UI world interactions streamline?

Game Talk The Drawing Board
1

I’d basically like to see all the options you can access through shift+number keys (crafting, sleeping, kill list, construction) all simply popped up in a menu with the ‘z’ key. It does add one extra keypress, I suppose, but I’d rather hit z-z for crafting, z-x for construction, z-c for… so on and so on versus stretching for shifted number keys :slight_smile: Plus it would pull a nice orderly menu up (arranged by importance/frequency of use) containing all the commands which would inform new players what can be done in Cataclysm without hitting ?-1 for the keybinding list :smiley:

I’m partially borrowing this idea from the radial/shortcut menu that the semi-roguelike Elona uses, if anyone is familiar with it… Also I’m sure something similar to this has been suggested, probably many times… Sorry if I’m beating a dead horse or spammily repeating, in that case :slight_smile:

EDIT: To derail my own thread slightly and to keep from creating a new one, is there any refining that can be done with the item wish list searching method in debug menu? Its fairly picky with certain items… Okay!

2

Some sort of radial/list menu in addition to the current system is eventually planned to be added for newer players.

As for the wish menu, the only problem it has right now is that it is Caps specific, if you type the wrong capitalization it won’t find the item you want (and it probably won’t be improved too much anytime soon, we tend to focus on non-debug features before debug ones).

3

hrm, yea a numpad-based quick key dealy is a pretty easy sell, but as i2amroy says, we’re sooo busy with other stuff I’m not sure when that would happen. I do like radial menus in general, possibly even a heirarchial one, so you have chained combos, like so:

7 8 7 8 9 8 9
 \|  \|/  |/
4-7   8   9-6
   \  |  /
7   \ | /   9
 \   \|/   /
4-4---5---6-6
 /   /|\   \
1   / | \   3
   /  |  \
4-1   2   3-6
 /|  /|\  |\
1 2 1 2 3 2 3

Either 5 or some other hotkey would start menu interaction, then you’d hit numpad keys to chose the action. Meanwhile it would display a menu that displays where you are in the command tree. This sounds terribly complicated, but if you’ve used a radial menu, you know how this works, it’s very intuitive, and it tells you what the options are at each step of the way. In practice, you learn the key combos for the commands you actually use a lot very rapidly, but it also gives you prompts when you’re new to the system, and you can always navigate around the tree (‘5’ backs out by a level, so you can go back and chose a different branch).

In actual use, you’d want to cluster similar commands together, so maybe ‘7’ gets assigned crafting comands, and 7-4 gets craft, 7-7 gets construct, and 7-8 gets disassemble. Meanwhile, 9 might be ranged attacks, with 9-8 getting throw, 9-6 getting fire, and 9-9 getting reload.

There are a bunch of variants, for example instead of the ‘7’ cluster being like above, you can widen it out to be like:

[code]
7 8 9
|/
4-7-6
/|
1 2
5

This reduces the depth of the tree, but loses the "directionality" of the pattern I posted first. The nice thing is, we could implement it such that it handles both, pick some default that we think works well, but then players could reconfigure it to their preference.

4 
7 8 7 8 9 8 9
 \|  \|/  |/
4-7   8   9-6
   \  |  /
7   \ | /   9
 \   \|/   /
4-4---5---6-6
 /   /|\   \
1   / | \   3
   /  |  \
4-1   2   3-6
 /|  /|\  |\
1 2 1 2 3 2 3

Yeah, well, this is very intuitive and allows great pace through dexterity and dynamics, but I doubt that the more recent generations of players would respect (and expect to use) anything more than to point, read, and click.

5

You’re right to a point, but I don’t care, it’s their loss :smiley:
Anyway, being a roguelike-like we’re already selecting away from players like that.
This would also be my primary candidate for an android menu.

6

Could also be used to play cdda with a game controller.
Ive taken a liking to play Elona with my xbox 360 controller ;). I guess the same could be done with CDDA

7

I’ll have to think about how this suggestion could correlate to my recent efforts of abstracting input events(goal is eventual gamepad support).

Problem is that these menus are pretty much hardcoded to a specific number of keys(like you’ll notice most of our menus right now have as many options as there are letters). Partially I intend to work around that by using key-combos to select an option, but for these “action trees” it’d be better to have a JSON-configurable hierarchy of menus.

Yeah, well, this is very intuitive and allows great pace through dexterity and dynamics, but I doubt that the more recent generations of players would respect (and expect to use) anything more than to point, read, and click.

The whole point of having hierarchical menus is that you get direct feedback on what the next options are. The fact that you can navigate them without reading doesn’t mean you have to. Also, I plan on the ability to do some stuff with clicking in the SDL version, it’s not really too hard, but it’ll never be the most efficient way to play the game.