[CF-Devel] Cosmetic improvements

[Tom Barnes-Lawrence]

It's often seemed to me that before making an official
stable release, Crossfire could prolly do with a handful
of small "Cosmetic Improvements", to give it a bit of polish.
  Obviously many such improvements would be inappropriate in
a feature-freeze, or difficult in such short time.
For instance, overhauling the PNG tileset would take ages.
  However, if the tilesets are to *eventually* change, IMHO
it would be a good idea to mention this on the start map
(so people know that some of the faces are likely to be changed
in future, and don't get too attatched to them, etc)
..
  Further, a sub-miniature patch that has no known issues:
The syntax of many of the messages CF gives the player is
screwy, and whilst some would be nontrivial to change, the
one regarding no_pick objects is not:
  If you try picking up an object "foo" that has "no_pick" set,
the message is "You cannot pick up a foo". In most instances, that
looks wrong, whereas in *all* instances I can think of,
"You cannot pick up THE foo" is perfect, as it refers to the one
you are trying to pick up.
The current form looks OK for trees, houses, etc, but wrong for:
floor, earth, grass, etc., plus anything like a book, sword, etc
that you would normally be able to pick up except that the
mapmaker has decided you shouldn't be able to.
Using "the" is spot on for *all* of those.
  There is only one form where I'm not sure about it: If you
have a pile of objects you can't pick up. If you try to pick
up the whole pile, it would have to say "You can't pick up the
arrows", or "You can't pick up the 27 arrows", rather than
"You can't pick up the arrow".
..
I've only just looked for the function, so I'm a bit confused
as to why it appears in c_object.c to be covered by both
pick_up_object and command_take (which does what?).
I'd also assumed "a" was printed by some function that returned
"a foo" or "3 bars" for an object or pile of objects, but it's
just part of the message, so you can change it straight to
"You can't pick up the %s".
..
If you want to cover the possibility of a pile of unpickable
objects, it'd need to use something like

sprintf(buf,"You can't pick up the %s",
(tmp->nrof=1)? tmp->name : tmp->nrof+" "+tmp->name+"s");

[As the function currently assumes *single* no_pick objects, I
expect that's all there ever is. Unpickable heaps sounds odd, but
not necessarily wrong though.]
  Not the biggest issue in CF, but it's been annoying me.
Tomble
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