Item Interaction Menus and Screens Done!

I am finally happy with the item menu system, the user interface changes and in general, how nicely these things look. Amusingly, having good access to see these items as I was testing the functionality out also helped me find quite a few items with buggy stats, so there's been a lot of fixing indeed.

First up, when you click on an item icon, you will get an interaction menu for it. They will all have the Info option, which shows you all the stats for the item.

The  other menu options will be determined by what the item is, and where it is. So, if the item is yours, and is stackable, you'll get options to combine similar stacks on that character, or even from the entire party. If it's already a stack of more than one, you'll be given the option to split it into smaller stacks.

Looking at items in a vendor's shop? You'll get the option to buy it. Or loot it from a loot-pile and so on and so on. It amusingly took quite a while and a good bit of work to get all the conditions right in those menus. Some early versions let me "sell" items to a loot-pile, and use items that still belonged to the vendor. Oopsie. Anyhow, that's all fixed now.

The second part has been something that's been missing from the game pretty thoroughly. And that is a way to see the full stats of an item. I've written up the interface to show stats that exist, and hide the other fields, so you are only going to see things that exist on an item.

Here, in these screens, you can see details for Leather Pants sold in Floren by Merchant Admurin. The offer Defence and Armor stats, while a Woodsman's Hatchet shows data for it's Attack stats and Damage range. Lastly, this scroll shows you what ability it will teach your character, but also what (if any) skills are needed to learn (and use) this ability.

There's a big bunch more stats and benefits that items can have, and the info page shows all if them as they pop up - so stat/affinity bonuses, reagent powers like you can see in the first screenshot and everything else. It's been a good few evenings work, but I'm really happy with where this is now.

Oh, and of course, simply double-tapping the item in any context will do the most obvious action, so you don't have to go through the menu each time. Double tap at a vendor to buy/sell items. Double tap in your character inventory screen to equip items or trade between characters. 

Edit: I also fixed a silly bug that I picked up this evening. When I expanded the terrain rendered onto the whole device screen, it borked the targeting during combat due to "reasons". That's fixed now.

Item Menu Almost There

Just another quick update tonight. I've almost done the menu system for items. I think I have it mainly working - though I will be honest and say that I do have a bunch more testing to do - so I may find bugs.

I do have to add a little polish to it, make it close easily it you tap off it and basic stuff like that, but it seems to now work in a much more intuitive manner.

Tap an item, get a menu that shows you what you can do with it. Anything in the menu, you can do.

Item Interface Rework

Just a quick update, I'm working on a much better, more intuitive and all round "less garbage" way to interact with items. There's no screenshot as I'm halfway through, so it currently looks very janky, but hopefully in the next day or two I'll have this in a much, much better way.

When I get that part done, I'll also update... sorry, not update. I'll MAKE a menu system for items in character inventories, as the way to interact with them at the moment isn't really good enough. It works enough if you know what to do, and what you're supposed to do.... but other than that, it's not up to par.

Anyhow, more on that in a day or two. 

Edit: I wasted a bunch of time on the weekend trying to get to the bottom of the bug where the screen looks garbage when changing the device orientation to no success, so for now.... it's still a bug.

Turtles All The (goddam) Way Down

Well, it's not turtles, but it was definitely whack-a-mole with some rendering bugs.

Lets start at the top. I was working on the layout for landscape mode to spruce it up to work nicely with the full world layout. Huzzah. Great Success. With a bit of nudging, tweaking and general swearing, I finally got that where I wanted it. Again, Huzzah.

However. As I was testing this, I was switching between landscape and portrait mode in the test device constantly, which was driving me bonkers as each time I did that, it showed me a bug where it wasn't re-rendering correctly. It's the same bug that (much more rarely) is visible when you change the game resolution. So I started chasing that down through the code in the various places where it could have been having the issue. I finally tracked it down to one place and fixed that.

However, fixing it there, although it resolved the issue with it changing resolution, also stopped it rendering properly at all. So then I needed to fix that, so that was digging into rendering engine code, which I've not touched in a long time... but I finally fixed that.

However... fixing it there then broke it working as it should have been when....

However..... then.... however.... when....

I think I spend close to six hours with this really annoying sequence, where fixing on thing broke something else. So, the conclusion to this disgusting ad nauseam was that a straight resolution change, currently nicely works. Changing the phone/tablet orientation does not. It is resolved when the player moves. But this is improved on what it was before. I may start playing this game again tomorrow,as it's all currently fresh, and I think it's actually not far off, I've got a funny feeling that it's once again some threads running ahead of others, as my logging seems to show that it should be re-rendering... but it doesn't seem to do it quite right. So that means, could be a one-line tweak somewhere, could be hours and days of frustration.

Anyhow. Landscape layouts look good. That was the goal for today. Mission Accomplished!

Rendering Rework Continues

I rounded out a little more work on the portrait layout for the app, and got it to a point where I'm happy enough with it, then got stuck into the landscape layouts where there's a bunch more stuff to do yet, but at least I sort of have an idea of how I want it to look.

I worked on some additional code to change up the rendering code to capture the new ratio of world to display when the phone is changed from one aspect to another - and I'll say it looks really janky when it doesn't change. There's still a bug that I don't appear to have an easy solve for - which is that I can't right now, get the terrain to pick up a fresh section of world till the player moves - so when you change the phone from portrait to landscape or the other way about, until you move the character, it's shows you half a screen of junk - so I'll need to solve that... but that's somewhere deep in the threads, and I've tried all the easy solves for that already I think.

Anyhow, not a super amount of time this evening for code, but what I got, was productive.

Massive Interface Rework

"You've got such a nice world... why don't you show more of it?"

So, that's some words from a mate when he was giving the app a quick run. And there was good reason for it, at least there was inherited good reason. Initially, the world view was smaller due to the lighting system being much slower than it is now. Then it was smaller.... cause it had always been small.And then... I guess it really didn't need to be that small.

So yesterday after work, I got cracking on making some changes to the code, knowing that there would be a lot of things to change and update to get what I wanted done. Luckily I'd already refactored my code for rendering when I wrote the code to let the game function in different resolutions, so I actually only had a bit of tweaking to get it rendering a non-square world. Then I made that fill the screen nicely, then tweaked where all the layouts sat and how they functioned, then that let to the top of the screen in portrait mode being much too cluttered, now that there was stuff to see there.

So, there was a huge cascade of "Now that's done, this needs doing..." over and over.

I'm still not entirely happy with the layout in portrait mode - and I've not even started looking at it in landscape mode - where I assume most folks will be playing it, but I do have a good idea at least for what I want that to look like.

And for now, I can bask in the much much better looking game.

Tomorrow, I'll try to tweak the last parts of Portrait Mode, then start on Landscape layouts. When that's done, there's now an amusingly decent bit of world that I have to tweak and fix - as the edges of the world show up with all the new screen! Oopsie!

Rumor Mill: Knight-Vitalist Hearen Guards the Floren Isles

It's been a pretty busy weekend, but today is Sunday and I've been writing conversation trees, creating quests - and ultimately going back to fix things on those two I got wrong. I'm working on a series of quests from the Knight-Vitalist Hearen, branching out from the Eastern Isle and heading north. I've loaded up the world with monsters and the like, but now I get to tie all these things in together. It's really fun, but it's taking a good bit of time.

I think as I figure out conversation tree requirements a bit better, I can write some code to at least make it easier, as now I half recall what I need, but half blunder through it on a number of attempts in getting it right.

Taking the current example of a series of quests from a particular NPC, assuming there's already a point in the conversation tree where you ask about jobs, the NPC will need an answer to offer you a quest. Easy. That reply will also need to be blocked from being repeated if you're already on that quest. A different reply should be offered if you're in the process of doing it. Assuming there's another quest that might be offered if you finish it up, that too needs to be written - and blocked from appearing until all the right conditions are met... and so on and so on. It is messy, but I think once I figure out a set of conditions "Offering a quest always has three sections" I might be able to have the editor code drop those in and make my life a bit easier writing these all up.

Rumor Mill: Captain Miles is in Floren

With a few code fixes up my sleeve over the last few days, I thought I'd get into some content - after all, bugs aside, that's what I really need to get done for the beta.

So, I quickly (and I am getting quicker with the design) knocked up the inside of the cabin for Captain Miles, and then started putting together a conversation tree for him, along with some quests which I've been testing out to some degree. I'm getting things better, and this is certainly going quicker than the first few, but these take more time to get right, with the various events.

I think at some point, I'll tweak the interface for both conversations again, and possibly the one for quests as well. Neither need a lot, but I think they both need a bit of a tweak to help get me there quicker.

So. Where's the Titan's Deep, Vintage 536?

Layout Bugs Smashed - I'm Doing My Part

I've randomly seen that meme a good few times in the last few days, so I'll run with it. I addressed to main things last night after work - a layout issue when the phone was changed to landscape mode and was chasing down a crash a friend was having, which I could not reproduce, so I am going to say that it's already been fixed.

As for the resolution, a while back, I changed the world view to be larger on the screen, and I did that by checking the phone's screen resolution and then applying the width. Worked well it turns out, until the phone was tilted to landscape mode, when I was still using the width, though I meant it to be the height.... but you know, because the phone was tilted, the height was the width... and.... yeah. Anyhow. That's also fixed and working the way it should be.

I'm not entirely completely happy with the layout here, but I'll take it for now. It's not broken, so I can look to tweak and improve it later. 

Break Over - and therefore, Bugfixes and Crashes!

First off, it's been a while. I needed a break, and I gave myself the luxury of having one for a bit. I did some woodwork, and built a carry case. I then saw all the mistakes I'd made and iterated the design and built another one much much better. I played a few tabletop games with mates. I bought a few random toys.

Also, I had a friend come up, and while he's been play-testing a little, we basically watched his daughter light up and basically playing the game, which although she was probably a bit too young to grasp all the details of, was wonderful to see someone just happily running errands and doing quests.

So, in terms of code, I feel like I've isolated and resolved a multitude of tiny bugs that were causing random crashes here and there. I've got a bunch more on my hit-list, and I need to change some display things over the next day or so, namely character names and the like (colours specifically) and also the size of printed text in various views needs to be standardized. On my android emulator here, and on my phone, things were perfectly readable - but on his shiny new android device, they were much smaller than they should be. So there's a few things on the next day-or-two hit-list.