It seems to me that the crafting menu is currently badly organised. For some recipes you need in the region of 20 key presses just to find them in the menu. On top of that, the keys for moving between parts of the menu are {<} and {>}, which involve pressing shift (on my keyboard, anyway), which is an extra effort.
This is a thread for thinking about ways of reorganising the crafting menu, and I’ve got a couple of ideas myself (although no idea about the faesibility of coding them)
1) Grid system
We retain the current “tab” system, wherein you must press {<} and {>} to shift between groups of recipes, but instead of having all the recipes in a list down the left, with a box for describing them on the right, we should arrange the recipes in a grid.
So currently it’s roughly like this
X = recipe name
Y = Selected recipe
= tabs
[Weapons][Comest][Electronics]<[Dildos]> X l Primary Skill: Sex X l Secondary Skill: Vagina X l Difficulty: 4 X l Your Skill Level: >9000 X l Time to Complete: 42 X l Tools Required: X l >Orifice X l Components Required: [b]Y [/b] l >Anal BeadsOk. So this works, but it means at least one keypress of {<} to get to the correct tab, and then 8 uses of the {down} button to get to Y.
However it could be arranged in a grid pattern like so.
[Weapons][Comest][Electronics]<[Dildos]>X X X X X
X X X Y
Under this system, you would still have to use one keypress of {<}, but then only 3 arrow keypresses to get to Y ({left}, {left}, {down}, assuming you start in the top left and pressing left jumps you to the other side of the menu).
Recipe info could then be displayed by pressing ?, if needed, but the player would probably skip this stage once familiar with the recipe, and instead merely press enter to craft. The recipe titles would be coloured in green and red to show whether the player had enough resources available to craft them (or keep the current system of grey and white. It was just harder to make that work on the forum.)
This system is a lot more user friendly, and doesn’t display needless information, whilst still keeping it available to the player if required.
2) Assign letters
Much like the current construction menu, it would seem very efficient to just have a letter assigned to every item on the list.
Thus:
[A: Weapons][B: Comest][C: Electronics]<[D: Dildos]> a X l Primary Skill: Sex b X l Secondary Skill: Vagina c X l Difficulty: 4 d X l Your Skill Level: >9000 e X l Time to Complete: 42 f X l Tools Required: g X l >Orifice h X l Components Required: i [b]Y [/b] l >Anal Beads
Players can still access all the relevant info if they want to (as with the construction menu) but they can also just press {>}, {>}, {e} <} for Cooked TV Dinner, or whatever.
This obviously assumes that no list goes above 26 items, but I don’t know of any that currently do (and besides, we found ways around that for the construction menu, by using {~} and whatnot.)
Note also that I assigned a capital letter to the different tabs. This is just an idea, and may not be practical, but it seems like it would help speed up crafting even more.
3) Allow the use of left/right arrow/vi keys
Pressing {<} and {>} is a drag. I know it’s minimal, but with repeated crafting, it becomes a pain to have to keep reaching for shift.
How about we just use the arrow keys, numpad keys, or {l} and {h} for lateral movement between tabs? Is there any reason why this wouldn’t work?