RE: [Arianne-general] Interface

[Brian T. <bri...@ho...>]

All,

I'm no artist, or coder for that matter, but I've been thinking about the
interface.  What it should be capable of and how it should work, please
don't jump on me.  I thought I'd add my 2 cents to this.

I have attached the basic idea I came up with.  The "jewels" represent
buttons to access the chat box, the inventory box, the magical skills menu,
and the nonmagical skills menu.  These buttons merely activate the drawers,
which I think could be made dockable the either the interface or the edges
of the screen.  For instance you press the chat button(say the red one) and
the chat window pops out from the side of the interface, depending on which
quadrant the interface is on the screen it'll pop out of the left or right,
or once its out it can be dragged away from the interface and docked at the
top or the bottom of the screen, regardless of where its docked if you hit
the red button it pops up where it was last docked.  For the skills menus I
would use vertical drawers (like one for fire one for earth etc)with
horizontal drawers for each ability that come out to reveal the individual
skills for that ability, I see these as 64x64 icons.  Again depending on
where the interface is located will determine whether they pop out of the
top or bottom of the interface, or they may be docked to the left or right
hand sides of the screen for easy access, again the buttons activate them.
The inventory window will be a larger screen,perhaps upto half the screen,
with items and a mannequin for equiping and removing items from yourself or
inventory, drop and drag with drag to the play screen as an possibility.

On the interface is a center portion which can be used for the "seeing"
ability(or wizards eye spell) that depending on the players ability will
allow them to see where other characters are, again resolution is determined
by how far the player can "see".  The yellow lines represent the players
line of sight(I see this as being a compass interface or "direction finding"
part of the interface in the game) other things are possible on this
interface as well.  My only question is how or should we represent
statistics to the players????  Do we have a stats screen or health meter of
some type available during play, I think yes to this, have constitution
represented by a bar, arc, or anything.  I think that stats should be
accessed by players only after death, perhaps, so that they can see how they
were doing and correct themselves.  I am not sure about during game play,
hack-n-slash worries here.  I'll work on more of the drawer type stuff if
there is interest, I'm going to keep it basic (thats my level anyway) unless
you think I shouldn't even be worrying about this (Miguel??).

WEll thats my 2 cents,
Brian Thompson