New inventory screen
I found the old inventory menu to be extremely slow to navigate, and after a while it would become tedious having to click through numerous menus before finally finding the action I wanted. To fix this, I decided to completely re-work the way the player interacts with the UI, as well as revamp the inventory menu. As I promised yesterday, I've included some screenshots below, but please note that the UI layout needs polishing and may change before release.
This is the general inventory menu screen:
You can hover the mouse over any item to get a description and information. Please note that the descriptions are just placeholders!
The inventory at the bottom left of the screen shows your currently equipped items. Hovering over them will display a similar tooltip.
You can click on any of the items to progress to this screen, where you will be presented with all the options related to that item. Once you select an option, you are returned to the main inventory menu (the first picture), and the text at the top will update to give you a description of how you carried out the action.
A move towards the mouse
As I also said yesterday, I've decided to move towards a mouse-based system for UI interaction. The keyboard shortcuts still work, but not everything can be done with just a keyboard any more.
The reason I chose to do this is that I found myself being extremely limited by having to support every action on the keyboard. Before the inventory update, I was having to use keyboard shortcuts from 0-9 to support every single option. That meant that if you had 20 items in your inventory, and you wanted to select the last one, you had to press: 9 (next page) -> 9 (next page) -> 9 (next page) -> 4 (select item). While doing that, you had to scan every option to see if the item you wanted was on that page. This was, as I'm sure you'll agree, a terrible design, and I had to change it.
I know there are good solutions to keyboard-based inventory UI's (such as those found in many roguelikes), but I felt as though I could make the inventory so much more responsive and user-friendly if I decided to move to a mouse-based system. Every single action in the game can be accessed with just a mouse (except for typing in your name and save-game file names), so, as is often the requirement for games of this nature, you can still play one-handed.
Progress
- - Finished inventory menu revamp.
- - Fixed large bug with rendering clothing colours.
- - Optimised clothing rendering.
- - Fixed some tooltip bugs.
