Transmogrification Chest interface improvements

[Susramanian]

Wrong as it feels to complain about the relatively painless process of turning loot into gold through the Chest, there's always room for improvement. It *does* get old to bring up the Transmogrification dialog for every item, examine it to determine whether we want it, and either pick it up or zap it. It's a lot of time and keystrokes for each item. To streamline this process, I'll recommend some changes.

Create a whole separate inventory tab for the contents of the Transmogrification Chest. Add the option to have all items the character walks over placed inside the Chest (thus appearing under the Chest's inventory tab). When the Chest's inventory is open, the player can press a key to zap the entire contents of the Chest tab.

Adding flexibility to the various inventory-displaying dialogs would also be welcome. It would be nice to be able to open up the inventory, highlight an item, and 'w'ear the item, 'd'rop the item, 't'ransmogrify the item, or 'g'et the item (moves it from Transmogrification Chest tab to the main inventory tab). This would require that those letters not be used as indices in the inventory, but that shouldn't be a problem. Just skip them.

With these changes, we can happily trot about the zones, only paying attention to our inventory when we get encumbered. Then we open up the Transmogrification Chest inventory tab, 'g'et out the stuff we think is worth keeping, and zap the rest into gold with a single keystroke-- say, capital T for 'T'ransmogrify All.

[Hedrachi]

Um... you don't have a "Transmogrify all" button at the top of your transmogrify window? Admittedly the only time I use it is when I get it, to transmogrify everything the beast dropped as well as what I was carrying to sell later.

[Susramanian]

That 'transmogrify all' button does save some keystrokes when encountering piles of items. Most often, though, we find items singly. The goal of my proposal is allow the accumulation of objects into a part of the inventory in which a 'transmogrify all' button can be safely placed. The inventory as it stands now is a very bad place for such a button-- how long before somebody fat-fingers it and deletes the entire contents of their backpack?

[tiger_eye]

There was a previous discussion to streamline the transmogrifier chest here:

http://forums.te4.org/viewtopic.php?f=39&t=26401

When encountering a pile of items, one typically picks up what they want, then transmog's the rest, so...:

Maybe just a transmogrify option in the pickup menu?

If you encounter a single item, then maybe use a command that transmog's an item on the floor without confirmation:

why dont make it work like that:

you press 'T' and if there is 1 item - transmogrify it if there is more instead of opening dialog it transmogrify 1st one on the stack if you want old style you just open transmogrify dialog.

As it is now, if you encounter a single item, it takes two keystrokes to transmog' it. If you encounter a pile with N on it, then it takes N+1 keystrokes (or 3 if "Transmogrify All" button is selected using the keyboard). If you want to transmog' many items from your inventory, then you can drop them first en masse (i.e., in the "D"rop menu, then one "return" keystroke for each item), then transmogrify all of them. In my experience, I haven't found this to be an annoying waste of keystrokes.

In the inventory screen, I think asking for confirmation before transmog' an item is a really good idea. Instead of moving things back and forth between a "chest" tab and inventory tabs--how many keystrokes would that take?!--it could be nice to be able to select multiple items in inventory to choose to transmog' all at once.

Auto-pickup of items sounds like a bad idea, unless it is a sustainable talent (as I suggested in the discussion I linked above).

A separate chest tab as suggested also sounds like a bad idea to me. On the other hand, if you were able to access the contents of your storage room (and cost 1 fortress energy to transport it to the player), then I could find it useful.

Oh, I would also like to be able to sort items in inventory w.r.t. when I picked them up. Then, if there was a "auto-pickup" sustained talent, one could access the inventory and see which items they picked up most recently. Functionally similar to a "chest" tab in inventory as suggested, but simpler and useful in more situations.

[Susramanian]

Auto-pickup of items sounds like a bad idea, unless it is a sustainable talent (as I suggested in the discussion I linked above).

A separate chest tab as suggested also sounds like a bad idea to me.

It's hardly polite to simply condemn something as a bad idea without offering justification. I did say that auto-pickup should be an option. The ability to toggle it on and off with a hotkey would be very nice. Making it a sustain would accomplish that neatly, though it would feel odd to have a purely UI-related element displayed with the combat elements in the sustains + timed effects pane.

Allowing the option to sort items based on time since pickup would be nice, but it wouldn't achieve the same degree of keystroke-reduction that the dedicated chest inventory tab would. I want to be able to walk around, filling that tab up without a single keypress, then browse it at my convenience and potentially transmogrify it all with a single keystroke.

My suggestions are designed with keystroke reduction in mind. Your post indicates that you're less annoyed by using repetitive keystrokes to manage inventory than I am, so I suppose my suggestions aren't really aimed at you

[lukep]

One (possible) downside of the proposed system is weight management. Depending on implementation and the character, it could either give infinite weight capacity, negating inventory management completely, or fill up too fast, reducing or negating some of the advantages.

[tiger_eye]

One (possible) downside of the proposed system is weight management. Depending on implementation and the character, it could either give infinite weight capacity, negating inventory management completely, or fill up too fast, reducing or negating some of the advantages.

As I understand Susramanian's suggestion, the items in the chest would still add encumbrance, so I agree, lukep, it could fill up pretty quickly.

Anyway, I posted something very similar in functionality in the post I linked to above (see here).
"""

Just auto transmorgify everything that I did't pick up while not in combat. Then enable me to get any transmorgified item back for energy at the sher tul fortress.

Going along this line of thought, perhaps the player could gain a "Sustain" ability when they get the transmogrifier or after the fortress gains enough energy. When active, (non-plot) items that you walk over will automatically be sent to your storage room (or perhaps a secondary storage room if players prefer). If you wish to transmogrify them for energy, then you can do it en masse back in your fortress. Transmogrifying a stack of 1000 once is much nicer than transmogrifying 1000 individual items separately.
"""

This would have even fewer keystrokes than even your suggestion, Susramanian. Also, I'm sorry if I'm coming off as impolite today--I'm writing more hastily than usual--and I was merely trying to include what others have already posted on this subject.

[bio_hazard]

If you really want to make this more efficient, cut out the action entirely. Make the transmorgrification chest increase the gold drops from killed enemies, and make the power level increase with some fraction of XP gained. Call it a transmorgification transducer then- maybe it is capturing life energy with a gold waste product or something... If you feel it is necessary, add some plot device where stores are unable to buy your things anymore (or don't add this).

[Susramanian]

I agree that encumbrance would be a big constraint of this system, but it's not like this is some new problem that arises with the introduction of the Chest tab. We're basically just roping off a corner of the player's inventory and designating it as the Transmogrification zone.

Having the chest teleport stuff to a special Transmogrification staging area in the fortress would be an improvement over the current situation, and has the potential to be even more keystroke-efficient than the Chest tab idea, but here are some things to consider:

1) Is the teleport one-way? If so, then that means some annoyance when you send something to your fortress accidentally that you would have liked to use or wear on the spot. You'd have to be more cautious, which probably means avoiding the auto-pickup sustain, which means we're back to considering items individually. If the teleport is not one-way, then the player effectively has an infinite carrying capacity. It's not the end of the world if you send something to the fortress you didn't intend to-- you can always go fetch it back if you really need it this minute-- but I think it would be annoying enough.

2) It would be very easy to accumulate gigantic piles of loot that require later sorting, and ToME dialogs handle big piles of loot badly. It's like putting off mowing the lawn for a month and then having to painfully deal with the resulting jungle. Makes you wish that you just mowed the damn thing every week like you promised yourself you would last time.

3) Darkgod has been making noises for months about implementing inventory tabs. Anything that pushes him further in that direction is a good thing, so I'm all in favor of creating demand for a Transmogrification Chest inventory tab

[Hedrachi]

Plenty of keys left unmapped so far. Maybe we could map one to open up the transmogrify inventory, instead of gluing it to the already-huge inventory screen? Chest itself would still be in inventory, and could add the weight of objects inside of it to its own weight in the inventory. I personally like the idea of a separate (or at least, separate from the perspective of the player) tab for chest inventory as my mouse can be a little twitchy and make the existing menus a little hard to navigate unless I keep the cursor hidden down in the corner of the message log or talent list or something. From screenies of higher resolution TOME windows they don't look as cluttered as they do on mine (I play at 1200x800 fullscreen, my laptop's Native resolution), so a chest tab when I'm playing as an alchie, or when I've got a lot of lewt for the fortress' trophy room... err, storage room is going to be even more cluttered and unhelpful.

[Susramanian]

Hedrachi, inventory tabs would work much like tabs in modern web browsers-- an efficient little UI element for switching the display of the current window between various things. We're not talking about adding another whole pane. Say tab switching is mapped by default to the tab key. Open your inventory with 'i' as usual. Then press tab (or actually click on the graphical representation of the tab), and the window switches to showing the contents of the next tab. You could have a tab for showing everything, a tab for just weapons and armor, a tab for quest items, a tab for the contents of the Transmogrification chest, hopefully even tabs we can fully customize. None of it requires cluttering up the display with an extra window.

[Hedrachi]

oic