Author Topic: Armor upgrade management screen  (Read 12935 times)

Chabbrik

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Armor upgrade management screen
« on: November 27, 2016, 08:57:54 AM »
In this thread I want to start a discussion on the flow in armor upgrade management.

Bug: Crafting does not clear completed project, I need to actively select another one to clear it. So if I made all three upgrades and the next armor type is not available, I still see the old screen.

There is no back button to leave armor improvement screen, you need to use main menu buttons.

I think that all equipped armor upgrades should show up in the crafting screen, maybe with wearing character photo as background or just their name under the icon. So that it is possible to manage all upgrades from a single screen. Right now with 4 characters, navigation to upgrade their armor is a bit tedious.

Daithi

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Re: Armor upgrade management screen
« Reply #1 on: November 27, 2016, 02:56:50 PM »
Thanks - I'll have a look at the issue with the previous crafting screen not clearing.

What you suggested is actually how the system started out. I agree it's a little inconsistent, but there are a couple of reasons why armour (and later weapon) crafting is handled like this. If every possible crafting outcome for each individual item has to be covered in the main crafting screen (there will be quite a few more weapons to craft), it's going to become cluttered. This would also necessitate searching every character's personal inventory, equipped slots for any item which could be crafted, and creating UI elements for each - this add quite a lot more work for the  and could potentially cause slow downs.

That said, the current system is not set in stone so it may change. The inventory system is a pretty complex component, and it would like take a few days to effect and debug these changes. We have a finite amount of time to work on Vigilantes, so to explain a little more about making decisions about what to work on, it comes down to deciding whether it's worth spending this time replacing a functional, but slightly clunky system, or devoting it to something else, like a system to automatically reload/repair weapons with a button click (which requires quite a lot of clicks from the player)

Chabbrik

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Re: Armor upgrade management screen
« Reply #2 on: November 27, 2016, 07:52:07 PM »
Thanks for the explanation. I do agree that getting inventory system right is really tricky. Even inXile said in one of their interviews, that it was one of the more challenging subsystems to develop.

I guess, I will wait and see how the overall game develops and how much time you spend in the inventory.

By the way, if possible, it would be good to have weapons unload bullets when moved from hero to base store, but it is a minor convenience.

My suggestion was based on assumption that you would have just a handful of heros and each will have more or less one armor and weapon

Daithi

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Re: Armor upgrade management screen
« Reply #3 on: November 28, 2016, 11:09:42 AM »
Am planning to add bullet unloading - probably won't be this update, likely going to focus on adding a few more combat areas this time.

Daithi

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Re: Armor upgrade management screen
« Reply #4 on: November 30, 2016, 01:06:36 PM »
Even inXile said in one of their interviews, that it was one of the more challenging subsystems to develop.

Yeah, inventory is the second most complex system in Vigilantes. Doing things like creating and managing item objects is fairly basic programming. The situation becomes more complex when you have to interact with them in a wide range of ways, and in a variety of locations. Buying, selling, crafting, managing and moving between the various inventories (home, personal, ground, equipped slots) with different methods (dragging and clicking)  both on a data and UI layers creates a lot of possibilities which have to be handled. It's definitely the most error prone aspect of the code, so I tend to only work on it when it offers substantial improvement to the game, and even then, tend to be a bit cautious with it  :)