Chaosforge Forum

DoomRL => Requests For Features => Topic started by: Zalminen on November 08, 2011, 10:47

Title: Weapon comparison made easier
Post by: Zalminen on November 08, 2011, 10:47

After reading the thread "DoomRL featured on Roguelike Radio", I realized there was one thing mentioned that had been bugging me for some time so I figured I'd make an actual feature request for that so it could be discussed better.

Currently when you find a new weapon, especially when it's something you haven't seen before the first question is naturally "Is this better than what I'm currently using".
You pick up the weapon and the inventory screen shows the damage, fire time, reload time and accuracy for the new weapon.
You open the equipment screen to check the current weapon - damn, it only shows the damage.
You open the character screen and finally see the current weapon stats.
If you want to compare against a weapon in the prepared slot you have to first switch weapons as the character screen only shows the primary weapon.

This is not exactly nice and handy.

Possible ways to fix this:

• Add a Compare button (for example Tab) to inventory screen. After you would select a weapon using the arrow keys pressing the Compare button would then toggle compare mode so the screen would instead list just the currently selected weapon, the currently equipped weapon and the prepared weapon and show the stats for all of them.
  This way you could use one screen to make the comparisons.
• Instead of the cool ASCII picture in the character screen, add a listing of the currenly carried weapons, armors and boots with the currently equipped stuff on the top. Choosing something from the list would then show how the current stats would change if you changed to the selected weapon/armor/boots and could be colorcoded to show what would improve.
  For example like this:
  
  ...
  Current fire speed is 1,00 (0,8) second/shot
  Current reload speed is 1,20 (2,00) second/shot
  Current to hit chance (point blank) is 90% (95%)
  ...
  
  Again you could use just one screen to make comparisons.
• One simple improvement would be to just show the prepared weapon stats in the character info screen under the current Weapon rows. This would allow easy comparison of the equipped and prepared weapons.
  ...
  Weapon - pistol (2d4) [6/6]
    fire 1,0s, reload 1,2s, acc +4
  Prepared - shotgun (8d3) [1/1]
    fire 1,0s, reload 1,0s, acc +0
  
  Armor
  ...
  
• Another way would be to add the fire speed, reload speed and accuracy to the equipment screen:
  ...
  [ b ] [ Weapon     ] pistol (2d4) [6/6]  (fs 1,0 rl 1,2 ac +4)
  ...
  [ d ] [ Prepared    ] shotgun (8d3) [1/1] (fs 1,0 rl 1,0 ac +0)
  ...
  
  This would also allow quick comparison between equipped and prepared weapon.

Of course many weapons have special features that this kind of comparison would not show but currently comparing even simple weapons is a bit annoying...

These are just quick ideas so I'm sure someone can think of better ways to make weapon comparisons easier.