Requesting suggestions on method of viewing inventory items full screen

Started by benblankley, Sat 13/09/2014 19:39:19

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benblankley

Hello, I've started a game I'm calling "Opening Night", and it's going to be about all the various crazy things that can happen during tech week before opening a live theater show. I'm a community theater president, and I've got lots of stories saved up about last-minute craziness. I don't think I've ever seen a game quite like what I'm creating, so that's pretty cool.

In some commercial AGS games I've played, the inventory interface allows the player to "look closer" at inventory items. I want this functionality to be required to solve a few of my puzzles. Right now I use the following code, and I wanted to see if if I'm going down the right path.

From globalscript.asc:
Code: ags

function gScript1_OnClick(GUI *theGui, MouseButton button)
{
  gScript1.Visible=false;
}

function iScript1_Look()
{
gScript1.Visible=true;
Display("&8 The script is barely readable.");
Display("&9 Our photocopier is a piece of crap.");
}


And this is what the interface looks like so far:



Thoughts? Am I going about this the right way, or is there a better way to do "full screen" inventory item examination? Thanks for your input.

Cassiebsg

Looks good to me. :) But then again I~m no expert on the subject.
And am already looking forward to your game! Sounds like lots of fun with real life craziness "puzzles". :)
There are those who believe that life here began out there...

LRH

Not entirely sure what you mean by "better." What you've got here certainly works, but you can really do it any way you choose. The way you have things now is just the default AGS game's method of doing it, meaning the player goes into his/her inventory, then chooses "look" and then clicks an item to inspect it more closely.  Then you've just got add something else that happens so that the player cannot make progress without doing this.

You can accomplish this any way you want, really.  If you had a text parser, you could have the game react when the player types out "inspect script."  You could make a custom GUI that lets a player choose from a list of carried items to look at.

Point is, possibilities are pretty much endless and it's going to be a matter of personal preference.  If you're happy with what you've got working now, run with it! :grin:

formica

This works just fine, as others have said, but what could be easier for you in the long run is rather than build a new GUI for every item have one GUI with an area to draw the sprite, then in the 'look' function add a part that tells the GUI area what to display. Then maybe also add a close/back button instead of just clicking the item to close (thats a little counter-intuitive to me, as it feels like clicking the item should do something to the item). This could give you other options in the future like manipulating an object in your zoomed in view using GUI parts.

Good luck!

benblankley

Thanks for the input all. Every design decision I've made has had me worried I'll end up painting myself into a corner. I think I will look into an "Exit" button" for the zoomed in view, because it's not very intuitive right now.

The single GUI idea is probably cleaner in the long run, that way I can maintain consistency a lot easier.

Gotta say, I think I'm hooked on adventure game programming now.

Snarky

Personally, I think an exit button is a clumsy and often ugly solution. One common approach is to make the edges of the screen, or any part of the screen outside of the object, an "exit". You can have the mouse cursor change shape to indicate this. This is also consistent with how modern image popups tend to work on the web, so it should be pretty intuitive.

I also dislike (intensely!) the Sierra-style inventory, where you have to click on buttons to set the cursor mode to interact with the inventory. It makes it slow (particularly since the cursors often reset after you've tried one interaction, and you have to keep clicking on the button if you want to e.g. try a bunch of different item combinations), it fills the screen with UI crap instead of focusing on the game, and (in the classic Sierra version with three different cursor modes) I personally always have to think for a second to remember WTF the difference is between the arrow cursor and the hand.

In your version you only have two different modes, so it would be much easier to just have them tied to the left-click and right-click, and do away with all the buttons (again, you don't need an OK button to close, just click outside of the window).

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