ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Does the new UI of beta11 feel and look good enough for a non beta release (baring any possible bugs obviously) ?

The most serious problem is that nowhere does it ever say to hit enter to get the initial dialog box for name entry. The first time I played it was REALLY not obvious what to do.

Ah good spotting

Please put stats and such other interesting things in the left hand pane.

Well, the new context menu to use talents on targets is a welcome improvement, even if IMO the best, most intuitive interface for such things would be having a customizable horizontal talent bar on the bottom of the play zone with 64x64 icons (tooltip on mouse-hovering) where you first left click on the talent, then left click on the target to use it. Subsequent mouse movement after clicking a targeted talent should display the targeting reticule; right clicking while having a targeted talent selected would cancel the targeting; not having enough resources to use the talent would gray out the icon. I'm saying this just because it's the way it is implemented in 95% of rpg games; still, roguelikes are traditionally more keyboard oriented than mouse oriented, so the actual mouse interface is more than enough for a turn-based RL.

Also, it would be nice to have better evidence of health degradation in the main game screen (while playing I admit my eyes are not constantly focused on the health bar); and something like a persistent, flashing gfx alert in near-death situations. Plus, it would be nice to have a better feedback of the fact that there are monsters in sight (change of the background music to battle stance, red bordered game screen, and such), since sometimes, especially if monsters are out of screen, it's easy do not notice them immediately and thus have less time to react.
What I want say here is that the overall feeling is that you must constantly pay too much attention to not miss a particular which could mean death in tough dungeons / situations.

Summing it up, anyways, current state is enough for a non beta release, these could well be further improvements for versions post first stable release. I vote yes.

There is support for a full screen FBO (framebuffer object), although not active yet, that allows to make the borders of the map to become more and more red as your health goes down. I can not make a screenshot from here but the idea is to have it look like that: http://te4.org/images/tmp/hpwarning.jpg

As for the icons bar, the thing is, I do not have icons :/

When picking up objects from the ground, if there are multiple objects, the order re-arranges itself confusingly.

e.g. imagine I hit 'g' and there are four objects on the ground, A B C D, in that order.

If I hit 'enter', to pick up A, the new order will be: D B C. Hit 'enter' again to pick up D, and the order is now C B.

This is confusing I have taken to picking up objects from the end instead (i.e. starting with D) because that doesn't change the order..

I would really like to see more info on character creation. Stat modifications and experience changes for races and classes chosen would be great.

Shop panes still overlap sometimes (see attachment).

darkgod wrote:As for the icons bar, the thing is, I do not have icons :/

Well, you could just start with a common grey button with standard 2-3 letters abbreviations (PD, AC, and so on); if unfamiliar with abbreviations at the beginning, the user still gets the tooltip with full talent description. Letters could have different colors or a graphical glyph to distinguish between ranged, sustained, personal and so on. If the talent is not available due to lack of resources, letters would be greyed out. If unavailable due to talent cooldown, an under-laying red progress bar coloring the icon would show cooldown progress (actual number in the tooltip to be used for better strategic turn calculations).

Also adding another observation: having to go through the inventory screen all the time to check the ammo amount remaining is a bit annoying for archers and slingers.

The new UI is great imho and it is useful to have a 100% mouse based interface even if I prefer to use the keyboard.

It should even be enhanced. There is very nasty (and I think well known) bug in vista and seven (but XP is OK) that freezes the keyboard (but not the mouse) if you switch between windows. The mouse UI is a great help in that situation. The only problem is that you cannot "save and quit" without a keyboard as a "return" key confirmation is required. A dialog windows "really quit" should be great in that case. (and the fix of this bug even greater )

ghostbuster wrote:There is very nasty (and I think well known) bug in vista and seven (but XP is OK) that freezes the keyboard (but not the mouse) if you switch between windows.

Uh? Never happened here (Win7 x64). Maybe you mean alt+tab? Uhm, never tried that inside ToME ...

I'd really like to see mouseover tooltips for all elements of the UI, including (especially) the 'c'haracter screen. What does armor do for a character? A tooltip pops up when you mouseover the word 'Armor' in the character screen. Oh, and count me in with the folks that want the basic stats back in the left bar. Other than that, I'd say it all feels quite polished and ready for non-beta.

ghostbuster wrote: It should even be enhanced. There is very nasty (and I think well known) bug in vista and seven (but XP is OK) that freezes the keyboard (but not the mouse) if you switch between windows. The mouse UI is a great help in that situation. The only problem is that you cannot "save and quit" without a keyboard as a "return" key confirmation is required. A dialog windows "really quit" should be great in that case. (and the fix of this bug even greater )

It's possible to unfreeze from that state. Not 100% sure how.
Hitting ALT again might have helped, but then it might have been something completely different

Feanor.81 wrote:

ghostbuster wrote:There is very nasty (and I think well known) bug in vista and seven (but XP is OK) that freezes the keyboard (but not the mouse) if you switch between windows.

Uh? Never happened here (Win7 x64). Maybe you mean alt+tab? Uhm, never tried that inside ToME ...

Yes, the problem is with alt+tab. If you change windows "mousely", it is OK.

It's possible to unfreeze from that state. Not 100% sure how.
Hitting ALT again might have helped, but then it might have been something completely different

Yes it works. Alt+tab freezes the keybord, but striking alt several times unfreezes it...

Strange. But MS Windows can be so weird....