Archive:Menu interface system

This article is currently only a proposal

The features or design guidelines described in this article are only a proposal made by one or some persons. It has not been evaluated or accepted by the core development team yet. Feel free to add your personal opinion about them or make counter proposals.

Player Status

This is how the user finds information on his character, as well as accesses the items he is carrying and equips himself. Our current model features a dual-part menu system consisting of two modules:

• The interface menu
• The context ring menu

The interface menu

The point of the interface menu is to give the user a direct, clear cut access to his information. The interface menu has links to player data and non-combat actions such as:

• Equipment
• Skills
• Stats
• Inventory
• Options
• Journal & Friend List
• Guild/Clan

The Context Ring Menu

The idea of the Context Ring Menu is to provide a flexible context-sensitive method for interacting with the world around the player. It contains executable commands such as "Invite to party", "cast spell", and "use object". (For those of you unfamiliar with the term, "context-sensitive" means that it adapts to the situation around the player. For example, if a player is near an interactive world item (object usage), the commands he can execute on that item appear in the menu. When he leaves the range of that item, those commands disappear.)

It's not possible to list the commands for the ring menu, since they are dynamic and change based on the player's situation. For a general idea of how it works, take a look at magic system GUI notes (the ring was originally the interface for spellcasting, but has been expanded to contain all world interaction commands)

Chat box

This is the chat window before hitting enter:

This is the chat window after hitting enter:

Top: The top band is not there anymore, instead a corner serves for moving (where the hand is).

Bottom: The typing box appears and the chat box gets reduced, so the height of the window is the same. The scroll has to stay at the last line (I get the impression the current scroll behaviour is broken...)

When the player hits enter again the typing box disappears and the text box gets the previous size (the scroll is always at the last line).

See the resizing corner (blue) has been moved a bit to the right so the typing box doesn't get over it.

Thread: [1]

Aiming system

Thread: [2]