Reading comprehension, bandwaggon people.
The problem is NOT the monsters/creatures (for those ascii works nice), but the abiguity that is created in the base-build part.
Did you ever take a look at the finished goods storeroom?
Or how about the whole bin/barrel interface? More than clunky.
Not to mention double detailed rooms looking like a graphics memory corruption.
Nobody is seriously asking for toady to create a tileset, but an engine change that supports:
-a charset with definable lettersize (it should be just two lines. One to read it from the ini, another one to replace the constant with the read variable)
-more than 255 characters. Which should also not be anything but trivial, if the author hasnt been doing some horrid programming (to explain: there are already more than 255 different kinds of repesentations, because of colour coordination. So using chars for variable storage would have been not very bright)
-more tiles visible at the same time. Nethack supports this, angband supports it, so it should even be accepted by the most narrowminded in the bunch here.
-SQUARE tiles. even if they are letters. The current "everything is warped by a factor of 2 in height" sucks just so much. Playing in a window with 2.5:1 AR makes it look ok (hey, square rooms are actually square!), but emphasiszes the lack of screen real estade.
I mean, when i play hengband, i have my normal terminal open, another one for the map and inventory. Plus a 4th one for the message log. And that in a "classic style" roguelike that doesnt even have basic tiles.
So there is no reason to get in a reactive "its great the way it is" mode even though it doesnt have basic usability features of just anything after moria and hack.
Just think about playing dwarf fortress, with 160x120 (which is good-sized characters on a 17") letters visible at once. Plus being able to keep on another screen that ALWAYS shows whats under your curser (like person/bin/tile menues right now). plus having the message log in a different window, not hiding the "idle dwarfs" number.
[ August 29, 2006: Message edited by: imsabbel ]