[Ohrrpgce] SVN: james/10345 Add mouse support to targetting attacks in battles.

Wed Apr 11 09:37:31 PDT 2018

On Wed, Apr 11, 2018 at 8:30 AM, Ralph Versteegen <teeemcee at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Wow, we're really here! Remarkable!
>
> Been doing some testing...
>
> Unfortunately if there are multiple overlapping enemies it can be hard or
> impossible to target all of them with the mouse. I can't think of any
> practical solution to this; I guess games just need to be designed around
> mouse controls, and existing games may need modification.
>

What if I made it so left click that collides with more than one enemy
while targetting would pop up a menu listing their names?

I might also want to add another optional targetting mode? It could pop up
obscuring part of the screen and show a list of all valid targets. It would
have appropriate keyboard controls too. I think the current targetting
handler is already clean enough that it wouldn't take too much cleanup to
separate it out, and add an editor option to pick which mode you want to
use.

> Another concern is showing an X when hovering over untargetable enemies
> that are totally invisible (for fake scripting purposes). Showing the Xs is
> a nice feature, but could sometimes look bad. Another example being pieces
> of a large boss sprite composed from multiple enemies. Maybe we should add
> an enemy bitset to stop it from showing.
>

Oh, that was sort of a debugging thing that I forgot to remove.

I could add both an enemy bitset and a global toggle. Also it is not just a
display thing, since clicking on an untargetable enemy does nothing as
opposed to clicking on an empty space which cancels targetting

> Any ideas for a way to pause battle? Maybe double-right-clicking?
>

I don't know. That would mean that right-click to cancel might need a delay
attached to it.

Or... what about clicking on the ready meters? That is pretty intuitive,
but maybe it would need to be an optional thing?

>
> I thnk that maybe would be good to allowing just clicking on a target
> directly without having to select an option from the battle menu, and have
> it just use the selected attack. (That is, if the hero battle menu is
> selected and you click anywhere off the menu, select the current battle
> menu option, or the last attack that was cancelled, and then process the
> mouse click.) For two reasons: it's a bit annoying to have to click the
> basic Attack option (which is the initial selection), and because it's easy
> to accidentally cancel an attack. At least, I seem to be constantly
> cancelling, for example when trying to toggle optional-spread but not
> dragging far enough.
>

Clicking directly on a target to confirm a main menu item sounds pretty
easy to do. I can try it. The only hard part is visual feedback of what is
happening.

>
> Right-dragging the mouse in the in-battle Items menu causes the menu to
> scroll by 3 rows for every one row that you drag the mouse.
>

That was intentional. I wanted the drag magnified because the menu list can
be really long-- but I could change or make it optional if it is a big
problem.

> Also, it's somehow possible to cause the hero to run away while you're in
> the Items menu and right-dragging. This happened to be about four times,
> but I can't figure out how to reproduce this now.
>
> I have a hunch, I'll check it out.

> I notice an inconsistency: In the OOB Items menu you can right-click an
> item to select it (eg to see the description). (Save/load also let you
> right-click to select) But in the in-battle Items menu (and all other
> menus), right clicking just closes.
>

I can fix that, thanks for spotting it.

> Also, I notice a bug in the OOB Items screen (one I've noticed and
> mentioned before, but with keyboard controls, and it was much harder
> reproduce it): selecting an item and then dropping it, with the mouse,
> rather often (50% of the time) causes either that item slot or another one
> immediately adjacent to it, to appear selected, although it isn't. In other
> words, the set_plank_state state of a plank gets incorrectly set. IIRC,
> with keyboard controls I saw this happen when swapping two item slots.
>

I haven't seen this, but I can look for it.

> Relatedly: in the Items and Spells menus, both in and out of battle, it
> turns out that it's kind of annoying that double-clicking to select an item
> only works if it's not already selected, because if it is then the first
> click selects and the second uses or deselects is (This is an oversight in
> the control scheme I suggested) In the in-battle menus it's a problem
> because the first click of the double-click will use a selected
> item/attack, and the second click happens once the menu has been closed,
> resulting in an unintended click on a target or off a target (cancelling).
>

Nothing anywhere is ever a double-click, just a click, and then another
click on something that is already focused. Double-clicks are pretty
painful to do accurately on a touch screen, so I had been avoiding them
entirely, but I understand why it seems like a double click is happening.

I am not sure how to fix.

> Also, I found a bug in the load screen: if (when it comes up when you load
> an .rpg file) you click EXIT and then immediately move the mouse, so that
> by the time the screen fades out the mouse is no longer over the EXIT
> button, then instead of quitting, a new game is loaded! musingly I
> consistently moved the mouse like this every time, and couldn't understand
> how it could be completely broken.
>

I'll check it out. I type my rpg filename on the command-line 99.9% of the
time, and I frequently forget that the browser in game even exists  ;)

>
> On 11 April 2018 at 10:33, James Paige <Bob at hamsterrepublic.com> wrote:
>
>> This feels pretty nice so far, but some more testing will be needed to
>> see what improvements might be needed.
>>
>> On Tue, Apr 10, 2018 at 3:30 PM, <subversion at hamsterrepublic.com> wrote:
>>
>>> james
>>> 2018-04-10 15:30:46 -0700 (Tue, 10 Apr 2018)
>>> 355
>>> Add mouse support to targetting attacks in battles.
>>> Click once to change target.
>>> Click on an already-selected target to confirm the attack.
>>> Right-click to cancel targetting
>>> Click outside of any target to cancel targetting
>>> Clicking on an invalid target plays the cancel noise and does nothing
>>> A short left-drag (anywhere) toggles optional spread targetting
>>> ---
>>> U   wip/battle_udts.bi
>>> U   wip/bmod.rbas
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Ohrrpgce mailing list
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>>
>>
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