Inactive Miniion

[Cervator]

Oh, just to highlight an important detail to this: Only one row would show normally. Pressing 'i' would then grow additional rows upwards to reveal your full inventory, with the bottom rows still being your quickbar and what's in them (rather than now where the first 9 slots on the placeholder inventory screen show what will be in the quickbar, which is visible at the same time). Mouse would go unlocked so you can rearrange. Then press 'i' again to shrink back down to one row.

But how to integrate that with minion control rather than a separate minion bar? That's what struck me as problematic, as they would sort of clash. But then too, I suppose, would having any sort of icon in the quick bar not immediately tied to an item in your inventory, which might be desirable (like spells). So maybe it doesn't work.

You could perhaps have one inventory quick bar, then one ability quick bar. One is 1-9 (or more likely 0), the other is the function keys (remappable, of course). That might make more sense with minion control being analogous to a spell?

 

[overdhose]

It could... minions might be scrolls (oops trademarked) which work as 1 time spells... summoning one would replace the scroll in that spot. Might be a mechanic to look into.

 

[overdhose]

thinking about the 2 toolbar layout I made a little concept to see what you think of it, or if this was your idea all along :

 

[Cervator]

Dunno - not sure what what picture you're painting, other than the inventory open bit. Keeping all the toolbars in one place and making them swappable with each other?

I figured something like:

1) Spells / abilities / minions on the current vertical toolbar, tied to function keys
2) Items only on the current horizontal toolbar, tied to 1-9 (0 eventually)

The two would stay entirely independent, offering distinctly different types of triggers (items vs non-items)

Come to think of it, each bar could expand upwards/outwards as a UI element to pick exactly what you want in the bar. The item bar would expand into multiple black lines like in your diagram (just with no other colors present) and the player could rearrange stuff, with what's in the bottom row being tied to hot keys and ready for use. The vertical bar (lets call it the "special" bar, if it goes beyond minions) could grow another column to the left to expose other abilities (spells, innate abilities, and "entangled" creatures)

So the special bar opens into your "spellbook" or "ability menu" or "creature roster" - or something. Point being, it is special, while the bar tied to your inventory is entirely item-based. Either one could be changed or upgraded to expand into more rows/columns if needed/desired.

Item based minions - you could put the item in your item bar, trigger it which spawns a creature, then that automatically makes the creature available for selection in the special bar. Re-trigger the original item and you put the creature away again?

With just two toolbars you could easily make UI options to place them in a desirable place for the player. Left, right, top, bottom. Could even put them in the same spot and just have the inner bar push out the outer bar as it expands.

 

[woodspeople]

Why are there 9 slots on the toolbar? What is wrong with using the number 0 as 10? Just curious.

 

[woodspeople]

You could also have them all expand upwards, and which is showing at any time is determined by pressing a letter, like T for tools, M for minions (or managing), etc. I'll bet users could swap between them pretty quickly.

Also not to toot our own horn or anything but the toolbar expanding upward was our idea

 

[Cervator]

Also not to toot our own horn or anything but the toolbar expanding upward was our idea

Thanks - I thought it was you, but couldn't remember, and couldn't find the post

I figure the 10th slot missing is arbitrary, tho using the 10th for something special came up once - I'm of the thought to just make it another slot. We could even do 12 slots, that's pretty common too.

Toolbar switching is what I glean from the diagram - it has worked before like for some classes in WoW and so forth. Certainly plenty easy and doable. I wasn't a huge fan of it in WoW, but there were too many dang things you had to put on your toolbars.

We probably won't have a lot to put on there for some time. I figure a single mixed "specials" bar will keep us going for quite a while, could always specialize later if something like a magic system develops

(At that point, could have a pure magic bar on the left, also expando style)

 

[overdhose]

excuses for the confusing picture, just quickly wanted to draw out the idea. But yeah toolbar switching was the basic idea: show 2 toolbars initially with the top one being the active and the one beneath it being the hot swap by key binding. 2 other key bindings would let you change the Hot swappable to another type : change red abilities with green spells for example, press swap key to change the active one with the hot swap. So yeah basically toolbar swapping like in wow etc, just instead of changing the active toolbar you change the hot swappable one, so as to keep 1 active for playing and ready one as hot swap. Depending on what you would be doing / specialize in, you could easily change your setup from mining (tools toolbar) + minion when you are building etc, to weapons + potions when you are fighting a lot. That was more or less the idea, nothing groundbreaking, just a bit more restricted by limiting tool bars in functionality.A bit like it would be tabbed, without using tabs. I was thinking that in a later stage, it could lend itself to mix toolbar skill points with your character setup : for example everyone starts with 5 free and fixed points : the 5 fixed points are attributed to the mix and match bar, providing you with some basic slots to start. The 5 free points you could assign depending on your play style : you could spend them to buy 2 more mix and match slots with respective cost 2 and 3 (increasing). Or you would decide to buy some cheaper slots and obtain more of them, but specialized in a certain domain : spells if you want to become a magician, minions if you want to become a dungeon keeper wanna be, weapons if will focus on hunting, plants / seeds if you want to become a farmer. It was a (silly?) idea, most will probably say people will get bored and should have enough slots to start by default, but I still liked it. It would give you an edge during level up in certain domains by the mere fact you have more slots available in a certain domain and determine some kind of character class, which would become less significant once you gained enough levels. Could also have rare loot that permanently increases one type of tool bar by 1, or even give an extra assignable slot (like skill books in diablo).

Anyway, I know it's far out there, and from primary reactions this will most likely be classified as another bad idea, but hey I tried, that's why I only proposed it as a concept drawing and didn't just blindly start building it.

 

[Cervator]

Oh I like the option. I wouldn't write it off. I suspect we may very well need it later

 

[woodspeople]

I like the idea of building capacity. I may as well admit that I love the Harvest Moon series, and it has a similar thing, that you get larger backpacks over time (actually you buy them but it takes a lot of mining to get there). Also, early on in many games too much capacity is overwhelming anyway.

 

[overdhose]

really liked the harvest moon series myself, long before they evolved into rune factory etc. I remember you could upgrade the farm and fridge etc, don't really remember the invent though. But yeah, think it's part of getting older, you subconsciously conjure ideas you have actually seen implemented before, just forgot where / how.

 

[overdhose]

Just a little heads up about modifying the inventory / toolbar. The current click event used supposes that there are 2 inventory entities, but a player has only one inventory. I created a toolbar component now similar to the inventory component to really differentiate both. This will of course influence all code addressing the player inventory / toolbar and might alter quite a few classes, so i wanted to check if it's alright to use this approach, or if you would prefer that I create a different click event system for switching between toolbar / invent. I made the inventory 18 spaces big atm as Cerv suggested, and graphically surrounded it by a small transparent border. Personally, I think it might be better to turn the toolbar in it's own component, thinking of the future and keeping toolbar / invent code separate, and opening the way for multiple toolbars.

Almost forgot : should opening containers still switch items with the toolbar in case you decide for this approach, or should it only transfer items between chest / player inv.
An idea of the ui :

Another question, all components are final classes, would you mind if I were to create 1 abstract Inventory class and have inventory and toolbar extend it?

 

[Cervator]

I'm not sure exactly which click event you mean (what happens when the player presses 'i' ?) but as far as I'm concerned as long as you test your stuff well then change away as per your best judgement. Inventory stuff is all yours at the moment anyway, I believe

To better illustrate what I'm thinking I made some mockups for UI elements. Behold my Paint skills! And ignore the number of slots, that's not what matters. Also imagine there's a window around the image, forgot to make a frame or something. First, current state:



Player presses 'i' to bring up the inventory, which slides into place above the item toolbar at the bottom. The player can move items between all three rows, and bottom row == quick bar:



Furthermore opening a chest simply expands the UI further in the same style - might help make the UI "flow" better? Also seems like it might be distinct vs other games?



As a further example, here's how trading with another player in multiplayer could work (middle "trade" thing is a button):



Finally it doesn't have to all be square grids (behold once more my MS Paint skills):



And just like how item-based stuff work you could expand the "Special" bar in various ways to interact with stuff. Here's an example of a spellbook (think the book UI Bi0hax already did, with cells added for slots):



Now we might want a tad bit more actual decoration, of course

 

[overdhose]

I don't know what other people think of it but that 5th picture looks... kinky
anyway what you saw in my ui idea thingy whatchamacallit (spell check actually corrected that word : *amazed*) was the outline of the inventory after you press 'i' (without the cells rendered in it) so as far as that goes : check. I'll add the chest outline to it to, so as to alter the chest inventory, but I guess I can actually keep the background of that one to make it look like an open chest ui? I'll tackle the trading etc a bit later.

 

[Cervator]

Yeah by all means throw some backgrounds in there, all the cells at the different "layers" don't need to be nearly adjacent or anything

Trading bit we won't need till multiplayer, so that one can go on the backburner. I'd be more curious to see what sort of "Creature Roster" UI we could end up with

 

[Immortius]

Just a little heads up about modifying the inventory / toolbar. The current click event used supposes that there are 2 inventory entities, but a player has only one inventory.

You may be getting confused with the (badly named?) OpenInventoryEvent, which is the event for a player/creature to open another inventory (currently chests or minions), which is why two inventory entities are involved. As opposed to just opening the inventory which doesn't use an event at the moment.

The UI for the chest ui was a rough job by me, feel free to replace it with something else.

 

[overdhose]

You may be getting confused with the (badly named?) OpenInventoryEvent

Well I was just thinking of "recycling' the same principle by turning inventory and toolbar in their own components and using a similar approach. I just thought it might be a good base for later, and thought it might be a mod-friendly approach.

I'd be more curious to see what sort of "Creature Roster" UI we could end up with

Well wouldn't we need a "creature roster" for that first? I'm not sure either, I like the way Overlord handles minions, with a den you can upgrade etc. So in my head the creature roster is a bit like that, an overview of what minions are living in your creature den, but I might be thinking waaay to far ahead here.

 

[Cervator]

That's pretty much what I figured we'd end up with eventually, some sort of listing of what creatures are living in your fortress/estate/whatever

In the meanwhile "Creatures you've spawned via minion bar" might make a perfectly good roster.

 

[overdhose]

I'll keep that one in mind for when I lack inspiration. i pushed the colored minion code if you wonna play with the colored lil critters. You know where to find it.

Someone with a bit more artistic feel might want to make them look a bit better then my simple fill with color bucket approach

 

[woodspeople]

Cervator edit: Merged into main miinion Incubator thread

Written by Overdhose and moved from wiki to forum by woodspeople...

For an idea about what the future might bring, check our Miniions roadmap.
For now this is more a personal IDEA / TODO list really, but need to start somewhere.

Ongoing:

• Message queue : a way to interact with the player, under construction.

Part of local DEV branch:

• color the minions for recognition

Started:

• pathfinding : some very basic pathfinding is in place, needs to be refined / worked out. On hold while working on messages and other improvements.
• overal refining / improving of the current system to make it truly playable.
• redesign the inventory system (not minion related)

near future :

• look at flocking, see boids as suggested.
• change the way minion mode works, make it more clear to player
• make the whole system more event driven
• add a slot representing the currently equipped item? could make it possible to use an item without leaving minion mode, could be necessary to issue certain commands
• ability to select large block areas
• add flag / waypoint blocks
• improve the behaviour menu? OR...
• replace the menu with a command queue similar to message queue

even further :

• look at collision detection and ability to select / attack entities
• linked to previous, an alternative way to summon minions will become necessary
• activate the minion mode upon selecting one
• add true minion behavior / needs / desires
• add the ability to build some basic buildings, be it some small housing for the minions or whatever