[Zappman]

Hello people,

This is a new project that Bolan and I are working on. It's a Douglas Adams-esque mystery set in space. Several things, including the killer, the way the victim died, and what is a clue or not will be randomized. (The clues will be determined to some extent by how the victim died, of course.)

Here are the basics of the inventory engine I made in a sample board. More work is to be done on the inventory engine and will include an overlay interface as well as dossiers on the suspects. (The content of the game will have nothing to do with the content of this sample board. This is not a demo of the game, it is merely the basics of an engine.)

Attached File(s)

•  Inventory.zip (3.33K)
  Number of downloads: 61

This post has been edited by Zappman: 23 December 2011 - 08:15 AM

[Micah]

Didn't see any feedback on this yet, shame. I know this is very bare-bones, but I hope your inventory engine uses more than the default text boxes. With new-ish features (like, Exophase versions new-ish) like improved strings, file handling, mzms, and the vlayer, inventory engines are pretty much only limited by your creativity. I'm not saying what you have is terrible, I just hope to see something a little more fleshed out.

[Dr Lancer-X]

I didn't see what sort of feedback would be possible. By all accounts, the inventory engine linked was very basic, even moreso than that encountered in the oldest of inventory puzzlers in MZX- and by all accounts, it's not the finished work, or even a framework for the finished work, nor an example one could draw any assumptions from the finished work about. The text "and will include an overlay interface" alone practically states that the inventory engine presented will bear no resemblance and likely almost no common code with the release.

For this reason I don't really know how to provide feedback. If the thread was 'this is an inventory engine, it might end up being used in a game, feel free to use this' I would probably respond to the effect of 'okay, this is pretty lacking, have you considered {bullet point list}.' - but it's not and Zappman is already doing the first thing I'd recommend (only I'd suggest using sprites instead of overlay so that you can still use overlay in your game itself without going to extra work)

[Maxim]

Here's a pretty major thing: I was able to access the inventory while the guy in the upper left had the player locked and was talking. Basically, I was able to interrupt the goblin spawning and kill him before it even started. Don't forget about this kind of event handling, it's necessary to prevent major bugs.

[Zappman]

Micah and Lancer-X: Yes, I'm working on what the overlay interface would look like. I wanted to use sprites but I don't know how to do that without including a whole ton of stuff on every board.

Maxim: Thanks for pointing that out. The inventory should be stopped when the player is stopped.

NOTE: Clues are like the tools in inventory, except they are just stuffed in a different tab. Most clues won't be useful for anything other than looking at and asking people about them. Some tools may be clues, however. We're still kind of working that out.

Here's an idea of what the interface will look like.

P. S. 'Anti-Crime Notepad, by Mike Fleag' is just filler text for the inventory introduction screen. No doubt something better will be put there unless people really like it.

Attached thumbnail(s)

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This post has been edited by Zappman: 27 December 2011 - 02:14 AM

[Dr Lancer-X]

Zappman, on 27 December 2011 - 12:05 PM, said:

I wanted to use sprites but I don't know how to do that without including a whole ton of stuff on every board.

What extra stuff would you have to include that you wouldn't need for the overlay implementation?

[Zappman]

Lancer: I'm using MZMs and not having stuff on the board. Cutting down on board size and such.

[Dr Lancer-X]

Zappman, on 27 December 2011 - 02:00 PM, said:

Lancer: I'm using MZMs and not having stuff on the board. Cutting down on board size and such.

Pur those MZMs on the vlayer and reference them with your sprites. Look up the 'spr#_vlayer' counter.

[Micah]

If you're opposed to using the vlayer, and going for a PDA-type feature, using a separate dedicated inventory board isn't a bad way to go either. All you'd need to do is store information with global values or external files, then add a hot-key to preserve the active board as it is while you teleport to the "PDA" board, do what you need to do there, then restore the previous board, and execute any actions that were initiated on the "PDA" board. The benefit to this is you can reference directly from the board, and changes to any of your sprites are quick and easy, since they're right there in the editor. Of course, mzms are just as easily implemented too using the same concept. Hope that made sense : /.

[Dr Lancer-X]

Micah, on 27 December 2011 - 03:54 PM, said:

Hope that made sense : /.

[Bolan]

Here we go, fairly basic box-generator. If you set the string $boxTitle to anything it'll add a division at the top for the title of the box. I think the variables at the top boxX/Y, boxDX/Y are fairly clear. Basically the second pair is for the text display area. The two local counters wasted at the beginning are the blackness you'll get around whatever text you cram in the middle... which really hasn't been added yet. Planning ahead and all. I also planned to enable basically choosing both the chars in the frame of the box and the drawing pattern based on whatever we might need later.

Party.

Attached File(s)

•  BoxmaxX!.txt (2.36K)
  Number of downloads: 68
•  InventoryX!.mzx (10.31K)
  Number of downloads: 45

[CJA]

omg "bullettype"

[Zappman]

We haven't given up on this, we will be working on it more, probably after the DoZ... mean while, I suggest you download Bolan's Imp Ossible.