Re: angband with mouse

On Feb 26, 8:36 pm, <a> wrote:
"Nick" <nckmccn...@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message

news:fq2n3i$2hk4$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx



OK, there are a few points to make here.

Firstly, keyboard only use is the common case now, and is likely to stay
so for
some time. But if Angband is going to continue to hold sway over the
hearts and
minds of its quirky minority of the population, it needs (IMHO) to
continue to
expand to viable alternative platforms. When it started, for example, it
was
only playable on a single platform - unix. Then there was PCAngband, and
eventually it became a cross-platform game. I'm sure this was not without
some
pain at the time, but it has paid off. With tablet PCs and PDA/phones
which run
Windows Mobile (or whatever) becoming more common, generalising the
interface to
make it more playable on these just seems like a sensible thing to do.

Second, I don't think there is any intent to sacrifice anything. Pete's
menu
system accommodates mouse users, certainly, but it doesn't decrease the
functionality for keyboard users - in fact, it increases it, because now
there
is often the option of scrolling up and down menus with the arrow keys as
well
as hitting the appropriate letter (which can help reduce Death By Typo).
The
perceived problems with the shop interface are not because it allows mouse
use
(FAangband has a mousable shop interface which is essentially like the old
V
one); it's because Andrew took particular design decisions.

Thirdly, I think maybe you are underestimating how hard it is to learn the
keyboard interface. Someone of my advanced years can take quite some time
to
get used to all the commands; having alternative forms of control can be
useful
from that perspective too. And you might notice that the command menus,
for
example, show the keyboard commands, so that using the menus teaches the
commands.

Thanks for your thoughts Nick.

I've asked about how exactly people use the mouse while playing Angband, but
haven't gotten any specific replies, so I'm still sort of in the dark about
it. I gather it can be used to move to a clicked-on location via a
shortest-path algorithm, and to select from menus. I assume it can't be
used to select an action such as Zap or Aim or Magic. So, I am not sure
what sort of hybrid keyboard/mouse interface is used by PDA players, nor why
the hybrid is much better than keyboard only (presumably a keyboard is
necessary in both cases).

No, it works fine for zap. You select use-object using a button (on-
screen or on-device). You select an item in the inventory. A (short)
menu of possible commands _for that item_ comes up. You select one of
those. Because of the initial context switch, this requires exactly
one more user action to do things with the mouse rather than the
keyboard. (Additionally, the user should be able to bind a few macros
or common commands to onscreen buttons of his own choice, like f1*, or
m1a*.)

That was the motivation for the new store UI works: object-action
rather than action-object. It may have been a mistake, but it wasn't
some organic process like you imagine.

Why don't you try playing a little FA with the mouse, as an
experiment? Nick's done a very good job. It's a pain on an ordinary
computer, but with a touch-screen it would work fine. I would suggest
V, but it's mouse support is still embryonic.

.