Hey All
So you may be wondering what I've been up to for the last 4 months or so, and I'll post all about that very soon! v0.3.3 has required a lot of general housekeeping work including improving the player inventory system to function nicely with world state saving, scripting and controls. As a result, it became a good opportunity to also squeeze in weapon switching and custom HUDs.
Here's the design I have -- please feel free to comment and criticize -- especially if it looks like it won't carry ideas for carts you'd like to make soonish.
Here's an example HUD that shows a single player carrying more than one weapon (switchable with Q/E or shoulder buttons):
The basic idea is to add an animation to INV_ITEM similar to the ones that exist now for arcade weapons, but to allow adding any inventory item to the hud, including things like potions that are activated with an alternative button, or temporary pickups like the score multiplier.
The items only have limited information about how they are to be displayed up top -- the layout happens mostly automatically. But certain common item meanings (score, life, player head) are tagged as such to help make a sensible layout.
The layout is performed in single player by separating elements into up to 3 groups and aligning then left, then right then center. Multiplayer layout is similar, but elements are squashed together and layed out per-player.
The goal here is to provide a simple way to make inventories for common genres, without requiring lua scripting or a lot of work doing layouts that work both in 1P & 2P. Later on, fancy HUD requirements can be taken care of in Lua scripts (more on that shortly!).
So, the steps to make a custom HUD will be:
- Add (or alias) any inventory items (INV ITEM) that the player should start with. // e.g. start with a bow and 8 arrows
- Add animations to inventory items that should be shown in the HUD
- Tag some inventory items as having a special meaning: score, lives
It will still be possible to use the old arcade HUD that you're all familiar with, but not to mix-and-match the two systems.
So, here's the question -- are there any simple HUDS you'd like to use that don't seem to work with a scheme like this?
Here are some examples that I think will be ok:
Doom: Score, life, current weapon & ammo
Bomberman, Bloot: Player heads with points won in a single row
RPG: armour & weapon, MP, HP, Gold
Adventure: List of collected objects
Scrolly Shooter: lives, score, panic bombs // lives logic not yet implemented





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