WASD with Mouse
Since my last post, I’ve been working on making the keys work using the WASD keys and the mouse. I wasn’t too sure how this would work out, and honestly, I’ve never done these types of controls in a game, much less in a windowed game. Other than a bout of rea life interruption, the new code was not terribly hard to add. The video attached shows more…
The (silent) video below shows the new WASD keys and mouse control in action. Actually, I recorded this before making A and D side step — that’s working now.
You’ll notice it is now very easy to face the direction you want or look up and down. Although I’m tempted to allow the engine to look further up and down, the current range seems (mostly) sufficient for now.
Spawn of Lysle
My son has become an alpha tester (whether he knows it or not). Ted is a big fan of Minecraft and Portal 2 and is already yearning for some type of editor and network play, so he’ll be pushing me just as much as most fans of the game to keep improving it. For now, he’s my personal slave for product testing. Its great when fathers and sons can bond.
Grabby Items
And going forward, I’m still planning on putting the controls for modifying key layout directly in the game. As I mess with the game controls more, I’m tempted to make the E key be a ‘Use’ button and leave the space as jump. The only problem is we currently use space to open doors and jump is currently X. But I’m thinking of combining the two with some type of prompt like that done in many games (Darksiders comes to mind first). So, if a grabbable item is in the middle of the screen, pressing E should put that item into inventory (similar to ALT-clicking an item) and if it’s a door or switch, it is activated. Because secret doors should remain secret, no prompt would be used. A quick E key allows you stay in mouse/WASD mode before having to bring up the cursor for UI actions.
So, if you have a cursor over a grabbable item, what should I do to notify the player it is to be grabbed? Floating text, in my opinion can be distracting, so I’m thinking of just making the item highlighted in a shade of white or yellow (call it ‘glow’). Opinions?
Amulets & Armor Developer 
Personally, I’d absolutely Love to see a text notification in the bottom right corner or somewhere, that tells what item you are looking at, if there is no item looked at, door or otherwise ‘e’-able item, then you’ll know you can’t grab it. But if you see something, be it a spell scroll or fruit or otherwise, the name will show up, maybe even a tidbit of what the item does. Like maybe known damage, or the amount of hydration a water flask provides.
Either way, fabulous work on the controls, I can’t tell you how excited I am to have a future where I can share Amulets and Armor with my friends in an environment they can actually use. And it is looking far smoother than I could have hoped! Amazing job so far! Excited to see more progress!
That’s a pretty good idea. The standard look-at text would appear somewhere and only if it is within grab distance (and a grabbable item). Still not sure where to show it, but we could do something with the text at the top or even the bottom. Additional suggestions?
As far as showing if something is grab-able and it’s name, not really, but I do think the max up/down viewability should definitly be increased with the mouse enhancement that you’ve added. The game is starting to give off a definite Quake 1 feel to it, which is not a bad thing at all in my opinion. I’m still amazed that Amulets and Armor was originally intended on being a semi-MMO. What a huge scope this game had, your team deserves way more respect and admiration than you received. I’m glad the LP has started giving a renewed vigor to such a classic.
How about removing the weird magic oscilloscope and putting the text there?
A reasonable suggestion leaving only the question of what to put there when there is nothing highlighted. Plus, I think there is a growing consensus to put a potion belt there of 4 or 5 readied items (possibly even scrolls) making the space unavailable.
What about if we just show the text centered at the bottom of the 3D view?
Oh wow, a potion belt would be so amazing, definitly reminds me of Diablo II at that point. The text would be fine anywhere as long as it’s convenient and not blocking the view, so middle, corner, or side, either way, sounds fine. Oh, and maybe if you can, a small icon of what you’re looking at would be useful, for when you are looking at items clustered in a small heap. It’s always confusing what you are actually looking at sometimes, but maybe the name is enough.
I like that! BTW, when you have ammo loaded, text like “AMMO: 20” appears at the bottom left. It probably makes sense to put a small icon and text next to it and replace the ammo text, but only when you are selecting an item for pick up. I supposed I could even make text something like “E=take “.
You could probably get away with “E:” alone, sometimes that’s enough to get away with. :p
Useful ammo text, with the new controls I bet a lot more people will be eager to use bows and magic attacks now. Maybe the arrows won’t even have to auto-home anymore.