Combat Interface Progress!

One of the things that has been sitting in the background quietly waiting to be solved (and giving me stress in doing so) was what the interface would look like for combat. With the phone, there's so little space (and lets face it, I am no android expert - I'm a novice at most) so I don't know all the good tricks on how to get the most out of everything.

But I think I am progressing nicely with something that switches from a non-combat mode interface, to a combat interface, hiding a lot of superfluous things on screen (valid for when you're running about) but less important when you're focused on what one character is about to do. And so, with that thought in mind, I've created a second set of inputs and HUDs that are much more trimmed down, to basically status bars, and dedicated half the space to what the combat options will be - move, fight, use skills or cast spells, grab something and gulp it down. That leaves a set of directional action buttons over the world view, that will be used for movement, for targeting and so on. I've written the code in a way that they can easily change depending on what options are available - meaning if there's an empty space in a given direction, it will show a movement arrow. If there's a monster, it will show an attack icon and so on. That should make it nice and easy to tie in additional actions later, such as bandaging a fallen party member or things like that. 

I'll try to tie these new buttons to actual actions, so that pressing a move button moves that character in the right direction, which seems simple enough, but there's so much code to write to look after that and connect it to the rendering engine!