ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Okay, one of the biggest problems for my play style is creatures that show up in my fov but are out of the display area. Partly, it's the 1440x900 resolution I play at, but it's also due to the extreme distances the player can see when a room is lighted. I've had enemies show up that are >20 tiles away but I can't see them without scrolling or setting the tile size to something smaller than 48x48. Manually resizing the tiles is a pain in the butt, and I also don't like sacrificing detail like that. Plus, my eyes go into squint mode whenever I'm using a size smaller than 40x40.

So, what I propose is a zoom feature. With automatic zoom-out in the situations I just described. I believe this would be pretty easy to implement and give a huuuuge boost to playability. Basically, load the full 64x64 version of a tile and keep it in memory. Use the cubic method to resize the tile when zoomed out (the game already does this natively to resize tiles down), but allow the player to do it on the fly. When the cursor is over the play field (not over a window or the hotkey bar), just use the mouse wheel to zoom in and out. Easy! No more choosing tile sizes!

For an added bonus, whenever a creature shows up off screen, automatically zoom out enough to put the creature visible at the edge of the screen. This could help alleviate frustrating deaths when a nasty caster with obscene range shows up out of view.

Please, please add this function. I believe it is a very simple addition that could reap huge benefits for playability. Thanks!

daftigod wrote:I've had enemies show up that are >20 tiles away...

How have you been able to detect enemies that far away? The "normal" maximum view range is 10, and I don't know of any way to get it above 15 (with the Higher racial).

I could see the dynamic zoom that you are proposing working well for some people, but I wouldn't like always changing sizes like that. Another possible solution would be to add some form of notification that pops up on the border, allowing the player to notice important things off of the screen easier.

Note: I play with 24x24 tiles, using the Simple Tileset, on a 1280x800 screen, and with all of the UI elements shifted to the corners/sides, so I can see at least 10 in all directions. My ideas/observations are probably heavily influenced by that.

The feature I'd like is an auto scroll / focus to whatever broke my auto explore or resting if it is off screen.

The game already detects if something is offscreen when you can't rest or auto-explore. A cool game option would to auto scroll the view port to show the hostile or whatever. Don't center on it, maybe just put it one or two tiles from the edge it was closest to.

The problem mostly doesn't apply with auto explore in my case (i'm using my auto-attack patch), but when i'm moving manually. The notification of enemy sighted then is easy to overlook because the game doesn't do anything obvious (like stop in auto-explore).

I agree, somekind of forceful visible indication should be a option, maybe default.


I'm actually unsure i broke the design since i'm playing twinked characters, (explorers, custom races, auto divination/vision stuff).

I sometimes just look at thi minimap while exploring, just so I can see when I'm about to be blasted by luminous horrors...

if the minimap made a 'pulse', say rapidly cycling the color of the new added enemy dots, or expanding them for a second, that would be solution, sure. I'm thinking a really obvious sonar pulse for the tiles version (the problem doesn't apply on the console version right?)

The (new?) enemy sounds on svn are great, maybe the same idea could be used for distant enemy sounds by lowering volume. If music interferes, maybe some kind of dynamic thing to lower game music while a actor 'voice' is playing (though i play without music now, and maybe that's why i noticed them only now)

Or maybe this doesn't actually need changing and we're overreacting.