Announcing the MOVE-TO command.

Release date: Wed 22 Sep, 1999 3:14 PM

What it is:

Some of you who have played Omega already know this command: It lets
you move to a known, interesting location in one command, rather than
laboriously navigating thru the map.

I've bound it to the ^V key because there were only about half a dozen
unused keys left and ^V was one of them.

Some differences Omega-lovers will notice:

       This version walks thru the map, it doesn't teleport.
       
       As a consequences, it doesn't offer a "cheat" to get past
       monsters, traps, obstacles, etc.

       It "knows" which location is nearest if several are the same
       (EG, several down staircases on the same level)

       It can be used in the dungeon as well as in town.       

Files:

moveto.diffs is a multi-file diff against Pangband1.1 of the changes.
moveto.txt is this file.

Installation:

Just apply the multi-file patch moveto.diffs and recompile and it
should just work.  

Usually that's:

	cd $your-angband-source-directory
	patch -p7 < moveto.diffs
	make

New source files:

flow.c
moveto.c

Anti-bugs:

Please don't mail me reporting that "it stops running in the middle of
nowhere for no reason".  It almost certainly did what it is supposed
to: Stopped running when a monster moved or something else disturbed
you, which sometimes is not obvious.  This is the correct behavior.
In general, you don't want to obliviously keep running onwards when
monsters are moving, etc.

If it bothers you a lot, you can turn minor disturbance options off
('=' for the options menu). That's often a good idea in town anyways.

Bugs:

The patch is against Pangband 1.1 but doesn't intersect the
Pangband-specific files so I think it will work on any 2.7.* or 2.8.*
Angband source.

I updated the non-Unix makefiles as best I could, but if they give you
problems, you'll have to fix them yourself; you can see what's going
on with them and experiment, and I can't.

I don't know of any actual bugs yet.  You can mail bug reports to
tob@world.std.com.  But please remember that I did this for free and
don't intend to make a career of patching Angband.


Non-features:

There are features that could be built on top of this, but which I
probably won't do:

	 The target locations could be sorted rather than being
	 presented in whatever order they come.

	 Allowing the player himself to mark "good spots" and go to
	 them.

	 Repeating the command more fluently, with just one keystroke
	 instead of requiring the user to re-choose a location each
	 time he is disturbed.

	 Allowing the player to follow a moving monster rather than a
	 static terrain.

	 Speed up the flow code by only searching out the full 32
	 steps a small part of the time, and most of the time using a
	 smaller limit.  This optimization is possible now but wasn't
	 before.

	 Make the code more object-oriented by bundling the data, the
	 passability test, and the state into one structure and
	 operating on that.  Monsters' flow would still be have more
	 data than move-to flow.  The operations would be safer.


Tom Breton
tob@world.std.com