useless
and a `pain in the ass' then it will be. But if not, then why not let it
augment play?

'one hand on the keypad/mouse and one on the keyboard'.

This is my opinion, but if the game forces me to take my hand off the
numpad and move it to the mouse and back, I will not be a happy little
player. As far as I'm concerned, my hands should never leave the
keyboard. It appears that this is a common feeling. I have no
statistical data on how common.

just FYI, I define anything that requires me to take my hands off the
keyboard is defined as a 'pain in the ass'.

Post by Glen Wheeler

Post by Courtney Campbell

Post by James Bulgin
Instead of always looking up a command in a reference
list, then typing it in, one could simply click on an button for the
command. Not a huge thing, perhaps, but it still makes things run
that

little

Post by Courtney Campbell

Post by James Bulgin
extra bit smoother.

<enter><scan list><a><enter>
or
<Take hand off keyboard to grab mouse><move mouse to menu><Click
menu><find item in menu><select item><Put hand back on keyboard>
There is _no_ doubt that it's quicker to hit <enter><a><enter> Then to
take your hand off the keyboard. hands off the keyboard _bad_. _+*BAD*+_.

There is also no doubt that upon first play of the game you don't know of
that feature. Did you read all the help files first? Will every one of
your users read it?
What is the great evil in letting a user get a context menu above a tile
letting them know what they can do to it? With the keyboard shortcut
highlited, this would be a very inviting feature for the game.

Well, I found it in my first game of Heng, and I don't think I read
anything but the r/c descriptions.

By the way, you should note that I know there is the possiblity that
something using graphics could be done right. I just have yet to see it
done.

Post by Glen Wheeler

Post by Courtney Campbell
The most important factor, is that in the 127th hour of Disgaea, or my
72nd game of CIV II this year, or my millionth game of Heros III, or my
umpteenth game of Steamband I don't give a shit what the graphics look
like. I wouldn't care if they were colored squares. Dots. Whatever.
Little nifty animations? A time cost to active the power is all that
represents. If you removed every picture from those games and had blue
boxes with a letter or two to represent stuff, it would be just as fun.
The game takes place in my head.

Would the game be just as fun the first time you played it?

For me the fun is the game, I play ASCII games all the time that are fun
when I first play them, so if Disgaea were in block with name form I
imagine it would be fun. (But you're right about this, it is _more_ fun
with the graphics the _first_ time through, for a 2-D Tatics game. :-)

Post by Glen Wheeler
Would it
have
been as clear?

Yes, possibly more so.

Post by Glen Wheeler
If everything was a different RGB colour of dot? Would
you take a screenshot, examine the colour of the pixel in a picture editor,
then consult a table?
Hey, you opened the door.

Ok, Not 'dots' as in pixel dots, but dots as in blue / red / green color
circles with titles. If the red dot is laharl, then i don't need a
table. I use my memory for stuff like that. You only need one color for
the monsters there. :-)

Post by Glen Wheeler

Post by Courtney Campbell
I don't understand this at all really. I mean, I _know_ people like
graphics, I just can't for the life of me figure out why. I mean, I
really have played a lot of CIV. At this point, I don't really care at
all what the latest settler looks like, I'm just interested in finding
out as quickly as possible where it is.

Right. You've played ALOT of civ. So have I. But the first time I
played, that little image of a wagon told me that it was something
settler-like. Once I realised what it was, a substitution occurs in the
players mind that contains more information, such as it's atk/def/mov
values and possible orders one can give it. But it's the initial exposure that
counts. If it was a pink dot, I don't think I'd really have played civ
very much.

Inital exposure? Haven't you ever played a board game? Risk? I have a
risk set that uses colored blocks as armies, somehow that didn't keep me
from playing it.

Yes, if they used a pink dot for the settler, I wouldn't have cared.
Hell, I would have played civ in ASCII.

Post by Glen Wheeler

Post by Courtney Campbell
[..]
It doesn't matter how nice your tiles are - I still won't give a damn
about them in my 5000ths game. I'd rather you spent the time making sure
the gameplay kicked ass. If you have an artist, I'd rather _he_ spend
time making the gameplay kick ass.

The artist is. Gameplay is a function of several variables, immersion
being one of them. Such things as aesthetics and ambience, mood, etc are
all a factor in this `immersion'.

In addition to your own imagination.

Post by Glen Wheeler
DiabloII would be a good example. I have seen people encounter the bosses
in diabloII for the first time and jump out of their chair. They sweat with
excitement. The boss is large and terrifying. I don't do that with
*Morgoth*.

I don't know, the first time I reached him I was scared shitless. Maybe
you really do have trouble immersing yourself in roguelikes. rest
assured that this is not the case for me. I can also see the *TERRIFYING
TILE OF DOOM* right now. heh. I just use my imagination.

Post by Glen Wheeler
It is much more clinical.
If someone sweats with excitement while playing an ascii based game, then
great. I know I've been excited before, but it had nothing to do with ascii
graphics.
The argument that ascii increases gameplay is a joke. So is the similar
one that graphical tiles decrease gameplay.

No one is making those arguments. ASCII does not detract from gameplay,
and graphics often do is the arguments. See above for argumentation.

Post by Glen Wheeler

Post by Courtney Campbell
[..]
Tiles are the sign of a bad roguelike.

Wow. This is the one statement which made me reply to your post.

good.

Post by Glen Wheeler
In fact, it is a terrible representation of you as a person.

Excuse me?

Post by Glen Wheeler
Would you
like to amend it? Really, so prejudicial. So much of your argument is
ridiculous fluff as it stands, being the things which I've snipped out,
and you come out with this? What does a fridge have to do with a holy war?
What holy war?

I don't need to amend it. Limited time exists, and time spent on tiles
detracts from time spent on gameplay. Therefore when you see tiles, it's
a sign that more time could have been spent on gameplay.

I've replied to this at length in the other post.

After this reply I'm going to killfile you. HAND.

Post by Glen Wheeler
So you are thinking critically when you state that ``tiles are the sign of
a bad roguelike.''? Is that your opinion?

yes.

Post by Glen Wheeler

Post by Courtney Campbell
[..]
me? I would have asked in irc. Less disruption than something like this
causes on usenet.
That's enough. I'm going to stop before I start to weaken my own
arguments.

Too late. How can you have an argument with sweeping generalisations
as it's basis?

As I've noted, it's an opinion.
-Campbell

[Hansjoerg Malthaner]

Post by Courtney Campbell

Post by Glen Wheeler
It is not a difficult task to place a monster and a potion in the same
square, and uses the exact same number of pixels.

uh, really? with 64x64 tiles? Got a link to a pic?

Glen doesn't have screenshots available yet, but you could take a look
at my project:
http://h-hworld.simugraph.com

It uses tiles of up to 128x128 pixels, but not every item uses the full
tile size.

The screenshots on the screenshot page aren't really up to date, so to
get a proper impression I suggest to download it and run the game.

**

This Angband offspring uses 64x64 pixel tiles:
http://www.simugraph.com/simutrans/iso_angband/

It's very unfinished, unstable, but it should give an idea how detailed
a 64x64 pixel tile can be. It uses ASCII letters as replacements fro
not-yet-existing artwork, probably this is very close to your ASCII-only
preference. Still it's very graphical in it's appearance :)

Some more screenshots from the related project Iso-Tome:

Loading Image...
Loading Image...
Loading Image...

IMO 64x64 tiles are well capable displaying a lot of detail. This is
work in progress, there are still some mistakes in the display module.

Post by Courtney Campbell
-Campbell

c.u.
Hajo

[ABCGi]

Post by Hansjoerg Malthaner
Glen doesn't have screenshots available yet, but you could take a look
http://h-hworld.simugraph.com

Thats http://h-world.simugraph.com

:)

[Hansjoerg Malthaner]

Post by ABCGi

Post by Hansjoerg Malthaner
Glen doesn't have screenshots available yet, but you could take a look
http://h-hworld.simugraph.com

Thats http://h-world.simugraph.com
:)

Thanks :)

c.u. Hajo

[ABCGi]

Hansjoerg Malthaner wrote:

Some more screenshots from the related project Iso-Tome:
http://www.cis-comsoft.com/~juergen/isobree1.jpg
http://www.cis-comsoft.com/~juergen/isoorc1.jpg
http://www.cis-comsoft.com/~juergen/isoorc2.jpg

---------------------------

Those look "choice"! Where do we get this download? I tried the link on
your page to ISO-TOME project and it is pernangband which is ToME but
not graphical at all???
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pernband/

*confused*

ToMETik is another (that can be downloaded and played) that is
developing as a nice graphical RL which uses David Gervais's tiles;
http://pousse.rapiere.free.fr/tome

r.g.r.n had a nice link to this old C64 remake of a graphical/sound RL;
http://squidfighter.sourceforge.net/fargoal/

[Hansjoerg Malthaner]

Post by Hansjoerg Malthaner
http://www.cis-comsoft.com/~juergen/isobree1.jpg
http://www.cis-comsoft.com/~juergen/isoorc1.jpg
http://www.cis-comsoft.com/~juergen/isoorc2.jpg
Those look "choice"! Where do we get this download? I tried the link on
your page to ISO-TOME project and it is pernangband which is ToME but
not graphical at all???
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pernband/

IIRC Juergen Frieling hasn't commited his code to the CVS yet, but I'm
not 100% sure about that. Thus I assume there are no downloads available
yet.

OTOH my old Iso-Tome code and images still ought to be in the ToME CVS
but probably in a non-working state becuase noone updated it for at
least two years.

c.u.
Hajo

[ABCGi]

Post by Hansjoerg Malthaner

Post by Hansjoerg Malthaner
http://www.cis-comsoft.com/~juergen/isobree1.jpg
http://www.cis-comsoft.com/~juergen/isoorc1.jpg
http://www.cis-comsoft.com/~juergen/isoorc2.jpg
Those look "choice"! Where do we get this download? I tried the link
on your page to ISO-TOME project and it is pernangband which is ToME
but not graphical at all???
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pernband/

IIRC Juergen Frieling hasn't commited his code to the CVS yet, but I'm
not 100% sure about that. Thus I assume there are no downloads available
yet.
OTOH my old Iso-Tome code and images still ought to be in the ToME CVS
but probably in a non-working state becuase noone updated it for at
least two years.

Isn't the point of CVS that it be the current snap shot of the code!?!
What's the use of a source safe type sharing of code if its not kept
updated. I guess there is some point, I'll stop ranting.

Oh well - what a tease :( Great looking screenies though. Are your
images any different from those used in Iso-Angband?

I'll be interested in downloading a release of it when it comes, I hope
he announces it here and/or r.g.r.a.

[Hansjoerg Malthaner]

Post by ABCGi

Post by Hansjoerg Malthaner
http://www.cis-comsoft.com/~juergen/isobree1.jpg
http://www.cis-comsoft.com/~juergen/isoorc1.jpg
http://www.cis-comsoft.com/~juergen/isoorc2.jpg

[...]

Post by ABCGi
Oh well - what a tease :( Great looking screenies though. Are your
images any different from those used in Iso-Angband?

The tiles in H-World are 128x128 while those in Iso-Angband are 64x64
I've reused a very few from the Iso-Angband image set - but IIRC the
tiger bug is currently the only images that is used in both.

c.u.
Hajo

[ABCGi]

Post by Hansjoerg Malthaner

Post by ABCGi

Post by Hansjoerg Malthaner
http://www.cis-comsoft.com/~juergen/isobree1.jpg
http://www.cis-comsoft.com/~juergen/isoorc1.jpg
http://www.cis-comsoft.com/~juergen/isoorc2.jpg

[...]

Post by ABCGi
Oh well - what a tease :( Great looking screenies though. Are your
images any different from those used in Iso-Angband?

The tiles in H-World are 128x128 while those in Iso-Angband are 64x64
I've reused a very few from the Iso-Angband image set - but IIRC the
tiger bug is currently the only images that is used in both.

Oh ok. I was actually asking whether your tiles in Iso-Tome (pernband)
were the same as the ones in Iso-Angband.

[Hansjoerg Malthaner]

[...]

Post by ABCGi

Post by Hansjoerg Malthaner
The tiles in H-World are 128x128 while those in Iso-Angband are 64x64
I've reused a very few from the Iso-Angband image set - but IIRC the
tiger bug is currently the only images that is used in both.

Oh ok. I was actually asking whether your tiles in Iso-Tome (pernband)
were the same as the ones in Iso-Angband.

Until Juergen Frieling took over the ToME version, they were mostly the
same. Now the ToME branch will have a lot of David Gervais tiles added,
while I wanted to try something different with the Angband branch ; but
I have no time to really work on it. H-World and Simutrans most often
are important to me.

c.u.
Hajo

[Glen Wheeler]

Post by Courtney Campbell

Post by Glen Wheeler
Wrong. A tile may communicate clearly and succinctly that a human is not
only a mage, but old and haggard. He may look weak. This implies he has
low hitpoints.
What if the mage in a roguelike was not a weak fighter? Then the tile
could represent this clearly.
A textual description is not sent to the message buffer after every hit,
and thus does not count. Unless of course your `viewable monsters' window
contains descriptions.
Or are you arguing that the monster description window (also an option in
*bands) nullifies this? I would retort that it is a completely seperate
feature to ascii.

If I were playing in a roguelike, and this was not in the text
description (carrying a sword, old, whatever) than no matter what the
tile showed, I would assume it was wrong.

Note that I was talking about a monster description window. Assuming that
the tiles, drawn by the people who are creating the game, are wrong is not a
good idea. I know that some things I will put in my tiles are going to be
clues on an effective strategy. Textual descriptions being completely
seperate to ascii, can do the same. But ascii alone cannot.

Post by Courtney Campbell

Post by Glen Wheeler
How laughable. My 7 year old sister could draw a picture of a bow and a
crossbow and you could tell the difference. But nobody can tell the
difference between } and } without `l'.

"parse the screen of a '}'" means, out of all the characters on the
screen, find the one that is a ranged attack weapon. It is easier for me
to look at an ASCII screen and pick out the '}', then it would be for me
to look at a screen of tiles, and pick out the one that's the bow.

I did not understand what you meant by the phrase ``parse the screen of a
'}' ''.
But surely you must admit; after playing roguelikes in ascii for so many
hours, one learns this ability reasonably quickly? I am more curious as to
how well people are at it on average, including regular players and
non-regular. I know many people who had to play with ascii for a long time
before accepting it, and becoming comfortable, let alone enjoying it. Only
at my hounding did they even give roguelikes a chance.

Post by Courtney Campbell

Post by Glen Wheeler

Post by Courtney Campbell
This is true, however then it becomes a question of wether this
additional information is worth the screen real estate you give up for
tiles that can communicate all these things clearly.

It is not a difficult task to place a monster and a potion in the same
square, and uses the exact same number of pixels.

uh, really? with 64x64 tiles? Got a link to a pic?

How about I just let you in on the (simplified) theory.

1. Draw the ground.
2. Draw the objects lying on the ground.
3. Draw the monster standing on the objects.

Sure, sometimes one will obscure the other. But that isn't such a bad
thing when the other option, ascii, where the `top' thing will definitely
obscure the rest.

Post by Courtney Campbell

Post by Glen Wheeler
I am currently deciding whether or not to include mouse support for my
game. We have implemented drop-down menus from the ui, which are
roll-your-own style, and do not look anything like any GUI I've seen before.
Because they are a gameplay device. I plan on using the mouse in a variety
of commands.
One hand on the keypad/mouse and one on the keyboard. Press 'l',

click

Post by Courtney Campbell

Post by Glen Wheeler
on
square. Need to know inventory? Click on the + next to inventory.

What

Post by Courtney Campbell

Post by Glen Wheeler
about spells? Click the +. Skills? Same deal.
You are ignoring the essence of good design. If one designs for these
features then they are not poor. If one designs for the mouse to be useless
and a `pain in the ass' then it will be. But if not, then why not let it
augment play?

'one hand on the keypad/mouse and one on the keyboard'.
This is my opinion, but if the game forces me to take my hand off the
numpad and move it to the mouse and back, I will not be a happy little
player. As far as I'm concerned, my hands should never leave the
keyboard. It appears that this is a common feeling. I have no
statistical data on how common.

The mouse will be there as an option. I will be making all efforts to
optimise for speed for players who wish to play quickly, and this will be
with both hands on teh keyboard.

But using the mouse for tasks to get people used to the game, and
designing the game so that the mouse isn't completely crippled compared to
the keyboard is IMO A Good Thing.

Post by Courtney Campbell
By the way, you should note that I know there is the possiblity that
something using graphics could be done right. I just have yet to see it
done.

Strange how that directly contradicts what you stated before;

"Tiles are the sign of a bad roguelike."

THE sign you say. Freudian slip? I don't care how you spin it. This is
incorrect and contradictory to what you just said above.

Post by Courtney Campbell

Post by Glen Wheeler
Would the game be just as fun the first time you played it?

For me the fun is the game, I play ASCII games all the time that are fun
when I first play them, so if Disgaea were in block with name form I
imagine it would be fun. (But you're right about this, it is _more_ fun
with the graphics the _first_ time through, for a 2-D Tatics game. :-)

Huzzah. I am in somewhat agreeance that after a few plays through a game
the graphics become a mere trigger in one's mind for your own mental data
structures; but so much that goes on in people's minds is influenced by how
they learnt it. I am surrounded by people who would love a roguelike game
if only it was a little easier to play and enjoy.

Post by Courtney Campbell

Post by Glen Wheeler
If everything was a different RGB colour of dot? Would
you take a screenshot, examine the colour of the pixel in a picture editor,
then consult a table?
Hey, you opened the door.

Ok, Not 'dots' as in pixel dots, but dots as in blue / red / green color
circles with titles. If the red dot is laharl, then i don't need a
table. I use my memory for stuff like that. You only need one color for
the monsters there. :-)

Yes...I was being somewhat snide. Apologies.

Post by Courtney Campbell

Post by Glen Wheeler
Right. You've played ALOT of civ. So have I. But the first time I
played, that little image of a wagon told me that it was something
settler-like. Once I realised what it was, a substitution occurs in the
players mind that contains more information, such as it's atk/def/mov
values and possible orders one can give it. But it's the initial exposure that
counts. If it was a pink dot, I don't think I'd really have played civ
very much.

Inital exposure? Haven't you ever played a board game? Risk? I have a
risk set that uses colored blocks as armies, somehow that didn't keep me
from playing it.

So do I. A board game is not what somebody playing civ thinks of. Not
the one's I've shown civ to at least. And I needed to show civ to alot, so
we could play multiplayer.

Post by Courtney Campbell
Yes, if they used a pink dot for the settler, I wouldn't have cared.
Hell, I would have played civ in ASCII.

You my good sir are in the minority.

Post by Courtney Campbell

Post by Glen Wheeler
DiabloII would be a good example. I have seen people encounter the bosses
in diabloII for the first time and jump out of their chair. They sweat with
excitement. The boss is large and terrifying. I don't do that with
*Morgoth*.

I don't know, the first time I reached him I was scared shitless. Maybe
you really do have trouble immersing yourself in roguelikes. rest
assured that this is not the case for me. I can also see the *TERRIFYING
TILE OF DOOM* right now. heh. I just use my imagination.

Ascii graphics appear clinical to me. The game plays as if it were a
mathematics exam. I want my game to be a *game*. Not an exam.

Post by Courtney Campbell
No one is making those arguments. ASCII does not detract from gameplay,
and graphics often do is the arguments. See above for argumentation.

Sorry? Graphics often do the arguments?
If you are saying that ascii does not detract from gameplay, then I'd have
to say that for many people you are wrong.
Two of my best friends are diehard gamers and they gave up on roguelikes a
long time ago. The reason was not the graphics, but abstract things like
immersion, feeling and tension. No, they didn't suck. They just didn't
enjoy it.
Yet they enjoyed the tk version of ZAngband quite alot. We all stopped
playing that though; it was broken gameplay-wise.

Post by Courtney Campbell

Post by Glen Wheeler

Post by Courtney Campbell
[..]
Tiles are the sign of a bad roguelike.

Wow. This is the one statement which made me reply to your post.

good.

Post by Glen Wheeler
In fact, it is a terrible representation of you as a person.

Excuse me?

Perhaps terrible is too strong a word. But sweeping derogatory statements
such as the above are generally the result of extreme prejudice or extreme
ignorance. I did and still do not attribute you with either.
Say, ''Poor presentation is the sign of a good meal'' as another example.
Now that I think about it, terrible is too strong a word.

Post by Courtney Campbell

Post by Glen Wheeler
Would you
like to amend it? Really, so prejudicial. So much of your argument is
ridiculous fluff as it stands, being the things which I've snipped out,
and you come out with this? What does a fridge have to do with a holy war?
What holy war?

I don't need to amend it. Limited time exists, and time spent on tiles
detracts from time spent on gameplay. Therefore when you see tiles, it's
a sign that more time could have been spent on gameplay.

As the other respondent posted, you are basing your argument on incorrect
assumptions. Time spent on graphics is not wasted. While I draw that orc,
I am thinking more on how to make him be more interesting in the game. I'm
thinking about that bug and that issue in the code.
What I'm not doing is making any bad decisions and coding them up
immediately. I'm carefully coinsidering every single point of design
allowed by the delay (quite significant too) introduced by graphics.

Post by Courtney Campbell
After this reply I'm going to killfile you. HAND.

Hm. Am I meant to throw a hissy fit now? Do we play killfile wars? Is
that `HAND' statement mean to enrage? I'm not sure, as this is the first
time somebody has actually *told* me they are going to killfile me. Most of
the time if somebody has a real problem with what I'm saying they will just
do so silently.
What I will say though is that I'm not killfiling you. Typically I will
only killfile spammers.

I am sad this has happenned. I really was a little provoked by your
emotional response, but am still genuinely interested by your opinion since
I consider you an intelligent individual. Ah well.

[Graeme Dice]

<snip>

Post by Courtney Campbell
You want to know why people like ASCII? No one wasted any time doing any
shit that doesn't matter during the course of a randomly generated
dungeon crawl.

<snip>

Post by Courtney Campbell
Tiles are the sign of a bad roguelike.

Your conclusion doesn't follow from the evidence. I suppose you believe
that Nethack with tiles is a worse game than Nethack without tiles.

Post by Courtney Campbell
It wasn't very nice of you to post a message that would lead to this
result, especially since you can just google groups it and be
entertained all the times it's happened in the past (as well as
answering your own question, but I guess you prefer to ask for help
without trying to answer the question for yourself)? :-)

You might want to stop calling the kettle black, since yours has been
just about the first incendiary post in this thread.

Post by Courtney Campbell
That's enough. I'm going to stop before I start to weaken my own
arguments.

It's too late for that. Stating opinions as fact pretty much destroys
any credibility in your arguments.

[Courtney Campbell]

Post by Graeme Dice
<snip>

Post by Courtney Campbell
You want to know why people like ASCII? No one wasted any time doing any
shit that doesn't matter during the course of a randomly generated
dungeon crawl.

<snip>

Post by Courtney Campbell
Tiles are the sign of a bad roguelike.

Your conclusion doesn't follow from the evidence. I suppose you believe
that Nethack with tiles is a worse game than Nethack without tiles.

No, because you cut out that evidence. Let me restate.

There is a finite amount of time a finite number of people can devote to
the game, the more time spent refineing gameplay balance and adding that
crucial fun factor the more enjoyable the game becomes. Most roguelikes
are made by very few people. If tiles are created, a fairly large
propotion of time has to be spent creating these tiles (between 20-40%
of the time that would be spent working on the code) in order for them
to be good. And this finite time is spent on tiles is _not_ spent on
gameplay, thus indicating that out of the finite amount of time that
people have to make a game tiles are a sign that not enough was devoted
to game play.

Note that my statement is that Tiles are a *sign* of a bad roguelike,
that that it *must* be a bad roguelike if it has tiles.

Post by Graeme Dice

Post by Courtney Campbell
It wasn't very nice of you to post a message that would lead to this
result, especially since you can just google groups it and be
entertained all the times it's happened in the past (as well as
answering your own question, but I guess you prefer to ask for help
without trying to answer the question for yourself)? :-)

You might want to stop calling the kettle black, since yours has been
just about the first incendiary post in this thread.

Ah, no that would be the post that started the thread, or prehaps if
we're not being cute, your reply to me.

What, exactly was it about my post that made it 'incendiary'? everyone
else seems to be having an actual disscussion with me.

Post by Graeme Dice

Post by Courtney Campbell
That's enough. I'm going to stop before I start to weaken my own
arguments.

It's too late for that. Stating opinions as fact pretty much destroys
any credibility in your arguments.

I will gladly allow that it is my opinion that tiles are the sign of a
bad roguelike, I did not mean to indicate it as fact, Though there are
_strong_ quantifiable factors that weigh in my favor. I'm not entirely
sure of the context of my statement in the original message, so I will
clarify that I did not mean to state it as fact.

But I'm certainly willing to hear a list of these wonderful tile based
roguelikes that I'm missing out on. :-) They have a newsgroup somewhere
I've missed?
-Campbell
P.S. Obviously I'm talking about roguelikes that were made with tiles
from the ground up, someone who isn't the maintainer who makes tiles for
a game escapes my reasoning above. You'll still note the majority of
players choose not to use those tiles.

[Michael Blackney]

Post by Courtney Campbell

Post by Graeme Dice

Post by Courtney Campbell
Tiles are the sign of a bad roguelike.

Your conclusion doesn't follow from the evidence. I suppose you
believe that Nethack with tiles is a worse game than Nethack
without tiles.

No, because you cut out that evidence. Let me restate.
There is a finite amount of time a finite number of people can devote
to the game, the more time spent refineing gameplay balance and
adding that crucial fun factor the more enjoyable the game becomes.
Most roguelikes are made by very few people. If tiles are created, a
fairly large propotion of time has to be spent creating these tiles
(between 20-40%
of the time that would be spent working on the code) in order for them
to be good. And this finite time is spent on tiles is _not_ spent on
gameplay, thus indicating that out of the finite amount of time that
people have to make a game tiles are a sign that not enough was
devoted to game play.

So it follows that all games are exactly as good as the number of man
hours spent making them?

Post by Courtney Campbell
P.S. Obviously I'm talking about roguelikes that were made with tiles
from the ground up, someone who isn't the maintainer who makes tiles
for a game escapes my reasoning above. You'll still note the majority
of players choose not to use those tiles.

There are as many shitty ASCII roguelikes indev as their are tile-based
ones. The most popular roguelikes from r.g.r.d are H-World and
Gearhead. Both have been developed by a single person and both have
tiles, H-World since inception and Gearhead only more recently.

[Graeme Dice]

<snip>

Post by Courtney Campbell

Post by Graeme Dice
Your conclusion doesn't follow from the evidence. I suppose you believe
that Nethack with tiles is a worse game than Nethack without tiles.

No, because you cut out that evidence. Let me restate.
There is a finite amount of time a finite number of people can devote to
the game, the more time spent refineing gameplay balance and adding that
crucial fun factor the more enjoyable the game becomes. Most roguelikes
are made by very few people. If tiles are created, a fairly large
propotion of time has to be spent creating these tiles (between 20-40%
of the time that would be spent working on the code) in order for them
to be good. And this finite time is spent on tiles is _not_ spent on
gameplay, thus indicating that out of the finite amount of time that
people have to make a game tiles are a sign that not enough was devoted
to game play.

You've made the assumption that the total amount of time that can be
spent on the program is limited. This is not the case, so your
conclusion doesn't follow.

Post by Courtney Campbell

Post by Graeme Dice
You might want to stop calling the kettle black, since yours has been
just about the first incendiary post in this thread.

Ah, no that would be the post that started the thread, or prehaps if
we're not being cute, your reply to me.
What, exactly was it about my post that made it 'incendiary'? everyone
else seems to be having an actual disscussion with me.

Maybe its entirety where you start ranting about a "holy war" and how a
person shouldn't post on-topic things to a public newsgroup.

Post by Courtney Campbell

Post by Graeme Dice

Post by Courtney Campbell
That's enough. I'm going to stop before I start to weaken my own
arguments.

It's too late for that. Stating opinions as fact pretty much destroys
any credibility in your arguments.

I will gladly allow that it is my opinion that tiles are the sign of a
bad roguelike, I did not mean to indicate it as fact, Though there are
_strong_ quantifiable factors that weigh in my favor. I'm not entirely
sure of the context of my statement in the original message, so I will
clarify that I did not mean to state it as fact.

I've yet to see actual evidence that supports your claim that its easier
to pick out an ascii character that shows a difference between a ranged
and melee weapon than an icon of both items.

Graeme Dice

[David Damerell]

Post by James Bulgin
actually use it. Yet it turns out that most of you would rather that than a
graphical mode at all. And this raises the question of why.

Generally speaking the difficulty you have is that you confuse ease of use
with ease of learning. For example, menus are all very well at first, but
retard learning the keyboard interface, which will be ultimately faster.
ASCII characters are arbitrary (although there are well-established
conventions that help to learn second and subsequent roguelikes) but they
are also very clear and easily distinguished - it's hard to design a
tileset with the same clarity that consumes no more screen real estate per
grid position.

Also, "ASCII" games need not be pure text; the various GUI ports of
NetHack can display text characters, but with menus, separate inventory
windows, etc.

[Glen Wheeler]

Post by David Damerell

Post by James Bulgin
actually use it. Yet it turns out that most of you would rather that than a
graphical mode at all. And this raises the question of why.

Generally speaking the difficulty you have is that you confuse ease of use
with ease of learning. For example, menus are all very well at first, but
retard learning the keyboard interface, which will be ultimately faster.
ASCII characters are arbitrary (although there are well-established
conventions that help to learn second and subsequent roguelikes) but they
are also very clear and easily distinguished - it's hard to design a
tileset with the same clarity that consumes no more screen real estate per
grid position.

Not neccessarily. The context menus I plan to implement, and that I have
seen implemented in many games utilise highlighting to *assist* in elarnign
the keyboard shortcuts which will make prolonged sessions much more
tolerable.

[Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes]

Post by Glen Wheeler

Post by David Damerell
Generally speaking the difficulty you have is that you confuse ease of use
with ease of learning. For example, menus are all very well at first, but
retard learning the keyboard interface, which will be ultimately faster.
ASCII characters are arbitrary (although there are well-established
conventions that help to learn second and subsequent roguelikes) but they
are also very clear and easily distinguished - it's hard to design a
tileset with the same clarity that consumes no more screen real estate per
grid position.

Not neccessarily. The context menus I plan to implement, and that I have
seen implemented in many games utilise highlighting to *assist* in elarnign
the keyboard shortcuts which will make prolonged sessions much more
tolerable.

Likewise. I always put the key equivalent of every menu item on the
menu item. Then if you forget which key takes items or whatever, you
can look it up almost instantly. That's just standard user interface
guidelines, everyone does that. Claiming anyone wouldn't is a strawman.

David's argument of "no more screen real estate" is just bizarre, too.
I'm typing this in an 80x25 window which occupies 1/4 of my 27" monitor.
We have higher-resolution and much bigger screens today than the low-res
14" monochrome terminals Rogue was designed for. That gives us a lot of
extra space. If you want the player to see the entire dungeon at once,
you can show a a detailed close-up in 32x32 tiles on one side, and a
minimap showing the entire dungeon in 4x4 tiles beside it, and still
have half the screen to show whatever else you want.

[ABCGi]

Post by Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes

Post by Glen Wheeler

Post by David Damerell
Generally speaking the difficulty you have is that you confuse ease of use
with ease of learning. For example, menus are all very well at first, but
retard learning the keyboard interface, which will be ultimately faster.
ASCII characters are arbitrary (although there are well-established
conventions that help to learn second and subsequent roguelikes) but they
are also very clear and easily distinguished - it's hard to design a
tileset with the same clarity that consumes no more screen real estate per
grid position.

Not neccessarily. The context menus I plan to implement, and that I have
seen implemented in many games utilise highlighting to *assist* in elarnign
the keyboard shortcuts which will make prolonged sessions much more
tolerable.

Likewise. I always put the key equivalent of every menu item on the
menu item. Then if you forget which key takes items or whatever, you
can look it up almost instantly. That's just standard user interface
guidelines, everyone does that. Claiming anyone wouldn't is a strawman.

Passing comment - I hate using CTRL/ALT shortcuts... I feel like a
pianist. In fact I'm not even a big fan of that SHIFT key either. If a
RL interface has all the predominant keys as one keystroke I'm happy.

Post by Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes
David's argument of "no more screen real estate" is just bizarre, too.
I'm typing this in an 80x25 window which occupies 1/4 of my 27" monitor.
We have higher-resolution and much bigger screens today than the low-res
14" monochrome terminals Rogue was designed for. That gives us a lot of
extra space. If you want the player to see the entire dungeon at once,
you can show a a detailed close-up in 32x32 tiles on one side, and a
minimap showing the entire dungeon in 4x4 tiles beside it, and still
have half the screen to show whatever else you want.

Holy Shite! You have a 27" monitor??? Can I come over? ;)

[David Damerell]

Post by Glen Wheeler

Post by David Damerell
Generally speaking the difficulty you have is that you confuse ease of use
with ease of learning. For example, menus are all very well at first, but
retard learning the keyboard interface, which will be ultimately faster.

Not neccessarily. The context menus I plan to implement, and that I have
seen implemented in many games utilise highlighting to *assist* in elarnign
the keyboard shortcuts which will make prolonged sessions much more
tolerable.

Nope. If there's no alternative but to use the keyboard, you'll learn it
faster than seeing shortcuts in context menus and maybe starting to use
them.

Note that I'm not saying that's a good thing; it seems harmless enough to
me to suck new players in with a set of menus and let them learn the fast
interface later. All I'm saying is that if your sole objective was to make
people learn the keyboard interface right away, that would best be done by
compelling them to use it.

[ABCGi]

Post by David Damerell

Post by Glen Wheeler
Not neccessarily. The context menus I plan to implement, and that I have
seen implemented in many games utilise highlighting to *assist* in elarnign
the keyboard shortcuts which will make prolonged sessions much more
tolerable.

Nope. If there's no alternative but to use the keyboard, you'll learn it
faster than seeing shortcuts in context menus and maybe starting to use
them.

Faster but not necessarily easier though.

Post by David Damerell
Note that I'm not saying that's a good thing; it seems harmless enough to
me to suck new players in with a set of menus and let them learn the fast
interface later. All I'm saying is that if your sole objective was to make
people learn the keyboard interface right away, that would best be done by
compelling them to use it.

Hmm your objective may be less successful using this method if too many
of your users give up. But I see what you are saying.

[Lucas Ackerman]

Hi James, I think it comes down to a few things for me: being
maximally informative, fast to interpret, and staying out of my way so
I can play the game.

IMHO, graphics have zero impact on roguelike gameplay, since unlike
action games the turn & grid based nature of RL's doesn't benefit from
improved representative imagery. If the game is exactly represented
in ascii, graphics may make it prettier, but not better to play. This
isn't a universal of course, but it's true of all the rougelikes I
care to play. Gameplay comes first.

I posted a rant a couple years ago here about using improved graphics
symbollically (essentially graphical ascii), and was silently ignored,
but you're free to take it as you will. Here's a google groups link
to the post:

http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=2588ebdc.0207201329.401b107f%40posting.google.com&oe=UTF-8

-Lucas

[ABCGi]

Post by Lucas Ackerman
Hi James, I think it comes down to a few things for me: being
maximally informative, fast to interpret, and staying out of my way so
I can play the game.
IMHO, graphics have zero impact on roguelike gameplay, since unlike
action games the turn & grid based nature of RL's doesn't benefit from
improved representative imagery. If the game is exactly represented
in ascii, graphics may make it prettier, but not better to play. This
isn't a universal of course, but it's true of all the rougelikes I
care to play. Gameplay comes first.
I posted a rant a couple years ago here about using improved graphics
symbollically (essentially graphical ascii), and was silently ignored,
but you're free to take it as you will. Here's a google groups link

http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=2588ebdc.0207201329.401b107f%40posting.google.com&oe=UTF-8

The conclusion I draw from that article is to draw good large tiles that
are not too complex. The objectified graphics wouldn't be necessary if
artists just made their tiles more simple and representative. In short I
am of the opinion that we don't need to go that far: however it would be
an interesting game to play, and a nice change.

Not ignored anymore :)

[Brent Ross]

In article <c7n2o4$28ua$***@news.vol.cz>,
James Bulgin <***@hotmail.com> wrote:
//
// First there is the issue of recognizibility. A graphical representation of an
// object is often more immediatly informative than a symbol arbitrarily chosen to
// represent it.

Some of us think the reverse here. In order to get the same amount of
area on the screen, tiles typically have to be small. Pretty looking
tiles are all fine, but at that size they just can't compete with
simple roman characters (which actually are one of the nicest sets for
recognization, with a good mix of shapes and ascenders and decenders).

Actual quote from me while playing a tile RL: "Oh S*&$, that's not
Deformed Rabbit #2, that's Squashed Spider!"... the important think to
note is that the monsters in question were not rodents or insects at
all (I believe DR#2 was a kobold and SS was an imp). To put it simply,
the learning curve might be a bit higher for ASCII (but the choices tend
to be fairly intuitive and tranferable between games), but the ease of
recognition of tiny letters is much higher than tiny pictures.

As for why ASCII? Simple, that's the niche that roguelikes fill.
Most RLs are playable on text terminals and a lot of similar games aren't.
RLs dominate their limited platform mostly because they were designed
by people who had to use that platform... and a lot of early RL players
certainly appreciated that they had a decent game they could play when
they had to use simple text terms. Once you have full graphics power you
might as well make use of it and go to arcade action and have something
more like Secret of Mana, Zelda, Guantlet, or Diablo.

Brent Ross

[Ray Dillinger]

Post by Brent Ross
As for why ASCII? Simple, that's the niche that roguelikes fill.
Most RLs are playable on text terminals and a lot of similar games aren't.
RLs dominate their limited platform mostly because they were designed
by people who had to use that platform... and a lot of early RL players
certainly appreciated that they had a decent game they could play when
they had to use simple text terms. Once you have full graphics power you
might as well make use of it and go to arcade action and have something
more like Secret of Mana, Zelda, Guantlet, or Diablo.

Here's an interesting thought: What about a turn-based FPS?

Forget the tiles vs. characters thing for a minute or two.
You can make it look like Doom, or Quake... except with
grid-based movement and turn-based time. No more overhead
view - strictly first-person. Clearly, the game would have
to be built for it.

You move, everything else moves, you move, ... and, at least
in theory, you should be able to build roguelike depth of play.
The advantage here is that further-away things in the 3d
representation are scaled down, so there's not the same kind
of limit to how far you can see that you get with topview
tiles. (there's another kind of limit, along with the limit
to your field of view width, but it's a familiar one).

If the up-close representation of that rifle fills half the
screen when you (i)nspect the rifle, there's room to notice
nifty details like the "light amplification level" control
on the sight, which is a discovery about what you can do.


Bear

who'd probably want a view with everything rendered
as blank white-filled outlines containing an ascii
character or name, anyway...

[Brent Ross]

In article <XJSnc.10637$***@typhoon.sonic.net>,
Ray Dillinger <***@sonic.net> wrote:
// Brent Ross wrote:
//
// > As for why ASCII? Simple, that's the niche that roguelikes fill.
// > Most RLs are playable on text terminals and a lot of similar games aren't.
// > RLs dominate their limited platform mostly because they were designed
// > by people who had to use that platform... and a lot of early RL players
// > certainly appreciated that they had a decent game they could play when
// > they had to use simple text terms. Once you have full graphics power you
// > might as well make use of it and go to arcade action and have something
// > more like Secret of Mana, Zelda, Guantlet, or Diablo.
//
// Here's an interesting thought: What about a turn-based FPS?
//
// Forget the tiles vs. characters thing for a minute or two.
// You can make it look like Doom, or Quake... except with
// grid-based movement and turn-based time. No more overhead
// view - strictly first-person. Clearly, the game would have
// to be built for it.
//
// You move, everything else moves, you move, ... and, at least
// in theory, you should be able to build roguelike depth of play.
// The advantage here is that further-away things in the 3d
// representation are scaled down, so there's not the same kind
// of limit to how far you can see that you get with topview
// tiles. (there's another kind of limit, along with the limit
// to your field of view width, but it's a familiar one).
//
// If the up-close representation of that rifle fills half the
// screen when you (i)nspect the rifle, there's room to notice
// nifty details like the "light amplification level" control
// on the sight, which is a discovery about what you can do.

There actually used to be some of these. Originally there was Labyrinth,
which used the simple recursive maze algorithm and was a turn based
game without any monsters (it drew a first person perspective with /\|-
characters). Then some people made some games with monsters roaming
around the maze... most of these weren't too popular. Bard's Tale and
Wizardry were big and notable successes though, but in a lot of ways
they're more CRPG than RL. Dungeon Master eventually came about, and
things returned back towards a less cluttered view... it's also pretty
close to a successful version of what you're describing, with the big
exception in that it was real time (the first 3D RT CRPG in fact)...
not that it required lightning fast response time, though (and you could
certainly count on being left alone in cleared areas if you wanted to
play with spellcasting). I'll agree that it might be fun to have a
few more of these... especially, modern and open source ones.

Brent Ross

[Arthur J. O'Dwyer]

Post by Brent Ross
//
// Here's an interesting thought: What about a turn-based FPS?
//
// Forget the tiles vs. characters thing for a minute or two.
// You can make it look like Doom, or Quake... except with
// grid-based movement and turn-based time. No more overhead
// view - strictly first-person. Clearly, the game would have
// to be built for it.
There actually used to be some of these. Originally there was Labyrinth,
which used the simple recursive maze algorithm and was a turn based
game without any monsters (it drew a first person perspective with /\|-
characters).

Hey, I wrote one of *those*! Way back before I forgot how to write
in BASIC, it was. I tried to translate the game to Pascal or C several
years ago, and utterly failed; the code was too tightly spaghettied
to make any sense when translated, at least naively. I gave up pretty
fast.
("Tightly spaghettied"... sounds oxymoronic to me, but judge for
yourself!)
Just for kicks, here it is. From the year 199? (last modified 1998,
but that was probably several years after the original game),
DUNGEON.BAS!

http://www.contrib.andrew.cmu.edu/~ajo/disseminate/dng/

-Arthur

[Gerry Quinn]

Post by Brent Ross
There actually used to be some of these. Originally there was Labyrinth,
which used the simple recursive maze algorithm and was a turn based
game without any monsters (it drew a first person perspective with /\|-
characters). Then some people made some games with monsters roaming
around the maze... most of these weren't too popular. Bard's Tale and
Wizardry were big and notable successes though, but in a lot of ways
they're more CRPG than RL. Dungeon Master eventually came about, and
things returned back towards a less cluttered view... it's also pretty
close to a successful version of what you're describing, with the big
exception in that it was real time (the first 3D RT CRPG in fact)...
not that it required lightning fast response time, though (and you could
certainly count on being left alone in cleared areas if you wanted to
play with spellcasting). I'll agree that it might be fun to have a
few more of these... especially, modern and open source ones.

Moraff's World was a roguelike with a 3D interface (there were four
images, one for each compass direction).

- Gerry Quinn

[Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes]

Post by Ray Dillinger

Post by Brent Ross
As for why ASCII? Simple, that's the niche that roguelikes fill.
Most RLs are playable on text terminals and a lot of similar games aren't.
RLs dominate their limited platform mostly because they were designed
by people who had to use that platform... and a lot of early RL players
certainly appreciated that they had a decent game they could play when
they had to use simple text terms. Once you have full graphics power you
might as well make use of it and go to arcade action and have something
more like Secret of Mana, Zelda, Guantlet, or Diablo.

Here's an interesting thought: What about a turn-based FPS?
Forget the tiles vs. characters thing for a minute or two.
You can make it look like Doom, or Quake... except with
grid-based movement and turn-based time. No more overhead
view - strictly first-person. Clearly, the game would have
to be built for it.

Yep. My Umbra game does that.
<http://kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu/~kamikaze/Umbra/>

The graphics are ultra-primitive line-drawings, because getting Python
to do real graphics was difficult at that time, and my attempt last year
at rewriting it for a more modern graphics library stalled out. But the
game design works just fine.

There've been a lot of 3-D turn-based RPGs. Akallabeth, early Ultimas
(can't remember when they shifted to tile maps for the dungeon),
Wizardry, Bard's Tale, Alternate Reality, and many more since.

[R. Alan Monroe]

Post by Ray Dillinger
Here's an interesting thought: What about a turn-based FPS?
Forget the tiles vs. characters thing for a minute or two.
You can make it look like Doom, or Quake... except with
grid-based movement and turn-based time. No more overhead
view - strictly first-person. Clearly, the game would have
to be built for it.
You move, everything else moves, you move, ... and, at least
in theory, you should be able to build roguelike depth of play.
The advantage here is that further-away things in the 3d
representation are scaled down, so there's not the same kind
of limit to how far you can see that you get with topview
tiles. (there's another kind of limit, along with the limit
to your field of view width, but it's a familiar one).

Dungeon Master & Moraff's World come to mind.
I wondered what an OpenGL Moraff's World would look like, and came up
with this:
http://javajack.dynup.net/mworld/

Alan

[The Sheep]

Post by R. Alan Monroe

Post by Ray Dillinger
Here's an interesting thought: What about a turn-based FPS?
Forget the tiles vs. characters thing for a minute or two.
You can make it look like Doom, or Quake... except with
grid-based movement and turn-based time. No more overhead
view - strictly first-person. Clearly, the game would have
to be built for it.
You move, everything else moves, you move, ... and, at least
in theory, you should be able to build roguelike depth of play.
The advantage here is that further-away things in the 3d
representation are scaled down, so there's not the same kind
of limit to how far you can see that you get with topview
tiles. (there's another kind of limit, along with the limit
to your field of view width, but it's a familiar one).

Dungeon Master & Moraff's World come to mind.
I wondered what an OpenGL Moraff's World would look like, and came up
http://javajack.dynup.net/mworld/

There's even an FPP Nethack rip, Dungeon Hack.

[Jimmy_B]

Post by James Bulgin
Now that the survey is more or less complete, it's quite clear
that most of you out there prefer to play your roguelikes in
ascii. I was quite honestly very surprised by this result. I was
origionally asking to see if I should bother putting an optional
ascii mode in my graphic roguelike if anybody would actually use
it. Yet it turns out that most of you would rather that than a
graphical mode at all. And this raises the question of why.

It is, in theory, possible to make a tileset as good as ASCII. In
practice, it isn't. Here's why.

(1) Display density. In a game like NetHack, it's very useful to be
able to see the whole dungeon at once. But generally speaking, tiles
look awful at that size.

(2) Simplicity. Look at a game with tiles; the display is *busy*.
When you're scanning the map looking for something, it's a lot easier
to spot in ASCII (simple, high-contrast character on a black
background) than in tiles (complex, usually on a gray background).
And the problem gets worse the larger the area you look at. This is
important, since you spend a lot more time scanning the map for
things of interest than you do identifying those things.

(3) Development. Tilesets are a major stumbling block to adding items
and monsters; for everything you add, you need to make a tile for it
in every tileset you have. Spells are much worse. This is a
significant stumbling block to would-be developers, and should you
have many tilesets you'll find yourself, essentially, managing
catalogs without msgmerge (a situation which would have me quite
PO'ed.)

(4) Scalability. I can play an ASCII game at whatever resolution, and
on whatever size monitor I feel like, simply by changing the font. If
you want to do that with tiles, your choices are (a) making a tileset
for every resolution (impractical), (b) applying an enlargement
filter (big ugly pixels), or (c) applying a reduction filter (an
image quality disaster).

(5) Availability. A graphical roguelike can only be played if it is
installed on the computer you are sitting at at this very moment.
Even ignoring online servers, it's nice to be able to use your own
patches, savefiles, and scoreboard no matter where you are.

Post by James Bulgin
I know that some of you gave reasons for this when you responded
to the survey, however I'd like to ask the question in a little
more detail. Nowadays, I seriously doubt this is because any of
you play on computers that cannot support graphics at all due to
technial limitations. Therefore, it is reasonable to assume that
it is because you enjoy it more for some reason. It just seems to
me that tilesets can be much more effective than ascii for many
purposes. I'll ignore asthetics for the moment, and focus purely on function.

Many of us play remotely over telnet or ssh, where graphics are
genuinely unavailable. Of course we might not do this if we felt
graphics were worthwhile, but it's not entirely correct to say that
there are no technical issues.

Post by James Bulgin
Another fact is that a purely text based display preclude the
possibility of any gui elements which could make the user
interface often much easier to use. (This is also usually the case
with graphical ones as well since they were built directally upon
the origional ascii interface) It seems that with the large number
of commands in most roguelikes (many of which are rarely used and
easily forgotten), it would be much more user friendly if there
was sort of menu system for these. Instead of always looking up a
command in a reference list, then typing it in, one could simply
click on an button for the command. Not a huge thing, perhaps, but
it still makes things run that little extra bit smoother.

This is no less possible with an ASCII or pseudoascii (ASCII in a
non-terminal window) interface than with a GUI interface, it's just
that most developers for some reason haven't bothered.


One other issue of note is that cross-platform GUI toolkits are, in
the timeline of roguelike development, a very recent thing.

[R. Alan Monroe]

Post by Jimmy_B
(4) Scalability. I can play an ASCII game at whatever resolution, and
on whatever size monitor I feel like, simply by changing the font. If
you want to do that with tiles, your choices are (a) making a tileset
for every resolution (impractical), (b) applying an enlargement
filter (big ugly pixels), or (c) applying a reduction filter (an
image quality disaster).

Don't forget vector graphics. I'm mulling over some ideas for a vector
graphic roguelike at the moment. Might try to make some mockups.

Alan

[The Sheep]

Post by Jimmy_B
(2) Simplicity. Look at a game with tiles; the display is *busy*.
When you're scanning the map looking for something, it's a lot easier
to spot in ASCII (simple, high-contrast character on a black
background) than in tiles (complex, usually on a gray background).
And the problem gets worse the larger the area you look at. This is
important, since you spend a lot more time scanning the map for
things of interest than you do identifying those things.

You could have at least partial solution by using animation.
I like japanese action RPG's very much, and I often see in those games
that the the creatures are animated all the time, even when they
don't move (it may look a little silly when they're walking in place,
but once you get used to it it's ok).
Diablo (and Resident Evil 3) used a smart way of highlighting items
lying around -- a glimpse of light appearing on them once in a while
(or after pressing a special key or using a skill).

[David Damerell]

Post by Jimmy_B
(1) Display density. In a game like NetHack, it's very useful to be
able to see the whole dungeon at once. But generally speaking, tiles
look awful at that size.

Someone will now say "oh, but on a high-resolution display you can have
lots of 64x64 tiles", which neglects to consider that on a high-res
display with an ASCII game one can often have separate inventory windows,
monster recall, spell recall, spoilers open, all that stuff; any loss of
screen real estate hurts.

Frex, when I play NetHack on a big X display, I have my object ID spoiler,
a terminal with a w3m pointing at Eva Myer's spoiler compendium, a text
editor for my game notes, IRC open... the screen is full.

[Ray Dillinger]

Post by David Damerell
Frex, when I play NetHack on a big X display, I have my object ID spoiler,
a terminal with a w3m pointing at Eva Myer's spoiler compendium, a text
editor for my game notes, IRC open... the screen is full.

Datapoint: When I play roguelikes, I'm usually waiting for a Genetic
Algorithm or Neural Network to converge, or waiting for a long compile
to finish. The turn-based thing is very important, as are the
(relatively) small performance impact on the machine. 99% or more of
my CPU is doing something else.

Bear

[Gerry Quinn]

Post by Jimmy_B
It is, in theory, possible to make a tileset as good as ASCII. In
practice, it isn't. Here's why.
(1) Display density. In a game like NetHack, it's very useful to be
able to see the whole dungeon at once. But generally speaking, tiles
look awful at that size.

A large-scale local area, combined with a small-scale mini-map, can take
care of this admirably (if it is required).

Post by Jimmy_B
(2) Simplicity. Look at a game with tiles; the display is *busy*.
When you're scanning the map looking for something, it's a lot easier
to spot in ASCII (simple, high-contrast character on a black
background) than in tiles (complex, usually on a gray background).
And the problem gets worse the larger the area you look at. This is
important, since you spend a lot more time scanning the map for
things of interest than you do identifying those things.

I really think this is the opposite of true. More individual
characteristics make objects easier to spot, not harder. Our eyes were
not designed to pick out individual ASCII symbols on a large page.

Post by Jimmy_B
(3) Development. Tilesets are a major stumbling block to adding items
and monsters; for everything you add, you need to make a tile for it
in every tileset you have.

Thus, new monsters and items tend to be carefully thought out, rather
than just shovelled in anyhow.

Post by Jimmy_B
Spells are much worse.

Not necessarily. You could get a long way with a small set (say a
flying blob, an explosion around a person, and an exploding ring,
followed by individual explosions on damaged monsters. The computer can
colourise it in a range of appropriate colours.

Post by Jimmy_B
This is a
significant stumbling block to would-be developers, and should you
have many tilesets you'll find yourself, essentially, managing
catalogs without msgmerge (a situation which would have me quite
PO'ed.)

Heaven knows what you mean by the last bit. Tiles may be a stumbling
block to some, but then again there are free sets (I like those used in
ZangbandTK). And some people like doing graphics as a change of pace.

Post by Jimmy_B
(4) Scalability. I can play an ASCII game at whatever resolution, and
on whatever size monitor I feel like, simply by changing the font. If
you want to do that with tiles, your choices are (a) making a tileset
for every resolution (impractical), (b) applying an enlargement
filter (big ugly pixels), or (c) applying a reduction filter (an
image quality disaster).

There are ways and means to change tile size, and it is always possible
for the developer to produce several sets at once, touching up the
individual sets where necessary. In any case, there are standard
resolutions which we can expect most modern desktop users to have
available.

Post by Jimmy_B
(5) Availability. A graphical roguelike can only be played if it is
installed on the computer you are sitting at at this very moment.
Even ignoring online servers, it's nice to be able to use your own
patches, savefiles, and scoreboard no matter where you are.

Without an online server, surely an ASCII game could not be played
without being installed either? Anyway, I guess the solution here is to
install the client. It would be possible to use a Java client or
similar.

Post by Jimmy_B
Many of us play remotely over telnet or ssh, where graphics are
genuinely unavailable. Of course we might not do this if we felt
graphics were worthwhile, but it's not entirely correct to say that
there are no technical issues.

Well, that is one reason to prefer ASCII. And if we were blind, we'd
hate ASCII and only play games that were 100% audio-based.

- Gerry Quinn

[The Sheep]

Post by Gerry Quinn

Post by Jimmy_B
(2) Simplicity. Look at a game with tiles; the display is *busy*.
When you're scanning the map looking for something, it's a lot easier
to spot in ASCII (simple, high-contrast character on a black
background) than in tiles (complex, usually on a gray background).
And the problem gets worse the larger the area you look at. This is
important, since you spend a lot more time scanning the map for
things of interest than you do identifying those things.

I really think this is the opposite of true. More individual
characteristics make objects easier to spot, not harder. Our eyes were
not designed to pick out individual ASCII symbols on a large page.

I'd rather say that the individual ASCII symbol were designed to be
picked out by our eyes on a large page...

[Gerry Quinn]

Post by The Sheep

Post by Gerry Quinn

Post by Jimmy_B
(2) Simplicity. Look at a game with tiles; the display is *busy*.
When you're scanning the map looking for something, it's a lot easier
to spot in ASCII (simple, high-contrast character on a black
background) than in tiles (complex, usually on a gray background).
And the problem gets worse the larger the area you look at. This is
important, since you spend a lot more time scanning the map for
things of interest than you do identifying those things.

I really think this is the opposite of true. More individual
characteristics make objects easier to spot, not harder. Our eyes were
not designed to pick out individual ASCII symbols on a large page.

I'd rather say that the individual ASCII symbol were designed to be
picked out by our eyes on a large page...

I don't think so - they were designed to be read in a linear sequence,
not searched for.

- Gerry Quinn

[Arthur J. O'Dwyer]

Post by Gerry Quinn

Post by The Sheep

Post by Gerry Quinn

Post by Jimmy_B
(2) Simplicity. Look at a game with tiles; the display is *busy*.
When you're scanning the map looking for something, it's a lot easier
to spot in ASCII (simple, high-contrast character on a black
background) than in tiles (complex, usually on a gray background).

I really think this is the opposite of true. More individual
characteristics make objects easier to spot, not harder. Our eyes were
not designed to pick out individual ASCII symbols on a large page.

I'd rather say that the individual ASCII symbol were designed to be
picked out by our eyes on a large page...

I don't think so - they were designed to be read in a linear sequence,
not searched for.

When you come right down to it, they were designed to be pictures
of bulls, loaves of bread, rivers, and what-have-you. But then the
Phoenicians and Romans came along and messed them all up. Still,
there are several millennia of market research behind the Latin
alphabet, and at least several hundred years behind the rest of the
ASCII character set (with the possible exception of $, ~, and `).
:)

-Arthur

[Gerry Quinn]

Post by Arthur J. O'Dwyer

Post by Gerry Quinn

Post by The Sheep
I'd rather say that the individual ASCII symbol were designed to be
picked out by our eyes on a large page...

I don't think so - they were designed to be read in a linear sequence,
not searched for.

When you come right down to it, they were designed to be pictures
of bulls, loaves of bread, rivers, and what-have-you. But then the
Phoenicians and Romans came along and messed them all up.

If they had been designed as pictures of orcs, dragons and kobolds, we'd
be all set. Though I guess 's' for snake may still bear traces of
pictographic origins...

- Gerry Quinn

[Jimmy_B]

Post by Gerry Quinn

Post by Jimmy_B
It is, in theory, possible to make a tileset as good as ASCII. In
practice, it isn't. Here's why.
(1) Display density. In a game like NetHack, it's very useful to
be able to see the whole dungeon at once. But generally speaking,
tiles look awful at that size.

A large-scale local area, combined with a small-scale mini-map,
can take care of this admirably (if it is required).

Except that a small-scale minimap is useless half the time, mainly
because it's too small to have much information.

Post by Gerry Quinn

Post by Jimmy_B
(2) Simplicity. Look at a game with tiles; the display is *busy*.
When you're scanning the map looking for something, it's a lot
easier to spot in ASCII (simple, high-contrast character on a
black background) than in tiles (complex, usually on a gray
background). And the problem gets worse the larger the area you
look at. This is important, since you spend a lot more time
scanning the map for things of interest than you do identifying
those things.

I really think this is the opposite of true. More individual
characteristics make objects easier to spot, not harder. Our eyes
were not designed to pick out individual ASCII symbols on a large
page.

Sometimes. For example, I'm writing this post using a serifed font:
extra details that make the text easier to read. On the other hand,
the background behind it is plain white, to keep the contrast high.
And there's a problem: by texturing the floor, and by using a subtler
value scale on the items, you drastically reduce the overall
contrast.

Post by Gerry Quinn

Post by Jimmy_B
(3) Development. Tilesets are a major stumbling block to adding
items and monsters; for everything you add, you need to make a
tile for it in every tileset you have.

Thus, new monsters and items tend to be carefully thought out,
rather than just shovelled in anyhow.

And yet, the shoveliest game still seems to be Angband...
It could go the other way as well: by not having to worry about
mundane details like tilesets, you're free to come up with more
unique monsters and more likely to try ideas which might fail to work
out. (For example, CalcRogue has grues, which have some really tricky
behaviors. If I had to make tiles first, I likely wouldn't have
followed through and finished the monster. The shovelmonster problem
is one of developer attitude, nothing else.)

Post by Gerry Quinn

Post by Jimmy_B
Spells are much worse.

Not necessarily. You could get a long way with a small set (say a
flying blob, an explosion around a person, and an exploding ring,
followed by individual explosions on damaged monsters. The
computer can colourise it in a range of appropriate colours.

True, but that only goes so far. And you can come up with better
spells if you're not simultaneously worrying about the GFX that go
with it.

Post by Gerry Quinn

Post by Jimmy_B
This is a
significant stumbling block to would-be developers, and should you
have many tilesets you'll find yourself, essentially, managing
catalogs without msgmerge (a situation which would have me quite
PO'ed.)

Heaven knows what you mean by the last bit. Tiles may be a
stumbling block to some, but then again there are free sets (I
like those used in ZangbandTK). And some people like doing
graphics as a change of pace.

This was an obscure pun on gettext terminology. Basically, the
problem is that if Variant A introduces a monster and draws a tile
for it, and Variant B introduces a monster and draws a tile for it,
then you have two out-of-sync tilesets and no tool to merge them.
(This is the same problem 'catgets' has, only dealing with foreign-
language translations of strings).

Post by Gerry Quinn

Post by Jimmy_B
(4) Scalability. I can play an ASCII game at whatever resolution,
and on whatever size monitor I feel like, simply by changing the
font. If you want to do that with tiles, your choices are (a)
making a tileset for every resolution (impractical), (b) applying
an enlargement filter (big ugly pixels), or (c) applying a
reduction filter (an image quality disaster).

There are ways and means to change tile size, and it is always
possible for the developer to produce several sets at once,
touching up the individual sets where necessary. In any case,
there are standard resolutions which we can expect most modern
desktop users to have available.

How many users are willing to switch video mode for a roguelike? Once
you go down that road, you lose the ability to share the screen with
background tasks. I certainly wouldn't play a roguelike that was
full-screen-only, nor would I play a roguelike which is thumbnail-
sized on my 1600x1200 screen (most graphical roguelikes are.)

Post by Gerry Quinn

Post by Jimmy_B
(5) Availability. A graphical roguelike can only be played if it
is installed on the computer you are sitting at at this very
moment. Even ignoring online servers, it's nice to be able to use
your own patches, savefiles, and scoreboard no matter where you
are.

Without an online server, surely an ASCII game could not be played
without being installed either? Anyway, I guess the solution here
is to install the client. It would be possible to use a Java
client or similar.

It is generally safe to assume that any computer you use will have
some sort of terminal client, be it PuTTY or something crappy like
Microsoft Telnet. Thus, you can connect to your own box and play
there. (Sorry, I was a little imprecise in saying 'online server'; by
that, I meant 'public server', as distinct from one's home box.)

[Ramela]

Post by James Bulgin
Now that the survey is more or less complete, it's quite clear that most of you
out there prefer to play your roguelikes in ascii. I was quite honestly very
surprised by this result. I was origionally asking to see if I should bother
putting an optional ascii mode in my graphic roguelike if anybody would
actually use it. Yet it turns out that most of you would rather that than a
graphical mode at all. And this raises the question of why.

It's cognitive psychology.

I would never use graphics on a roguelike because characters (with color)
are much more easily recognisable than graphics. Because characters are
familiar to me prior to playing a roguelike attaching new significance to them
is a lot easier than learning a new set of symbols. Even more so because there
are alot more tiles in a tile set than there are characters.

[ArX.Elric!]

Post by James Bulgin
Now that the survey is more or less complete, it's quite clear that most of you
out there prefer to play your roguelikes in ascii. I was quite honestly very
surprised by this result. I was origionally asking to see if I should bother
putting an optional ascii mode in my graphic roguelike if anybody would
actually use it. Yet it turns out that most of you would rather that than a
graphical mode at all. And this raises the question of why.

WARNING: bad english :-)

I think any roguelike _must_ be ASCII.
Creating tiles won't bring a lot of new gamers to play your roguelike.
Example: I tried to introduce one of my friends (hardcore gamer) into
roguelikes. First I showed him ADOM. He said that this game looks
interesting, but that ASCII graphics kills all interest. Then I showed
him tiled version of NetHack. The first words he said were: "What a
shitty game? I'd better play Diablo - it looks much better!".

So, if you can to create a roguelike with really good graphics (like
in Diablo or Fallout), a lot of non-roguelike gamers will play it. But
you'll spend really _big_ quantiity of time for graphics - don't you
think that spending it for making fixes and improvements will be
better? Who'll download 100mb archieve containing your game? And,
finally, good graphics will kill a roguelike in your game. Graphics
turns off our imagination, so it's for lazy ones. But our imagination
can to create images better than any 3d accelerators. Use ASCII,
tilecreation is a wasting of your time.

ArX.Elric!

[Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes]

Post by ArX.Elric!
I think any roguelike _must_ be ASCII.
Creating tiles won't bring a lot of new gamers to play your roguelike.
Example: I tried to introduce one of my friends (hardcore gamer) into
roguelikes. First I showed him ADOM. He said that this game looks
interesting, but that ASCII graphics kills all interest. Then I showed
him tiled version of NetHack. The first words he said were: "What a
shitty game? I'd better play Diablo - it looks much better!".

Notice the first thing he said? "ASCII graphics kills all interest".
He didn't like the tile art (and probably he wouldn't like indie films
that don't have $50M budgets, either), but at least he looked at that.
Why do you put great value in his reaction to tile art, but not in his
reaction to ASCII?

In most cases where I've shown tile-based roguelikes to people,
they've said "Hey, neat, it's just like Ultima", and had no problem with
it. Where I've shown ASCII-based roguelikes to people, they say "call
me back when they finish making the game".

Only if the graphics are deeply ugly are you going to turn someone off
with graphics, who wouldn't be turned off far worse by ASCII.

Post by ArX.Elric!
So, if you can to create a roguelike with really good graphics (like
in Diablo or Fallout), a lot of non-roguelike gamers will play it. But
you'll spend really _big_ quantiity of time for graphics - don't you
think that spending it for making fixes and improvements will be
better? Who'll download 100mb archieve containing your game? And,
finally, good graphics will kill a roguelike in your game. Graphics
turns off our imagination, so it's for lazy ones. But our imagination
can to create images better than any 3d accelerators. Use ASCII,
tilecreation is a wasting of your time.

There are four blatant falsehoods here.

1) Neither you nor anyone else has the right to dictate how anyone
else spends their development time. If I want to write sonnets and
embed them in my program, I can do so, and it's none of your business.

2) There are several high-quality free tile sets. Even if someone
spends almost no time at all on art, they can have a nice graphical
roguelike.

3) With a modern network connection[0], a few MB isn't going to take
long for anyone. People download 100MB games *all the time* these days,
and tile art doesn't take 100MB. My Hephaestus game is 3MB, and it has
a giant art library.

4) Pictures do not destroy imagination, they fire up and engage it.
This is why film drove radio dramas out of the market. This is why
text-only games have been driven from the market. About half of new
games, even best-sellers, are still 2D, because that is sufficient to
immerse the player. Nobody makes commercial text-only games anymore.
Books survive only because they provide a long enough and dense enough
flow of information to make up for the limited medium. No roguelike is
the equivalent of even a novella.

[0] Right now I'm listening to a 128K audio stream. I throw away more
bandwidth than some third-world countries possess just because I don't
like any local radio stations.