TotalBiscuit explains AVWW in one sentence.

[Bluddy]

Yeah I don't like the swapping idea either. It's hard enough to remember what's bound to what in a pinch -- making items swap will compound the confusion.

[x4000]

Hmm.  I see that point.

So what if it just swapped the left mouse button but not the right mouse button and onward?

[Penumbra]

So what if it just swapped the left mouse button but not the right mouse button and onward?

That sounds the closest to the "equipping" mechanic used by other games.

[Volatar]

What happens when you press two numbers, does it reset to what it was before, or does it just keep swapping. Because if it doesn't reset, you'll never remember where your old skill went.

It would just keep swapping ad infinitum.  But it's all right there on your screen, so you can easily drag your inventory around if you really need to.  We'll see how it works out.

One of the major advantages of Terraria's system is that when you are not sitting around managing your inventory, you need never look at your hotbar at the top. You just scroll through your tools, and they appear in your characters hands. This means your eyes stay with your character in the center of the screen.

[Bluddy]

Yeah I think the current UI is very close to the Terraria UI already so there isn't so much work to do there:

- Move only the left mouse button's selected skill and only display its selection.
- Bind it by default (in this configuration) to the mouse wheel.
- Make sure it's clearly displayed. It has to be obvious from looking at the bar for a fraction of a second which spell you have selected. You might want to enlarge the selected spell slightly.
- Get rid of the notification floating up when you switch spells. It's not necessary. Instead use a little 'click' sound to tell you when you've moved your selection. (Make sure the particular click doesn't get annoying when it fires many times)
- Pressing a number switches the selected spell - it doesn't fire it right away.
- I really think the UI needs to be scaled at high resolutions. It seems way too small to be able to tell what's selected.

I'm not sure how exactly Terraria handles the right mouse button. Maybe others can give more information about that.

Re: Volatar's comment: I didn't know that. Maybe put a small icon of the currently selected spell under the glyph?

[Drjones013]

I seriously have to weigh in on the anti-switching side. I come from an extensive line of FPS games and the first thing I do when I can is 10 key my basic weapon loads and movement; everything else gets ***t-canned. It's absolutely necessary to have fast access to only relevant options when a game forces real-time interaction and there are multiple ways to do it but *only* so many options to process. More options, greater reaction time. The more steps involved in the process, the greater the delay in action. I use the 10 key in AVWW for additional spells in addition to movement and my mouse just becomes a reference point for aiming. I can see how a person might want to remap spells to the mouse on the fly but that's only applicable if the mouse is trained as the 'firing' button (in fairness, this IS how FPSs are designed now). Mouse-wheel options threw this control scheme out the window until I was able to disable it (mouse 3 is mapped for me).

On the other hand, all of the WoW players I've seen have macros tied to their number keys.

[x4000]

In terms of scaling the UI up on larger monitors, that's out of the question -- if it's too small to see clearly, play on a smaller resolution. Increasing screen resolution size in a 2D game just makes everything smaller and lets you see further in the game world, not making what you see sharper.  If we were to scale things up that would make everything blurrier.

In terms of showing what the current LMB spell is, perhaps just putting that by the mouse cursor as suggested would be enough.  Or floating under the character's glyph or something.

[Penumbra]

I seriously have to weigh in on the anti-switching side.

I am almost certain that this will be added in as an option only, and not thrust upon us all. 

[tigersfan]

I seriously have to weigh in on the anti-switching side.

I am almost certain that this will be added in as an option only, and not thrust upon us all. 

Yep, you can count on this.

[Bluddy]

In terms of scaling the UI up on larger monitors, that's out of the question -- if it's too small to see clearly, play on a smaller resolution. Increasing screen resolution size in a 2D game just makes everything smaller and lets you see further in the game world, not making what you see sharper.  If we were to scale things up that would make everything blurrier.

The UI is not the same as the game-world. I can see people wanting a high resolution world, but also wanting their UI elements not to be microsopic (as they are now).

[x4000]

And yes, what we're discussing right now is an experimental option that you'd have to specifically enable.  If it proves very popular -- as movement-directed-aiming did on the keyboard side -- then it might turn into the default.  But that remains to be seen, and even if it did the current model (and all the related flexibility in general) would still remain either way.

[x4000]

In terms of scaling the UI up on larger monitors, that's out of the question -- if it's too small to see clearly, play on a smaller resolution. Increasing screen resolution size in a 2D game just makes everything smaller and lets you see further in the game world, not making what you see sharper.  If we were to scale things up that would make everything blurrier.

The UI is not the same as the game-world. I can see people wanting a high resolution world, but also wanting their UI elements not to be microsopic (as they are now).

Then they're out of luck.   Unless I rendered all the assets at 2x resolution of what they were now, I cannot express how bad this would look if scaled up.  Absolutely, incredibly, terrible.

And frankly, on an appropriately-sized monitor I love that the GUI is mostly out of my way.  I switch spells only when I need to, and my health and mana are easily visible right over my character's head.  I don't spend a lot of time looking at the maps unless I'm not actively fighting right in that second.  So it's really nice because it gives me a really clean and clear view of what is happening action-wise, while still having the GUI there but just in my peripheral vision.  I start feeling really cramped on anything less than 1920x1080 these days, heh.

Of course I don't expect everyone to agree.  But there's just no way to cleanly scale graphics up -- down, sure, but not up.  And fact is I didn't create many of those icons at any higher resolution, so I'd have to redo many of them from scratch.  The spells themselves I have larger versions of thanks to the crafting interface, but those are the only ones.

For the rest of it, it's just one of those things where if somebody is of a mind that they want a larger interface to see it more easily, they probably want to see text, their character, and so on in a larger format as well.  So just downing the screen resolution fixes that all in one swoop; which is what a screen resolution is for in a 2D game.

[nanostrike]

Overly defensive much?  I think you completely mistook my post.

The standard response when somebody gets called out while running their mouth. If I had a dollar for every time I've seen that... I'd have a few dollars.

I understood alright.  You turned off the UI before even seeing what the UI looked like, then didn't like it.  Yeah, the icons are a bit off, but if you'd played with the UI on first and seen that, you would've known and been prepared.  As for your own ineptitude, it usually comes up in the form of "I don't know what I'm bloody doing!", where you have no clue what's going on or what you're supposed to do because you read nothing from any documentation that came with the game or ignored/didn't understand a tutorial.  It happens frequently.

You've given no specific examples what-so-ever. Sadly this is fairly common of those that criticize without too much thought to consequences. I saw exactly what the UI looked like, it looks exactly like what's in the 2 pictures where it shows you exactly what the UI looks like. You can't possibly have missed it, I spent a good minute on that screen talking about it. So what exactly what you going on about? It was an entirely legit piece of criticism leveled at the game which both broke immersion and made it awkward to play, forcing you to then make a choice between "click until you find where they put the interaction box which more often than not won't be where it should logically be" and "be given too much information by the UI which damages the decision making process and is borderline spoilerish".

"It happens frequently" is a nice way of saying "I have no specific examples so I'll wave my hands around in generalisation. What can I say, I dislike it when people misrepresent my work, I prefer constructive criticism which is useful

I'm not planning on going through all of your videos to find examples just to counter your butthurt response to someone criticizing your videos.  Get over yourself.

My favourite part of this was when he used a rock throw spell with a set arc/weight physics thing and complained about it not? hitting where he had his cursor pointed and said the spells were inaccurate.

Maybe if I try really hard I can one day grow up to be as good at the video games as tortleboscuit.

Careful!  He'll make a forum account just to post some "Prove it with examples!" reply to this.  Apparently he regularly patrols the forums of indie games to find topics about himself and stamp out any criticisms.

[Dizzard]

I definitely agree with what TB said about NPCs.

Picking up NPCs is definitely more out of selfishness than any real desire to help them. They have something you want (ability at some job) and there isn't any negative consequences to seeing somebody in need but running the other way or ignoring the mission.

I think it would be great to have some missions that have negative consequences (they don't need to be detrimental, just noticeable) if you ignore them, but you're forced to balance responsibilities a bit more. Then perhaps you could assign settlement npcs (that have been "lucky" enough to be granted glyphs) to work on these particular missions while you're out exploring. (like rescuing civilians) It would be interesting to have a kind of commanding officer type of dynamic in the game. So that not only do you need to worry about yourself, but also the welfare of soldier units and they're ability to get results (and not face a horrible death while on a (simulated) mission)

[x4000]

nanostrike: I realize he was rude to you as well, but can we please just be civilized and let this drop?  He had some valid points, but on the other hand I understand that initially you weren't trying to be as critical as it sounded.  If you'd said the same thing about me that you said about him, I would have taken it poorly too, though.  It's easier to see clearly when it's someone else's work being discussed rather than your own when it comes to having an emotional reaction to criticism.

Again, not to come off as lecture-y, but what I really desire here is a positive atmosphere where people can disagree without it turning into a flame war.  You said your piece.  He said his.  You still don't agree.  I think we're done with that subject then?  If neither side is willing to just let it go, these things just escalate until somebody kills somebody or keels over from blood pressure.  We're all on the same side here, so far as I know.