Hey, so I've been vacationing off-grid and not working on this. I did a little before I left, added a few more F1 screens and fixed a few things like the cudgel not working but haven't uploaded it.
I heard about the DNF leak, haven't looked into it yet. I'll have to check that out when I get a chance, I remember being in awe of the trailers when I first saw them, but it's probably super-old tech by now. And I just saw a post that there is going to be a DNF movie?
About the books: My idea was to make actual readable books in-game. I wrote a script that takes a PDF file and makes each page into a texture on a poly object "page" and I started writing a book-handler object that will group those poly objects together and let you flip through the pages. It's not working yet but the giant books in the tutorial are an idea of how I expect them to look. The library in the north end of the tutorial will have shelves with books on them, you can take them to the reading area and open them up and read them in-game. The test file I've been using is a PDF scan of the original Doom II manual.
About the dummies: I've played a few different games that have some kind of weapons testing areas that told you the damage you were doing. So every time you get a new weapon or stat bonus equipment or whatever you can go test it out and see what your actual damage output is. I like that idea, I wish every game had that.
Also did you notice that the weapons icon lights up when you're in range? In so many first person melee games (Hexen, Action Doom, the Castlevania mod, etc) it's so hard to tell the range of your melee weapons and if they'll hit or not. I thought that was pretty useful.
I haven't decided exactly how I want the inventory system to work. My initial idea was to have the active inventory item drawn in 2d, similar to how Heretic and Hexen do it. Then I wrote that code to drag things around in 3d and really liked the effect of seeing what you're holding in front of you. I might add a sprite of an open empty hand and draw the item on top of that so it looks like it's being held. For the actual inventory, I'm thinking of leaving weapon slot #1 as the fists and making #2-9 as quick slots. You can drop any inventory item (weapon, tool, wand, potion, food, etc) into those slots and it will let you pull those items up quickly. That way you just put the 8 things you use most in those slots and don't even have to mess the the inventory manager until you need something else. I think that would let the player focus on the action and not have to dig thru nested bags to find every thing.
Your question about leaving the item hanging - it will be out there if you either have it in your hands (slot #1) or have it in a quick slot and have that slot selected. Basically you'll only see if the item if you're ready to use it. For equipped lights, I think I'll still have the light source projected out there, but not the actual sprite. It's kind of a cool effect to see your light source, but the novelty wears off and then it's just an annoying thing blocking your view.
The code is kind of messy and over complicated. Just the code to light a torch is needlessly twisted. Most of it is because I'm not sure exactly what I want to do or how I want to do it, so it's a lot of experimenting and learning and getting ideas and trying other things. Once I finalize my ideas of what I want it to do I'll go back and clean up all the code, but for now it's kind of messy and experimental. But if there's anything you're wondering about how it works or why I did it that way, go ahead and ask and I'll explain it the best I can. And if you need any help understanding zscript, I'm getting better and better at it the more I try it.
Oh yeah I completely forgot to mention that the power gem and the health flasks work. The power gem is pretty straight-forward, just lights up based on amount of weapon charge. The flasks have over 500 frames of animation - you can do give/take health commands and watch them go. Was it worth all that work for such a subtle effect? Maybe? I'm also going to add a third flask to represent your hunger level. And I wrote a script to recolor the liquid in the flasks to just about any color, but not sure what I'm going to do with that yet.
The tutorial was originally just a linear string of rooms, then I got the idea to make them off a hall so you could do redo ones or skip ones or whatever. Then I got the idea to make them like classrooms in a school and that idea stuck. I've got another idea for the tutorial, that will fit well with the Ultima universe, but it's gonna be a lot of work so I'll have to wait until I have the skills (and free time) to make it happen. Basically the tutorial would be you at home doing a bunch of tasks to learn the interface, and then go to sleep at night and that transitions into the UW1 dream intro sequence. But yeah that may or may not actually happen, just an idea at this point. And I'll have to go check out Serious Sam, I think I played it a little bit way back when but don't remember much about it.
Anyway thanks for the feedback, and I'll look into the misspells and font issues.
I'm going to take a break from this for a bit. So much still to learn and try, this project is months away from completion. I'm going to take the skills I've gained so far and throw together a smaller easier game so at least I can say I've released something
Actually I started it a few days ago so it's about half done already.
Hope your project is going well, I see you haven't posted any update yet.
Oh and about a week ago I took the time to play through UW1 and UW2, just as a refresher. Wow, they seemed so much more epic back then. Games these days can be so huge, these look kinda small and clunky by comparison. Still, good memories, and makes me interested to see your take on following the plot of UW3. I started reading through the design document for that.
