AVWW Beta 0.565 "Better Texture Sorting And Other Tricks " Released!

[keith.lamothe]

Another thing I'm noticing is that the number and variety of spells is getting to be such that a lot of constant swapping is required to be able to use them all, even with a 5 button mouse. Has any thought gone into a more robust quick switching system?

There's a button for switching your "active row" to the next row in your inventory.  R is the key on mine, not sure if that's the default.  Anyway, you can set up 9 or 10 sets of 5 by using the first 5 slots of each row, and rotate through them pretty quickly that way.  Or is that too slow or too inflexible?

(ninja'd)

On the mission thing, look for the mission "ruins" in the first surface chunk of the region, and enter that.  The mission stuff is in there.

[Hyfrydle]

I think the tree map layout confuses people, we aren't used to seeing maps drawn like that. The sizes of the rooms on the map have nothing to do with their actual shape and whether you go up or down in a house is rather difficult to decipher.

I think the maps are fine once you get used to them but as a new player it takes a bit of practice to understand how they work. Maybe a section clearly explaining the mapping system would be useful under the reference section.

[x4000]

I think the tree map layout confuses people, we aren't used to seeing maps drawn like that. The sizes of the rooms on the map have nothing to do with their actual shape and whether you go up or down in a house is rather difficult to decipher.

I think the maps are fine once you get used to them but as a new player it takes a bit of practice to understand how they work. Maybe a section clearly explaining the mapping system would be useful under the reference section.

We do plan a visual map guide outside the game, too.  Putting that into the reference window might be tricky, but is something we should probably try to do.

[Toll]

One thought I had re: maps is that you could have different brightness for rooms you've explored versus rooms you've not visited. It might be more obvious than the black bar for new people.

[x4000]

That could work, yeah.

[KDR_11k]

I also think there's not much other way that we can draw those in a procedural fashion.

You keep track of the floors that buildings have, you could use some sort of layer-based approach based on that, e.g. a plane that shows the first floor with a box showing the staircase leading to another plane.

[x4000]

The problem is in spatial organization of all this.  Having a central node that grows both upwards and downwards is extremely confusing.  And more to the point, having other sorts of traditional map-style representations of this where there weren't long lines between various groups of rooms, is pretty much impossible.  Well, I won't say impossible -- there might be some way, but I've sunk several days into it and could not find a way that was remotely as compact or clear as what is in the game now.  As in, nothing else would even fit on the screen all at once.  Of course, that was back in the days when most buildings had 100-1000 rooms, so that didn't help.

[x4000]

New one: http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,9739.0.html