Graphical suggestion

[RZ]

I've got some ideas to enhance graphics for WM.. instead of using only text and percentage to display stats i think it will be nice if we have a bar such as the common rectangle health bar seen in many games. And i think it will also be nice to see an icon/sprite beside an item text because the inventory panel looks so bland with just text.

So, what do you think guys?

[Dagoth]

Bars for displaying health/tiredness/happiness/whatever are certainly possible. Yeah, I like the idea. At some point (after a lot more bugfixing) I'll probably make a new control,  PercentageBar. It will be fully graphical, settable to percentage 0-100, with two background colors (gray/black and dark red) and a few bar colors (black, green, blue, yellow, orange, red, off the top of my head). That way the bar color can be chosen based on what range the value is in, so for instance as a value dropped you could see the color go green->blue->yellow->orange->red.

What about the inventory panel (Item Management screen?) would you spruce up?

[RZ]

Can't wait for it to be implemented.. 

For the inventory panel, i think it is fine as it is now but maybe a little graphic addition like this (shop'd it since i'm not a coder) will make it better

http://img208.imageshack.us/img208/1189/templatecm.jpg

[Dagoth]

We should be getting support for images in listboxes eventually from Necno, so that should be possible then. Of course, we'd then need a bunch of little images like that to use, preferably free/open-source ones.

[Mehzerz]

Right... finding the little images would be the problem. I suppose the easiest way to do it would be to restict the images by "type" of item. So all healing items share the same icon, dresses, shoes, weapons, ect. each type having it's icon.


That way we're not stuck with items without icons. Soooo with the existing item categories... it looks like we'll need 9 different icons.

[exodia91]

I do a little bit of spritework from time to time, I'd be happy to make some icons for you if you ever need them. Just send me the dimensions and what you want.

[Dagoth]

The default list-item height is 20px, -2px for the beveled border, -2px for slight padding... so, 16x16 would probably do the trick. It'll probably be quite a while before we would need them, though.

[Dagoth]

In regards to the percentage bar control, I felt like mucking about in Photoshop a bit and came up with this mockup:


Note that there's no working code, this was just put together in Photoshop to test out sizes and so forth. I do have some workable images for it now, though, so when the time comes that'll be one less thing that needs to be worked on.
It will of course be able to smoothly scale out horizontally to whatever length is desired, once I actually code it in.

[necno]

Yes, icons in the listboxes is going to be my task for next week... well implementing support for them anyway.

[Midnight_Amratha]

wow, that looks to become a neato feature, meesa liiike!
will you make the "show specific item picture" available in case people find a picture they want to add to their new *pressies* for their girls? but with the generic/parent picture from the group to show up by default in case there is no picture provided?
the "big" picture could be placed on top of the description or at the bottom, oh and could we please have a scrolling window for the description of items, sometimes the description are "swallowed" by way of being too long
 
i guess that means another revamp of the item generator as well, but not something that is pressing, merely one of those tweaking issues that can be left for later.