Hud Mock-up

[Darkness_Falls]

Ishtvan, the proposed interface was in addition to the standard Thief functionality we all know and love. See this quote:

Darkness Falls wrote: (1) T2 functionalities would remain as the primary way to select weapons. If you're in a non-stressful or non-combat situation, however, you have the option of using this mini-HUD instead.

The point of this idea was that some of us don't always remember if hitting '7' does a rope arrow, gas arrow, or whatever. Domarius said it best: "I too, forget which number key is what weapon in T2, and just cycle around till I get what I want."

 

I'm visual and would appreciate having an alternate (secondary) way of selecting my weapons and tools. If you don't like to select weapons using this completely secondary way, then you just would never use it. It's that simple. Before commenting, please read my last few posts to know what all I'm talking about and again, this is not a replacement of Thief 2's methodology.

[Domarius]

Also, weapons will change wiith each FM, as they do in T2 FMs, so the numbers will change. Something visual would be good.

[Springheel]

Isn't that what the icons in the corners are for? There will always be a keybind to cycle through weapons and inventory items. I just don't see why there's a need for a game-interupting menu screen.

[New Horizon]

It's somewhat counter productive in that we would have to create two separate systems that function quite differently. I don't really think it has a place in this type of game.

[Darkness_Falls]

Isn't that what the icons in the corners are for?

Yes - if you like cycling through items then inefficiently skip over the item you want then have to go back to it. Or, hit 5, 6, and 7 first only to find out the gas arrow you want is key-bound to 8 (I hated having to scroll through 10 items in T2 to find the compass or a colored key, etc.)

 

I just don't see why there's a need for a game-interrupting menu screen.

Game-interrupting only if we make it be interrupting. The game wouldn't pause. If you make the usability design intrusive, it will be intrusive. Hopefully we're more intelligent than that. (Oops, that sounds like something oDDity would say )

 

It's somewhat counter productive in that we would have to create two separate systems that function quite differently. I don't really think it has a place in this type of game.

That's cool. Just offering thoughts on how to make the weapon/tool-select be more efficient. Considering the whole scope of Dark Mod, I doubt this would take much time. But if the majority of us don't feel it's "broke," then why provide an alternative to "fix" (rhetorical)

 

I can see it's an uphill battle though, and there don't seem to be very many proponents, so I don't care what we do.

 

Domarius does raise a good point tho.