I’ve made a lot of progress with the character screen over the last week or so, ever since getting the spiral stat/skill thing worked out:
Of course, except for the spiral (which you totally can’t tell above, but I finally figured out how to get anti-aliasing on the LineRenderer, so it looks much smoother), everything here is just a placeholder. I’ll come up with some actual images and textures to use later on (yes, I know that the icon for “punch” is a kick, and I don’t care), but these let me see how the layout will look, and test out various features.
I’m especially proud of the “select a weapon” popup- it took me a while to come up with a good way to do that, but I’m starting to embrace how flexible Unity’s prefab system is. I spent a long time trying to embed dynamically-generated text and images inside of a Vertical Layout Group, housed inside the Content block of a ScrollView, and it was an absolute disaster. Something about dynamically generating the stuff inside the Content block completely threw off all the size fitters, and the end result was very Picasso-esque. I probably could have spent a few more days getting it all worked out, but I realized it would be way easier and faster to just create a prefab for the icon-name-description weapon block on the inside, and jam them inside the Content of a ScrollView without any need for a Vertical Layout Group. After all, they’re all the same size, so I know exactly where they need to be positioned.
After that, it was basically just getting all the mouse-over behavior working right as far as highlighting and clicking things, and then replacing them on the character’s “equipped weapon” blocks.
You can’t see it in the screencap above, but right underneath where the “select a weapon” popup appears is the Equipped Armor block- that’s what actually contributes to your Soak value aside from your Might stat points and your Endurance skill points. As soon as I started working on that, I realized that I had sort of painted myself into a corner with my inventory system. My plan is to have one inventory “pouch” that holds all your items, whether they’re weapons, armor, key plot items, or combat consumables. However, so far I had only implemented combat consumables, and my combat code expects the list of inventory items to only include consumables.
I really don’t like the idea of having a “Weapons Inventory,” “Armor Inventory,” “Combat Inventory,” and “Miscellaneous Inventory.” But I also *really* don’t like the idea of rewriting everything in the combat code to support such an all-encompassing inventory list. I realized, then, that this is pretty much a textbook scenario for implementation of inheritance in classes. Most guides and books use animals for the examples- “Pet is a class of animals with four legs, Cat is a class of animals that eat mice, Cat inherits everything from the class Pet” kind of stuff. So, what I need is an InventoryItemClass that implements some basic stuff, like “name,” “description,” “purchase cost,” “icon sprite,” and an ability to return a list of items filtered by type (for example, only combat consumables). Then, WeaponClass will inherit from InventoryItemClass, but also include “damage dealt,” “skill used when attacking,” “melee or ranged,” and stuff like that. ArmorClass will also inherit from InventoryItemClass, and include “soak value.” Perfect.
