Re: [Adonthell-devel] User interface open items

[Kai Sterker]

2011/8/15 Michał Kaliński <address@hidden>:

> I think we shouldn't go out of our way to hide characters in rooms
> other than the player. In a few games I played that did this, I found
> the constantly appearing and disappearing objects annoying. It serves
> little purpose in a general RPG. If someone really wants to do so (for
> a stealth sequence or something), they could do that using scripts.

Agreed.

> I'd be reluctant to make speech bubbles a part of normal rendering
> process. It could possibly lead to weird results, like partially
> obscured bubbles going through walls. Maybe not, I don't know much
> about the renderer's internals. Still, bubbles are a gui element and
> not a map object.

True again. Doing it that way would really feel like a bad hack.


> Another way would be to just check the character positions. It would
> prevent hearing conversation from across the map and allow overhearing
> in a natural way. I'm not sure about overhearing things across floors
> - a bubble coming out of the floor or ceiling could be confusing for
> the player. Perhaps it could be amended by a simple check whether
> there's a solid object between characters in z dimension.

I guess one could work with a sphere (or box) around the player and
potentially display speech bubbles for characters within that box. The
radius could possibly depend on an actual character skill
(http://adonthell.berlios.de/doc/index.php/Rules:Stats#Skills). In
addition, one could trace a line from the player to the NPC and
determine if a floor tile is in the way. Leaves the question again
what could be considered a floor tile, but I guess anything that's
longer and wider than high could qualify.


> I'd like to ask - will the speech bubble (and similar gui elements
> written in python) become a part of core engine (which has no python
> scripts as of now) or some sort of run time package?

I guess they would be part of individual game packages. Right now,
quite a few of the scripts from adonthell/test/data are already
duplicated for wastesedge/ because of that.

In the future it might be a good idea to have a default implementation
or game template available that could be used as a starting point.

Kai