Re-writing message output. The thing with roguelikes has been that there is a single line on top of the screen and you get -more- when there are more message that can fit into that line. But why should it be like that with modern displays when you can just add more lines?
I've run into some implementation troubles with multiple message lines which is and isn't a surprise. You would think it's easy and for most programmers it is. Well, maybe one thing confusing me is trying to re-write the old rather than designing a multiple line message routine from the scratch.
I was thinking also to make the direction of message flow optional. I think it's easier to understand when message scroll up and the newest message is on bottom. Then again some games display messages on bottom of the screen and messages scroll down. It could be actually possible to make both optional in Teemu, just in case.
Other than that the Player class is almost done and started a gui color class mainly for optional background colors. When I get this message trouble solved it's also easier to finish routines that display messages, because they have to change somewhat, in some places.
2 comments:
Doomrl has 2 or 3 message lines, ivan has several, crawl has 5 and optional -more- prompts, angband has for over a decade had a separate message window with size limited only by the screen. This problem has been solved for a long time, but people who play games with outdated interfaces didn't notice.
I was aware of multiple message lines, but from other than roguelike games. I've played IVAN, but it was such a long time ago I didn't remember it had that. And to make it clear this was not a problem to me, only a style issue.
In fact I like some "outdated" UI decisions and Teemu will have more of them than it has now!
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