Dear Blue Manchu, Could you please add an option to Card Hunter which would automatically complete all animations the same way they are completed early if you click anywhere during the animation? Currently, to make the gameplay progress faster, especially with Firestorm effect animations, it is necessary to click a lot. This is extra ergonomic load on the user and can lead to RSI in very active players. I like the graphics and animations in Card Hunter a lot. They and the hard work of the animator(s?) deserve to be enjoyed to the full by players and I know I have and will! But let's be realistic here. After hundreds of hours of playing the same game all game elements blur and fade away. You only care about the mechanics and the inputs you need to provide. At this stage any improvements which lessen your workload are very welcome. Well, why not just don't click so much, you could say? Again, let's be realistic. Card Hunter is a loot chase game. The player is converting her time into items. The faster this happens, the more items she gets and the more successful she will be both in SP and MP. Clicking like a Diablo player makes it faster. Many players will click. In my view, there is no question whatsoever about this. I implore you, Blue Manchu, please make gaming life more pleasant and injury-free for your most active players and add this option. It doesn't matter if it's not foolproof and sometimes leads to graphic glitches. We can live with stuck labels and dice images etc. if they are the price for this. The option could be labeled as unsupported and used at one's own risk. I also suggest creating a new option page for advanced options like this to not lead new players astray, like advanced video options are often put into their own page deeper within the menus. The option could even be a console-only one and not saved between sessions to really hide it from the general public. The players who need it are more than happy to open the console every session and give the command when it saves them thousands of clicks per hour. I don't know your code but I'm hoping the new option would be pretty cheap to implement as it would only need to complete each animation as it happens the same way as if the mouse was clicked after the animation started. Surely this means the code to complete each animation fast already exists and only needs to be called automatically? As a back-up, if it's not possible to fulfill this request, could you please look at changing the fire hit effects animation to be instantaneous? That is the main offender making all the clicking necessary. In SP Firestorm farming the animation happens 30-40 times per minute. Many of us do a LOT of SP Firestorm farming. As long as the possibility exists, we the players will Firestorm farm and we will click and the option I suggest would make our gaming lives better and more healthy. Thank you for your time and thank you for making a game so excellent many of us are willing to spend a large portion of our free time with it!
Not to mention the cost of mouse replacement... The animation is beautifully done, but some of it (particularly the shifting of cards) I find very annoying. I'm probably in the minority here, but I really wish there was a way to turn it completely off. No slide, no fade, no 'break in half on the way out' for discards either. Just gone. Probably not the best place to post this, but I've been grinding and the card antics really get on my nerves. Back to card hunting.
^^ Agree, I prefer old style interfaces in general. Heck I'd probably smile more if the entire game was done in ASCII.
I approve this suggestion. It's weird that you can cancel animations by clicking like a maniac, but you cannot tweak animation speed to that same level in the settings.
+++++++++++++++++++++++ Also, there should be a way to speed up between-scenario animations, like treasure drops. (And keyboard input for those between-scenario buttons.)
Yeah, one way to accomplish the purpose of this suggestion would be to just increase the upper range of possible animation speeds to where at top speed the animations would be instantaneous. One additional idea would be to make fire attacks hit all monsters at the same time. This way there would be no interminable wait while ten zombies take turns being scorched. This might be more complicated to achieve codewise, though, depending on the way the system currently works. The other suggestions might involve a lot less effort.
Do it please. I just finished 28 adventures with firestorm and it was very straining. I would be perfectly happy if i could turn down the animations and grafics to the level of UltimaIV, that would save a lot of my life.
