Author Topic: Ingame Wiki/Encyclopedia Idea  (Read 1736 times)

Offline RocketAssistedPuffin

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Ingame Wiki/Encyclopedia Idea
« on: February 07, 2019, 03:46:27 pm »
Something I had thought of a small while ago. Basically an in-game accessible menu, very similar to the Quick Starts, which gives a more convenient way to find out how something works, or refresh memory, etc. Potentially, units could also have a place and would draw their values and descriptions direct from the game files, instead of being exported to the wiki.

That also has the benefit of the unit pages updating themselves with each release.

There's a picture attached of a Quick Start category quickly rigged up, using some text from a wiki page I did recently, as an example.

Obviously it'd be better formatted and nicer looking than that.
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Offline zeusalmighty

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Re: Ingame Wiki/Encyclopedia Idea
« Reply #1 on: February 07, 2019, 07:16:17 pm »
I think this sort of feature would GREATLY address learning curve issues, as even experienced as I am I still find myself puzzled by how certain things function

One of the best implementations of this sort of system is in Pillars of Eternity 2--the "Bestiary." This was particularly cool as journal entries would automatically fill-in things as you encountered them (so a first encounter with a monster would be very vague; after many encounters you learn all of their stats)

While I don't think that would fit well here, Pillars 2 was great at letting you get more information about something with interactive keywords that could pop up in pretty much any menu. (I should try to add pics here--the mechanic would be great here I think, as it declutters things very well while also making everything very transparent)

Again, there is so much to this game that having a living enclyopedia one can interact with on the fly would go a long way to counter the learning curve

Offline Dominus Arbitrationis

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Re: Ingame Wiki/Encyclopedia Idea
« Reply #2 on: February 08, 2019, 01:33:11 pm »
I _really_ like this idea. I think it would be best to allow the player to see the whole thing from the start, unlike PoE2 where it is generated as you encounter stuff.

In trying to get a mockup, the biggest problem I ran into was getting the text to wrap automatically. Since we would want to do this in code mostly so it updates on its own, we would need a way to wrap the text. I was thinking of using a TextAbstractBase, since we can define that text using the buffer and import stuff automatically, but I also don't know how to get it to populate with all the data short of saying "Populate from X, Y, and Z", which isn't ideal.
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