Grimrock

Which changes or improvements would you like to see?

- I wish damage numbers would not disappear so quickly. This is especially a problem during intense battles. I usually have no idea how much damage I am doing unless I'm taking my eye off battle to look at weapon squares. Either make it 2-3 seconds longer, or create a "Time to display damage values" Low/Medium/High (1/3/5 seconds) setting in Options menu.

I also have a damage related wish, but it's about the damage that you receive yourself.
As it is now the numbers cover up your whole health bar when you get hit, so when fighting enemies like the zombies, who deal attacks in quick succession, it's very difficult to tell how much health you've got left.

Good point. Those constant big red splats hinder awareness of when its time to drink a potion or run. And with certain enemies that do flurry attacks (Skeletons, Mummies) those rapid-fire splats are really annoying.

I'd love to be looking at my opponents during fights instead of the little UI boxes in the bottom right. But not sure how to accomplish that while keeping combat fun and involved.

D'Ascoyne wrote:I also have a damage related wish, but it's about the damage that you receive yourself.
As it is now the numbers cover up your whole health bar when you get hit, so when fighting enemies like the zombies, who deal attacks in quick succession, it's very difficult to tell how much health you've got left.

Confirmed, this is a known problem rooting back (and reported also) to LoG1

my wish, is keybinds...

Sure you can get around this with autohotkey but why..

why can't we have keybinds to the hands of the characters, inventory etc.

remilafo wrote:why can't we have keybinds to the hands of the characters, inventory etc.

Simple: count how many hotkeys you'd need to do that. 8 hands + weapon swap, 4 inventories with 4 tabs inside ..

Dr.Disaster wrote:

remilafo wrote:why can't we have keybinds to the hands of the characters, inventory etc.

Simple: count how many hotkeys you'd need to do that. 8 hands + weapon swap, 4 inventories with 4 tabs inside ..

not really, as everyone could select the relevant key subset for himself. Infact, this is also standard PC game feature normally expected to be available. (And surely not hard to implement.)

badhabit wrote:

Dr.Disaster wrote:

remilafo wrote:why can't we have keybinds to the hands of the characters, inventory etc.

Simple: count how many hotkeys you'd need to do that. 8 hands + weapon swap, 4 inventories with 4 tabs inside ..

not really, as everyone could select the relevant key subset for himself. Infact, this is also standard PC game feature normally expected to be available. (And surely not hard to implement.)

"standard PC game feature" sounds like "spoiled brat" to me

What's your count?

Movement: wasdqe (already in the game)
Hands: ui op jk l;
Runes: numpad
Select champion: numrow 1 2 3 4 (already in the game)
Swap weapons of selected champion: x (already in the game, but requires hovering your mouse over the champion instead of selecting them)

A standard US keyboard has 33 very easily accessible keys (for a traditional typist) and another couple dozen that are still pretty easy to reach, plus metakeys. You can run out of comfortable hotkeys in a bloated RTS or something like Dwarf Fortress, but I don't see it happening with Grimrock. Heck, if you want to get really fancy you could include complete charsheet and cursor manipulation using the cursor keys etc. and still not run out of keys.

Obviously I'm not a Grimrock dev, but I'm pretty sure the reason hotkeys for attacking weren't implemented was not that keyboards have too few keys on them. Rather, it seems to be an intentional design decision to make fumbling with a clunky interface a large part of combat - think about why you have to draw runes instead of just clicking on a spell icon. That was how most of the old dungeon crawlers (which Grimrock is based on) did it, after all; Dungeon Master required you to click on attack buttons and input sequences of runes for spells, Stonekeep required you to click near a monster for your swings to hit it and some monsters were even vulnerable to hits in specific spots.
I will leave whether this is a good or bad design as an exercise for the reader.

Note that Grimrock 2 provides a Champion:attack() method. I haven't experimented with it yet, but once documentation on GUI drawing is released I plan to make a plugin for custom dungeons that allows players to define and use keyboard controls.