Frobbing small items

[ferret]

I enjoy TDM immensely but I find it frustrating sometimes to frob small items, especially in chests or in small containers.

 

Is it just me? Sometimes I have to spend several minutes in a very dangerous situation in order to grab a small object from a container because I can't find a way to highlight it. It is extremely frustrating to see the object there in front of my eyes and still being unable to just grab it, especially when I'm in full light and I hear steps coming my way. Arggggh, you dumb thief, just grab the fricking thing already!

 

Are there any tricks to improve this?

[Springheel]

I find it a lot easier when leaning forward or to the side.

[Goldwell]

Yes I have the same frustration as you do however with a combination of the leaning that Springheel mentioned and also if the mapper turns the bottom part of the chest to unfrobable it makes it much easier on the player.

[Sotha]

...Aand the mapper can change the frob box size for the item.

 

But yeah, maybe it is a learnable thing: I usually have no problems in frobbing items from containers. The actual difficulty, I think, is estimating where the center of the screen is. Since TDM has no HUD it is difficult for people to get the center of the screen on the small item that is only few tens of pixels in size.

 

Perhaps an unobtrusive center-of-screen HUD pointer, activateable from the options, would help? (Or a custom crosshair mod .pk4) It could be as simple as a semitransparent dot, or a soft crosshair.

 

Like this:

There is a small dot in the center of the screen to help the player to point at items that can be manipulated.

http://spartanwarfighters.net/2top/3forum/images/Arma_2/DayZ/standalone/P-masks.jpg

[ferret]

...Aand the mapper can change the frob box size for the item.

 

But yeah, maybe it is a learnable thing: I usually have no problems in frobbing items from containers. The actual difficulty, I think, is estimating where the center of the screen is. Since TDM has no HUD it is difficult for people to get the center of the screen on the small item that is only few tens of pixels in size.

 

Perhaps an unobtrusive center-of-screen HUD pointer, activateable from the options, would help? (Or a custom crosshair mod .pk4) It could be as simple as a semitransparent dot, or a soft crosshair.

 

Like this:

There is a small dot in the center of the screen to help the player to point at items that can be manipulated.

http://spartanwarfighters.net/2top/3forum/images/Arma_2/DayZ/standalone/P-masks.jpg

... Or perhaps a small semitransparent circle. This sounds like a good idea in that the player is not completely reliant on the goodwill and wisdom of the mapper. I have no idea what would this require in terms of coding, but I don't think adding a minimalistic HUD would be challenging.

[wesp5]

... Or perhaps a small semitransparent circle. This sounds like a good idea in that the player is not completely reliant on the goodwill and wisdom of the mapper. I have no idea what would this require in terms of coding, but I don't think adding a minimalistic HUD would be challenging.

 

I agree to that, it sounds like a good idea and if hard-core players don't like it, they can turn it off in options!

[demagogue]

I'm ok with it as long as you can toggle it on and off, and it should probably default as off IMO.

 

I'm still on board with the general minimalist, immersive-sim design philosophy that the HUD be kept generally clean of out-of-world-meta features as much as possible/reasonable, and there should be a very good reason for adding any bling.

[ferret]

I'm ok with it as long as you can toggle it on and off, and it should probably default off IMO.

Sure, or even an add-on (if anything like this exists).

[Sotha]

I agree it should be off by default. I think it is "frobbing aid" similar to our lockpick aids or the bow aimer, you activate it if you need it.

 

Refining the idea further, it would not even need to be on-screen at all times, but pushing the frob key would smoothly fade it in and then it would smoothly fade out after some seconds. That way the view is clear, and when the player starts frobbing stuff the aid appears to help, and once the player has stopped frobbing, the aid disappears again leaving the screen nice and clean

 

So.. who's gonna make a proof of concept for it?

 

*Deep silence*

 

Anyone? Hello?

 

*Echo of derelict halls and corridors*

[Springheel]

I'm still on board with the general minimalist, immersive-sim design philosophy that the HUD be kept generally clean of out-of-world-meta features as much as possible/reasonable, and there should be a very good reason for adding any bling.

 

 

Agreed. That's one of our core design philosophies. I would rather fix the issue in other ways, like increasing the fbox size of small entities.

[SteveL]

A lot of small entities don't have frob boxes, which makes them trickiest. I remember from issue 3704 that coin purses don't have a frob box, which makes them trickier to remove from chests than keys.

[Springheel]

That probably just needs someone to go through the entities and add them.