ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

As you may or may not know, Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup has a great autoexplore feature that makes the game so much less tedious to play. Basically, you hit a hotkey, and your character will automatically run around until a monster comes into your LoS, or if some other situation happens (a buff running out, etc). If it goes down a hall and sees that it's a dead end, it will turn around and go somewhere else.

It doesn't make any decisions for the player. It simply makes it much quicker and less tedious to explore levels. It won't search for hidden doors, etc. It just runs around the level until something happens to stop it. It's a lot like shift+direction travel, except it won't stop when it hits a wall; it will turn around and go somewhere else.

I would not be able to play the game without that feature; it makes it that much better. If you have never tried it, you should be glad, because you have no idea what you're missing.

I think TE4 would benefit greatly from this feature. This is a great game, but the auto explore feature is the one biggest thing I miss from Crawl. It almost makes all other roguelikes unplayable to me because of the lack of autoexplore.

I think that this is also relatively easy to implement to. Auto explore simply moves to the nearest unexplored tile. So if one were to make a function that finds that and then passes that to the run function you would have auto explore. running already does most of what auto explore does. This is more of an extension of running by simply targeting the nearest unexplored tile by key press.

It is on DG's todo list, but not sure about the priority...

This would be a fantastic feature.

An additional desired features would be that if an unidentified object is seen, then the "target" switches from unidentified squares to this object, and one should move to towards it and stop when one stands upon it and the object is identified because of this.

If auto-explore gets implemented I suggest changing the track skill, which one frequently casts while exploring, to be a sustain skill in order to be compatible with auto-exploring. Maybe lower the perception range as a compensation for being sustained.

Yet another suggestion. When pressing the autoexplore button, first rest until fully restored before starting exploring.

Dunno about that last one.

It's not biggy to press "r", then "o" (or whatever key ends up to be it) if you want to rest up, and the hate-using classes might be in a hurry to move on...

Copypasta from my post a few minutes ago in the "Defining Features of ToME4" thread:

Seeing as the main gripe here seems to be the tedium of going back and covering every little nook and cranny of a level to make sure you didn't miss anything, how about once you've explored/uncovered (meaning sighted, via LoS or magically, not necessarily traversed) at least 90% (95%?) of the *accessible* squares on a level, you can activate the Orb and ask Elisa to kindly 'scry out' the remainder of the map, including all inaccessible squares, and give you either a quantitative statement about remaining mobs/loot (e.g, "Almost there! You only missed 2 enemies and 3 items - well done!") or qualitative (e.g, [artifact or other very good item missed] = "Ooooh, I sense treasure! :D"; [0 enemies left] = "This place is safe, no doubt about it!"; [3 enemies left] = "Phew, you've sure done a great job, but don't quit just yet!"; [boss left] = "OMG I THINK IT SAW ME :((( *severs connection*" lol..)

Scried, accessible parts of levels can then be highlited as such on the minimap, making it easy to clicktravel to them if you *really* want to be comprehensive. On a related note, it would be nice if you could clickdrag the minimap.

Elisa's scrying may work 'through' you in such a way that means it can be enhanced by your magic or willpower, or by some other talent/stat.. not sure exactly how that could work, but regardless of stats, perhaps if you have truly cleared a level of *all* monsters, she will feel safe enough to reach out through your link with her mind and give you an identified list of all items remaining in that zone.

Thoughts?

I agree that exploring the nooks and crannies, especially of wooded areas like Trollmire, is annoying. An autoexplore feature would be a nice way of relieving that.

Gliktch wrote:Copypasta from my post a few minutes ago in the "Defining Features of ToME4" thread:

Seeing as the main gripe here seems to be the tedium of going back and covering every little nook and cranny of a level to make sure you didn't miss anything, how about once you've explored/uncovered (meaning sighted, via LoS or magically, not necessarily traversed) at least 90% (95%?) of the *accessible* squares on a level, you can activate the Orb and ask Elisa to kindly 'scry out' the remainder of the map, including all inaccessible squares, and give you either a quantitative statement about remaining mobs/loot (e.g, "Almost there! You only missed 2 enemies and 3 items - well done!") or qualitative (e.g, [artifact or other very good item missed] = "Ooooh, I sense treasure! :D"; [0 enemies left] = "This place is safe, no doubt about it!"; [3 enemies left] = "Phew, you've sure done a great job, but don't quit just yet!"; [boss left] = "OMG I THINK IT SAW ME :((( *severs connection*" lol..)

Scried, accessible parts of levels can then be highlited as such on the minimap, making it easy to clicktravel to them if you *really* want to be comprehensive. On a related note, it would be nice if you could clickdrag the minimap.

Elisa's scrying may work 'through' you in such a way that means it can be enhanced by your magic or willpower, or by some other talent/stat.. not sure exactly how that could work, but regardless of stats, perhaps if you have truly cleared a level of *all* monsters, she will feel safe enough to reach out through your link with her mind and give you an identified list of all items remaining in that zone.

Thoughts?

The final exploration of a level is not the only problems. Some dungeons like the Maze are just extremely tedious to explore as a whole.

Even for other dungeons and also before the final exploration, auto-explore would remove a boring, simple, tedious task (numerous clicks/keystrokes just to move to the closest black square) and thus would instead increase interesting combat time.

It is one of those things that once you have tried you never want to be without it again and you are amazed that you managed without it before. I consider it the most significant improvement that can be made to ToME currently.