UI improvements suggestions.

[von-dietrich]

I am sure everyone will agree, that item menus in Gothic 1/2 are bad. You can get easily lost searching for that one thing you just picked up. In G1 you have scroll through tons of items to choose the one you want. Weird shopping experience in G1. etc.

My proposal, is to improve on existing G2 item menu, by implementing some features from Gothic 3, and creating univesal menu (optional?). Graphics might be based off original games, so it fits better.

Here's list of proposed features;

• Making new aquired items stand out, by changing temporarly their background color to for example yellow.
• Adding tabs with categories at the top. Tags would also work here.
• "Take all" and "Close" buttons in chests above items in chests for mouse users.

Here's a mockup of how chest could look like ( with use of tags, their names could be represented by icons to save space ) -

I also made an mockup based off Gothic 1 graphics. Of course the final project should have universal grid size, placement etc. Both mockups are created from screenshots found online.

Thanks for working on this project!

[frabert]

@falsestar is already working on the Inventory, we've already talked a bit about possible improvements in the chat :)

[von-dietrich]

That's great! I hope features I listed will be somehow implemented :)

[aaeberharter]

Thanks you for your contribution @dietrichdaniel. Some of the features you mentioned are already planned. I plan to add categories similar to those you proposed, including a 'Favorites' category. I still have to think about a mechanism to mark / unmark favorites.
In other games I have seen newly acquired items to stand out of the list but I am not really a fan of that. I think it would be better to give the player an option to sort items by pickup-date. Take-all button is also planned, but in a way so that the game is still playable by keyboard only.

[tomedi]

@falsestar What about a solution similar to the quickselect- bar in G3? I think it would be handier if you can choose whatever item you want to have at the number part of your keyboard rather than stick with the old, unflexible system.

[i30817]

I think part of the idea was to be impossible to use potions in mortal combat so if you're hoping for that with your 'use any item' it needs to be a setting, borderline cheat.

What i really really want is a script action/shortcut to pick up all the crap and potions ingredients in a respectable radius around the hero. You can keep the animations for immersion but actually finding all the crap on a place we already know is full of ingredients is a pain.

Auto loot in games might be kind of unnecessary in a non-diablo like but i want the option. Just don't make the hero drop to his death in the pathfinding or try to go out of the city if the walls block that swampweed just outside the wall or make it work while in combat or if combat starts or make it uninterruptible.

[frabert]

From Gothic.ini (Gothic 2):

usePotionKeys=0
; ... with this value you are allowed to use the potion keys if set to "1". potionkeys do not work and are not visible in the keyboard settings if you leave this to "0"
; we feel potion shortkeys suck in gameplay, so you will manually have to enable them here

So something like that was already present in the original engine. As for the "cheating" part: IIRC, consuming potions takes quite a while in Gothic, since it uncaps, drinks and puts the bottle back into the inventory, so I don't think it would be feasible to drink while dying in a fight. Might need testing, though

[i30817]

I edited my post because as usual I though of something after posting.