Jupiter Hell > General Discussion

Design Rant : Inventory

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Kornel Kisielewicz:
Wow, we've resurrected Aerton!


--- Quote from: Aerton on January 24, 2014, 05:32 ---It does not have slots on a doll for a reason. Items still occupy the bag space when equipped, so it would add nothing, but confusion to the UI. Current weapon is highlighted by background and a little 'E' in the corner. Also, you can see Leon wielding the gun. Also, his cloth changes, even if the armour set is not represented in the bagpack. I think it's because there is no reason ever carry a spare vest, so they just reduced the inventory space by a few rows it would take otherwise.

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This is a pretty valid point! For a moment I wanted to immediately go with it, however, there's another problem -- what about addon slots? Things like mods, or expansion elements for armor? There'll be no easy way to see what you're currently packing.


--- Quote from: Aerton on January 24, 2014, 05:32 ---I like simplicity of a plain inventory list in DRL. It's provides the information at a glance, is sorted by type, and you can easily see how much more space you have. I also see a benefit of providing a player with a dilemma - to carry one great item, or a few lesser ones. Can the same choice be provided while keeping the simple structure?

What if an item name was in bigger letters so it takes a two or even three lines in the list? Of course, the actual representation in the graphical game needs to be richer than a bigger font - think of it of having the same inventory grid but it has only one column and all items still having varying vertical size, while all sharing the same width. Since it's actually a 1D space, there is no need for spatial optimisation minigame and items can be freely rearranged. Essentially, this will have the same usability of DRL inventory, while allowing the items to differ in size.

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However, a 1D list has no hopes to fit in even a HD screen, not to mention our lowest supported resolution of 600. Eg, if you don't take any large items, the list could go for at least 40 elements, which gives us... 15 pixels per item?

Thiebs:
Personally, I like the 2D box inventories like Diablo and Resident Evil 4, so long as you can rotate items. However, if one were to do a 1D list, there are a couple of ways to maximize the space. Imagine your 2D box, and in it a pistol is a 1x3, a medkit 1x2, an armor 2x4, and ammo is 1x1 boxes (for like 15 bullets). In a list, you could just take your largest regular item, the 2x4, and consider that the standard size. Then, you would simply make other items stackable until they added up. So you could stack up to 8 ammo boxes, 4 medkits, 2 pistols, etc. You could even represent this graphically, since you'd need much fewer slots, you could draw the image next to the name in the list, with multiples in the same slot having smaller, side-by-side images. I'd still prefer the 2D myself, but I hope this gives ideas.

Aerton:

--- Quote from: Kornel Kisielewicz on January 24, 2014, 06:02 ---what about addon slots? Things like mods, or expansion elements for armor? There'll be no easy way to see what you're currently packing.
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Does presence of a doll change any of that? If you have five guns in the bag, their slots still need to be displayed somehow. Looking the pic in OP, I guess that slots are added for the current weapon only. The same can be done with no doll. It would not contradict the main benefit of having no item being represented twice.


--- Quote from: Kornel Kisielewicz on January 24, 2014, 06:02 ---However, a 1D list has no hopes to fit in even a HD screen, not to mention our lowest supported resolution of 600. Eg, if you don't take any large items, the list could go for at least 40 elements, which gives us... 15 pixels per item?
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Hm, I did not imagine these being so numerous... I guess you can resort to having 2 or 3 columns, but it's not so pure.
The main thought was to make the inventory items spatially-independent of each other - both to remove the tetris aspect and to make it sortable automatically. Usually, RPG games solve this by assigning each item a weight, but I don't like how arbitrary the number limit feels.

thelaptop:
I forgot to add a comment about dropped objects.

I can see why you don't want object permanence when dropped -- this makes the floor itself an oversized inventory.  But making dropped objects disappear immediately is hokum as well.  Here's a thought: any object within LoS of enemies or DoomGuy doesn't disappear.  Anything that is not within LoS for a consecutive amount of fixed time (say 30s of in-game time) gets forgotten/lost i.e. removed from game completely.

I'm starting to favour the list approach of DoomRL the more I think about it.  Tetris manipulation of inventory may look pretty, but loses the conciseness that a list can provide.  Also, we want the player to spend time killing things and exploring, not figuring out what the hell they are carrying about.  I'd go as far as to suggest a mechanic that DoomGuy carries only what he can remember, and he can only remember a certain amount of things, which justifies the list count.

Juice:

--- Quote from: Kornel Kisielewicz on January 24, 2014, 06:02 ---This is a pretty valid point! For a moment I wanted to immediately go with it, however, there's another problem -- what about addon slots? Things like mods, or expansion elements for armor? There'll be no easy way to see what you're currently packing.

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How about making some sort of pop-up for the weapons/armors to insert the mods?

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