ToME WikiKhymChanur: Sometimes I want to see what item or trap is under a monster, especially when ESPing monsters in a vault. Other times I want to not see piles of items on the ground, to see if there's traps or other nasty things under them, especially after using Fireflash and not knowing where the lava spots are. For monsters in a vault, you could take off your equpiment that's giving you ESP, but that might be dangerous/stupid if they also provide resists/immunities, and is impossible if the ESP is a side effect from casting Detect Monsters or Precognition.
A way of taking care of this would be to make a new command. Invoking it once disables the display of monsters, invoking it twice also disables the display of items on the ground, and invoking it a third time returns display to normal. Doing anything other than the "L"ook command returns the display mode to normal, as does pressing "Esc".
TheKeeper: I agree. If you kill a monster and some of his loot falls on a trap, you can't see it anymore and it's very annoying to 'L'ook at each tile to see if there's a trap there.
Solorin: This seems unrealistic to me. An object falling on a trap will obscure your sight of the trap, as will a monster standing on some object. Some traps are also created with bait on top. You just have to be wary of these situations. Doesn't a rod of detection reveal objects and monsters in a sequential manner, so that you can detect objects that are under monsters? If it does, than wearing ESP would be more of a trade-off issue. For example, you would think "Should I use ESP which gives me constant detection, or should I use this rod of detection which enables me to all the objects underneath these monsters?".
KhymChanur: You can see the traps by "L"ook-ing at the monster/item and pressing the space bar over-and-over; it will eventually say what traps/items it's standing on. Same for seeing if a monster or item is on top of lava. It's just so tedious to do it that way.
RedNaga: Mmmm... on a side, it is true that baited traps would make no sense with such a command (and we would lose the thrill of walking on a lone dagger and end up surrounded by 'Q' 
), but it is silly for mages, thaumaturgists, geomancer and all the other characters who make intensive use of fire magic to have to examine all the loot left behind by a *huge* troll band just to see where lava has been created. And *that* should be pretty hard to get hidden by a simple object.
Maybe traps and baited traps could be differentiated as features, so this command would show them as simple floor (by dungeon type, of course) when the bait object is hidden.
As for the ESP issue, AFAICT, ESP does not substitute detection, since there are so many mindless monsters wich are not detected by ESP (even *very* dangerous ones). IHMO ESP is an option, detection is not.
NeilStevens: If someone can come up with a good UI for this feature I don't see why it wouldn't be included. Magic detection implants knowledge into your mind, and we can ignore logic at will, heh.
Idea: we could rework the look commands into three new ones: one to look at terrain, one to look at items, one to look at monsters. When you engage the item command, it removes the monsters, and vice versa.
MayLith: Hold down a command key, hit look command repeatedly to cycle through the three?
RedNaga: I think it's fine, but i would like to still keep the old look command too, to be able to get a 'global view' of the situation when needed.
NeilStevens: I'd rather that we designed one good interface and used it, instead of cluttering the interface with a bunch of keys all doing slightly different versions of the same thing. We only need one way for the user to examine the map, not three or four. The cycling idea sounds very good to me. Something similiar is already done for the monster lookup after all.
RedNaga: i didn't see this before... i agree with the 'single key' thing. What i was meaning was just that i would like the old look mode to be available among the 'cycled' ones.
FeathinSilyar: Using the 'l'ook command would still be a very tedious compromise to something that memory and vision should make easily apparent. How about a toggle, with a different key, to make all monsters or monsters and objects unshown, so that at a glance objects or terrain can be seen everywhere, as if nothing was on top of them?
RedNaga: This sound dangerous... what if you hit the key by chance or error when there are no monsters on screen and the stumble into a GWoP not even knowing it's there? Urk! (I suppose this does not happen to everyone, but it's the kind of things that keep getting my characters killed)
KhymChanur: You could make it so that anything besides 'l'ook returns the mode to normal.
RedNaga: I'm sorry, but then i wouldn't see the point: i would have to press a key to hide things, and then any other keypress would return things to normal? Isn't this pretty the same thing as using a separate look command?
KhymChanur: You might not want to 'l'ook at any particular thing, but just take a gander at the whole map, to see where objects and traps are located. Also, if you have more than one different ignore-mode, than you'd need two different commands bound to two different keys, and it seems to me that we're running out of keys to bind new commands to.
RedNaga: as Neil said above, you don't really need to examine the map without monsters or objects turned off... it's more a facility for short-range sightings. As for the key issue, that's why we've been discussing of cycling the different view mode with a single key.
NeilStevens: Modifying the map when the player is actually moving and attacking sounds error-prone to me, too. I'd rather the UI not have traps like that.
PaulMoore: The thing that bugs me is getting the list of things a monster is carrying. I've been playing summoners recently, and I really don't care what my pets are carrying, but I do care what they are standing on. Essentially, I want to say "Hands up! Who's standing on the Phial?" Maybe an extra option on "look" ('x' for 'examine'?) to list what a monster is carrying, otherwise don't display it?
RedNaga: but that's exactly what you will get by modifying the look command as discussed above... one more click and monsters disappear allowing you to see what's beneath them