Tuesday, May 31, 2011

Various UI Improvements

Today I've made a ton of UI improvements that were needed to the game. I've added a complete list to the update notes (which are still in progress) but here are some highlights:
  •  Pressing numpad 5 will open up the travel window. You may have noticed before that the layout of the buttons are arranged similarly to a compass. With North being the topmost button, West being the middle left button, etc. Now you can use the numpad to walk in these directions.
    • You can use numpad 7,8, and 9 for NW, N, and NE
    • You can use numpad 4 and 6 for W and E
    • You can use numpad 1, 2, and 3 for SW, S, and SE
    • You can use numpad * to enter sleep mode
    • You can use numpad 5 will exit the travel menu.
  • Pressing the alt key will cause the available actions to show you a hotkey associated for each action. You can memorize them, or press alt a billion times before pressing an action to reference what button will trigger what action. 
    • There will be some issues with this, but that's why alpha testing is good. When I release the update (keep your fingers crossed, hopefully later this week around Friday/Saturday) you all can help me find them :D
  • (Older change, but not really mentioned on this blog) There is now an option window to customize your UI a little bit. It's not perfect, but you can change the following things:
    • Colors for virtually all game buttons and text (foreground / background)
    • Change the font and font size for the main text window
    • Enable and Disable borders around the text boxes
    • Change Text Alignment (not yet implemented)
    • Make the game window maximize on loading or simply stay at the normal size
    • Choose to stretch the graphics (default) or simply let them remain their native size. Making them *not* stretch is not recommended. It's lazy of me, but I got tired of constantly resizing every image so it would match the graphic window. VB automatically does this if this option is enabled so I don't need to bother. If you disable this, some images will go beyond the borders. I will definitely consider more options for the window including stretch to fit if people would like that.
  • New Item Screen!
    • No longer are there a billion buttons with each item and a clunky weird ass system of looking at, using, selling, and dropping items. You can just click on an item in a list of items to get a description. You can click use to use them, etc.
    • There is the option to equip items in one of two item buttons. When you equip an item, it will appear on the main window and allow you to use the item WITHOUT going to the item screen. This has been implemented and works great.

That should be the bulk of the changes. I look forward to making this game available to test later this week (hopefully). Just don't expect too many changes yet. I keep saying this a lot, but I really don't want people to be expecting a lot of new content yet. This version was simply to redo the engine. While I'm rambling, let me once again just highlight the planned future development after this version (boy do I love bullet points):

  • 0.10.6a : This will be a massive rehaul of the old engine. The new engine is based upon  the .NET framework and should be more accessible and ideally less buggy. I will open a "0.10.6a" bug report post for people to comment on. I will work on fixing your reports.
  •  0.10.7a : The plan is to make finish this as quickly as humanly possible. I hope 0.10.6a is not very buggy...but that's a laughable prospect only because programming rarely proceeds perfectly. Once 0.10.7a is released, the game will enter "closed" development again (keep reading if you want to know what I mean).
  • 0.20.0a : This is an internal test version. This will not be released on the blog. The intent is to release the game only at large intervals (every 0.20 versions, so 0.10.0a, 0.30.0a, 0.50a, etc.) so that every time a new version comes out you will have a larger amount of content available with each release. I don't want to release every version because then by 2 hours after a release you'll have explored every nook and cranny, that's no fun (for me :p)
    • Did you really enjoy 0.10.6a? I hope you did. If so, and you were kind and spent some of your time kindly submitting bug reports, decided to write an event, or helped in some other way you have a chance of being invited to test 0.20.0a! I can't guarantee you all will get a chance to help test it, but I will invite you based on a lot of factors that matter only to me really :p
      • (Note: Don't ask for 0.20.0a if you don't recieve a copy, it's not for everyone's consumption. Please wait until 0.30.0a. If you do ask me, I will never give you an invite for a beta. I know that sounds harsh but I want to shield my mailbox ahead of time just in case :p)
  • 0.30.0a : This will be the next big release after 0.10.7a. This will feature a ton of new content. The starting city of Pornicle will be completed and roughly half of the surrounding area around Pornicle will be completed. The game will now feature the combat system (which may or may not be half implemented) AND the sex system (think of a combat system but based upon sex instead) will be in place. You will be able to push the transformations you can get into Pornicle to higher levels and start receiving some more extreme events and transformations. I feel 0.30.0a will give everyone an almost complete example of my goals for the game.

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