Current (E)at menu is very basic - it just lists things you can eat your character is carrying, as well as on surrounding tiles. It gets less and less comfortable to use the more food items you have, and doesn’t sort food in any way (other than pushing the ones marked “old” to the top and “rotten” to the bottom). This quickly leads to it being overloaded with unnecessary informations and making it hard to find what you need.
Personally I’m using this menu a lot, but every time I ask myself “why is this menu looking like this? I waste lots of time going through all of these options every time I need to eat/drink something”.
Idea
My idea is to redesign the (E)at menu completely, giving it custom GUI. It could look more or less like this (quick Gimp painting):
This menu gives you power over food from which tiles would you like to see - numerical values being the tiles around and under the character, “C” being character and all he/she is carrying, and “A” is a toggle between “select all” and “select none”, depending on current selection. (unless everything is selected, single-tapping it will always select everything, and double-tapping will deselect everything).
Food menu
First important change here - no containers are displayed and all entries of the same type are merged no matter their separate spoil times. The only exception could be food with separate temperatures.
For example:
Current menu: “3 plastic bottles of clean water (2)”
Suggested menu: “6 clean water”
If any food in stack is old, it will show entire stack with proper color. Rotten food won’t show in this menu at all. When you decide to eat from stack, the one closest to spoiling is always selected first. Eating isn’t closing the menu.
Sorting/displaying options
Here you can decide on order in which you want things to appear.You can move the sorting options around, similar to clothes layering. Options could include:
spoil time (the most important by default)
hot first/frozen first/ignore temperature
best nutrition/best quench (with separate keybind for quick switching)
Summary
So, this is the suggestion for improved (E)at menu. What do you think about it? Do you have any suggestions on what could be improved or changed in it?
Personally I’m primarily Java/C# developer with some OpenGL and DirectX experience, but I might pick up improving this menu as a challenge if nobody else would take it.
Sounds like you are suggesting a variant of the advanced inventory menu modified for food. If you decide to take this project on yourself, you might consider starting there.
If the menu doesn’t close every time you eat (which I’m in favor of), then you’ll want the hunger/thirst levels displayed in the menu and updating every time you eat.
Likewise, sort options would ideally include “everything within reach,” and “list by container”/ “list by container size” options, as sometimes what you choose to eat is as much about getting an empty cardboard box for crafting with later as it is about the food.
It is kinda similar to advanced inventory indeed so that’s a good starting point, it wouldn’t actually display any items, through, so they are likely incompatible. (as all food of the same type is condensed into a single entry to make it easier to navigate/read)
I get the reason behind the ignore the containers but I feel like that could lead to problems of taking from areas you might not want to, which I guess isn’t a very big deal. I know that when I end up with 20000 individual bags of the same kinds of candy it makes the list huge and lag slightly so I just end up "U"nloading all of the food that comes in containers into just big piles and it drastically shortens the list, and a bonus because who doesn’t love floor candy!?
In my opinion the normal menu was “good enough”. If anything it’d be nice to have a remember filter for active food, maybe a custom list of “recipe food”, a third tier for ingredients, etc, but it would save only a second or two over a game versus the current system of just looking down the list. Maybe an “Are you sure, this is not very healthy?” if I accidentally highlighted an ingredient instead of the biscuits.
If you find yourself with too much food, really ask yourself if you need those 6000 terrible candy bars or soda.
Having a more complicated “eat” system would also mess with metabolic interchange - the best energy recovery system unless it was nerfed.
tl;dr when I eat I grab foods or make something and shove it into my face. I don’t see the nutrition content of everything irl, I just have to remember what’s healthy and what’s not, and prioritize those.
