Released: Quick Action Bar

[Komag]

Sounds good. Probably should also reduce the count right at a use of the tool itself so that players with one potion left can't spam click the button and get two or three potions worth of healing before the next 30th frame

[JohnWordsworth]

Just a quick notice to say that I've upgraded the Quick Bar. Mostly small changes, but one really major bug fix!

1. Potion counts are only updated every X seconds, which can be defined in the config section at the top of the script (default 0.33).

2. Disabled and Dead characters are grayed out and cannot be selected.

3. Potions in the inventory of disabled characters don't count (but they still do in dead character's inventories).

4. Most importantly: There was a bug where trying to swap in an orb for a fighter say, would cause the item to be destroyed (it was taken out of the backpack and it wouldn't get put into the hand, so would then be lost at the end of the function). This has been fixed - if there are any problems in doing a 'swap' then it is simply 'undone' and reverted back to the original state.

[Komag]

Testing this out today, very impressive, works great, I absolutely love it and want to update my dungeons with it!

Couple requests:
1 It's quite oversized for me, taking too much screen space. I play at 1366x768, and if you play at 1280x720 it's even worse. If I understand it right, the dds files are static and gui just places an image or not, so there is no easy way to scale it. But perhaps something could be done? Maybe an alternate "small" version for people playing on lower resolutions? If there was a second set of images and sizes to go with them, it could be another option in the configuration, to use the 33% smaller version (or whatever).

2 The quickbar doesn't go away while I'm holding RMB - I'm guessing that shouldn't be too hard to implement.

3 For my dungeons specifically, the quickbar is there during dream sequences. All of the party is disabled during these times, so it would be best for me if the quickbar simply didn't show up if all the party is disabled. Perhaps that could be a selectable option in the settings, whether we want the quickbar to disappear if the full party is disabled.


I have to say, this is probably the most professionally done tweak mod I've seen in a long long time, just so well done. I truly deserves to be placed in every dungeon ever made.

EDIT - one other "bug" - the limits of dragging it (to keep it on the screen) aren't the same on all four sides. The top and left sides let me get nice and close to the edge (look like around 6 or 7 pixels), but the right and bottom sides keep it more like 15-20 pixels away from the edge, which is a little annoying. I want to put it in the lower left corner, hugging the corner, but it's forced too far up right now. I wonder if this is related to #1 above?

EDIT - working on scaling the potions, and I noticed the original default value for healing and energy potions is 75, not the 50 you have set. Did you lower it on purpose? The only ones that are 50 are speed and poison.

[JohnWordsworth]

Hi Komag, thanks for kind words and the wonderful feedback. I shall try to incorporate them all into another version this weekend. For discussion;

1. Good point about the size - I play on 1080p. You're right that you can't scale with onDrawGui unfortunately. I'll make a small version and auto-scale between the two at a given resolution (maybe below 1600x900-ish).

2. Should be very easy to implement .

3. I think turning off the quickbar when the party is disabled isn't a bad idea. I can also make a function on the quickbar script so that you can forcefully turn it off in a way that the user cannot just turn back on again at points if you need to do it manually: qb_script.setForceDisabled(true/false);

4. That's interesting about the dragging, I'll sort that out!

5. Doh! I just used '50' as the amount from memory. If it's meant to be 75 then I shall change it .

[Komag]

Sounds good

[JohnWordsworth]

Upload will come tomorrow, after some more testing, but I've just had a mammoth couple of hours bashing out some updates...

1. Better snapping to all 4 screen edges.

2. Added a 'skin' system and it will auto select the correct skin for the current screen height between 3 different skins.

3. QuickBar is invisible when right clicking.

4. QuickBar is invisible when all 4 champions are disabled.

5. QuickBar can be forced off with a simple function call.

6. Tapping 1, 2, 3, 4 will also change the current character on the quick bar (while the inventory toggles).

7. Overall slightly better layout of elements.

8. I've taken a risk and used non-power of two textures to save a bit of space. Seems to work okay. Source files are now 650Kb and an exported .dat file with just the QuickBar is 350Kb (presumably the dat has some Zlib / RLE compression).

9. Potions now default to 75 HP/Mana restored.

Barring any bug fixes, this will probably be 'Release 1.0'!

[Komag]

Ha, I was going to suggest #6, nice that you added it

I just thought of a crazy idea - allowing the player to set the hotkeys! There would be a tiny "set hotkey" button on the bar, and when the player clicks it, the script asks for each hotkey one at a time, and detects which key the player hit next, recording it for the hotkey.

Not sure if that would work right, and not sure if it would be feasible to implement, or even necessary. But I'm sure a certain number of players would like that.

[JohnWordsworth]

Latest version of the QuickBar (v1.0.0) has been released on the Nexus.

@Komag: I had thought of doing that (customizable keys), but haven't had the chance yet and wasn't really sure how much it would get used. As upgrading the QuickBar for a modder is just a case of copying and pasting a new script in, I might leave it out for now. If the QuickBar appears in a few mods, then I will add it .

[Komag]

Looks like a mistake with the file uploads at Nexus - the regular quickbar seems to actually be the sample dungeon

EDIT - I managed to carefully copy/paste the script section from the dungeon.lua to mine, works fine.

[Komag]

Testing new version:

Working great! Love the improvements
- stays off when party disabled, player can't turn on at that time, good
- auto-size seems to work well, the size appears just right for me
- 1,2,3,4 hotkeys working well, makes it more convenient
- RMB makes it go away, good

BUT
- Moving it to the edge still problematic for right and bottom edges, won't let me get close enough (or, conversely, it's allowing me to get too close to the edge on the top and left sides). I noticed in the editor that this doesn't appear to be an issue, only in the exported game version. However, with how I like to place the bar now, this isn't an issue for me, since I don't need it right up against the edge anyway
- I found that I wished the default potion used would be one from that champion's inventory, and only use one from someone else if the selected champion is out. However, I probably only wished this because of how I'm used to playing and using potions, so this is probably not an issue at all. Over time I'm sure I would get used to the idea of just having a designated potion carrier (or two) rather than distributed potions, and always just use the quick bar, so it totally won't matter who's holding the individual potions.
- the graphics of it seem a bit brighter than the lines and highlights around the champions HUDs, maybe they could be toned down a tiny bit to better match? I found the QAB caught my eye a little more than I would like due to this.

Can't think of anything else right now. This is really nice, I'll try to encourage every author to put it in their dungeons, this should basically be "default" for every Grimrock mod!