[crossfire] Client proposal: redo inventory/look widgets

[Lalo Martins]

Also spracht Mark Wedel (Sat, 04 Aug 2007 23:42:46 -0700):
> Lalo Martins wrote:
> 
>> So here's the proposal: Currently we have an inventory notebook and a
>> "look" table.  I propose to replace them with two other widgets: what I
>> call the "stuff notebook", and the "shortcut area".
> 
>   Are you combind what is currently the two separate look & inventory
>   areas into
> 1 widge, that you are then subdividing into these 2 new widgets?  I'm
> just having troubles visualizing the layout here.

Yes.  Or to describe it differently -- I'm combining the separate areas 
into 1 widget, and introducing another widget based on your "shortcut 
area" idea.

>> The "shortcut area"...
> 
>   That seems reasonable.  Note that dealing with numbers requires a
>   little bit
> of extra work - currently, whenever you enter a number into the client,
> it presumes that is the count of how many items you want to drop or pick
> up.

Oh... I forgot about that.  I use it all the time, for dropping money and 
for alchemy.  Then again, those are two things that have no urgency; I 
suppose it would be OK if on 2.0 you were required to click on a textbox 
first, before typing the number.

>   I also wonder if there is some practical limit to number of useful
>   quick item
> keys - at some level, you'd get so many, that it could be a pain to
> remember what is there.  I'd think that because of space constraints,
> those quick items would have to be just icon views, and not names
> (unless you hover the mouse) - but if you have to hover the mouse, that
> sort of looses the ability for it to be a quick view.

I was imagining an icon view, yes.  I don't really care for it to be a 
quick view; its purpose is really binding keys.

>   I'd have to play around a bit to see if having to switch back and
>   forth
> between ground view and inventory view would be OK, or if it would be
> annoying.
>   The GTK2 client contains different support for containers (displayed
>   inside
> normal inventory, not look area), so that may not be quite so bad.

Of course, the answer will be different from person to person; but the 
glade layout I did for my laptop did have look and inventory as tabs, and 
it didn't bother me too much, except when I needed to equip or eat or 
drink something very fast.  Which I solved by using bindings, which leads 
to the shortcut area :-)

>   I'd probably suggest another tab there, which is filtered inventory,
>   but let
> the character define the filter how they want - probably simple
> checkboxes (like the newpickup) - unpaid, magical, etc.  This is
> probably better than current system, as it is more flexible, and matches
> my current method of play better - go to dungeon, get loads of crap,
> come back, do detect curse, drop that, do detect magic, drop non
> magical, then do identify, drop unlocked stuff I don't want.

I did think of something like that, but it sounds like a lot of work, and 
I'm already biting a rather large chunk with my ideas.

>> The third tab deserves its own paragraph :-) what I'm proposing here is
>> a "body diagram" similar to what many computer adventure games have...

>   It would seem to me that the only purpose of such a body view if you
>   can't
> really interact with it (or at least equip items directly on it) is
> somewhat limited.  Its informative to tell you where you have open
> spots, and another way to see what stuff you have equipped (but the show
> equipped items filter would probably give a more detailed information).
> 
>   It always seems to me the value of such body diagrams is 'ah, I have
>   nothing
> on my feet - let me drag some boots there' type of thing, and/or as an
> easy way to equip/unequip items and see overall effect.  It is
> graphically nicer than having to use the body command to see what stuff
> I could equip, but would still seem to be of limited usefulness.

You seem to have missed these two parts:

>> Clicking a slot (with or without
>> an equipped item) would bring up a menu with the items that can be
>> equipped there.
>> 
>> Since it's a notebook widget, it would be hard to drag items from the
>> inventory to the body diagram; but then again, I have no idea why you'd
>> want to do that, since you can double-click it on the inventory :-)

Notably, yes, I think it could be possible to enable drag-and-drop; I 
just don't see that it would be worth it, since really, you can double-
click already.

>   One thing quickly off the top of my head, is if you click on an empty
>   spot
> (say your finger where a ring goes), it could be nice to have an option
> for it to make a filter so that it only displays objects that go there. 
> Thus, you see an empty spot and you could quickly see if/what you have
> to put there.  This does require more information that client currently
> has (client currently doesn't get body info data for objects).

This was on my description :-)

best,
                                               Lalo Martins
-- 
      So many of our dreams at first seem impossible,
       then they seem improbable, and then, when we
       summon the will, they soon become inevitable.
                           -----
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