This weeks focus was the continuation of the inventory system and implementing the start of the object examination process. What I wanted to do was to alter the way the inventory displayed on the right of the screen so that I could display the name of the object and a series of buttons that allows the player to either examine or use the object (there may be more actions later). At present I don’t have any usable objects so I was concentrating on the examine function.
So, as you can see I’ve altered the process so that the inventory object is now highlighted (full bright) when the mouse cursor is over it, and I’ve moved the object title up and I’m displaying the examine icon/button along the bottom edge (the use icon is also set up to display if the item is usable). Hovering over the eye icon illuminates it to illustrate it’s click-able. Clicking it brings up the object details panel.
This is still a work in progress but I think the clean display works really well. Please be aware that the codes shown here will be changed so no writing them down or bookmarking this page just so you can immediately open doors 😉
The process has shown up one small issue. The mouse cursor is displayed as a sprite and sprites are drawn below GUI elements. Why is this a problem? Well the examine panel (and the inventory) draws the sprite images above the mouse cursor because they are on the GUI layer, so the mouse cursor goes behind the object sprites in the inventory and also behind the tint box of the examine panel. It’s still visible but it’s knocked back because of the tinting. Something for me to look into and see what the implications are of moving the mouse cursor to the GUI layer instead.
