Hey All

So you may be wondering what I've been up to for the last 4 months or so, and I'll post all about that very soon! v0.3.3 has required a lot of general housekeeping work including improving the player inventory system to function nicely with world state saving, scripting and controls. As a result, it became a good opportunity to also squeeze in weapon switching and custom HUDs.

Here's the design I have -- please feel free to comment and criticize -- especially if it looks like it won't carry ideas for carts you'd like to make soonish.

Here's an example HUD that shows a single player carrying more than one weapon (switchable with Q/E or shoulder buttons):

The basic idea is to add an animation to INV_ITEM similar to the ones that exist now for arcade weapons, but to allow adding any inventory item to the hud, including things like potions that are activated with an alternative button, or temporary pickups like the score multiplier.

The items only have limited information about how they are to be displayed up top -- the layout happens mostly automatically. But certain common item meanings (score, life, player head) are tagged as such to help make a sensible layout.

The layout is performed in single player by separating elements into up to 3 groups and aligning then left, then right then center. Multiplayer layout is similar, but elements are squashed together and layed out per-player.

The goal here is to provide a simple way to make inventories for common genres, without requiring lua scripting or a lot of work doing layouts that work both in 1P & 2P. Later on, fancy HUD requirements can be taken care of in Lua scripts (more on that shortly!).

So, the steps to make a custom HUD will be:

1. Add (or alias) any inventory items (INV ITEM) that the player should start with. // e.g. start with a bow and 8 arrows
2. Add animations to inventory items that should be shown in the HUD
3. Tag some inventory items as having a special meaning: score, lives

It will still be possible to use the old arcade HUD that you're all familiar with, but not to mix-and-match the two systems.

So, here's the question -- are there any simple HUDS you'd like to use that don't seem to work with a scheme like this?

Here are some examples that I think will be ok:

Doom: Score, life, current weapon & ammo
Bomberman, Bloot: Player heads with points won in a single row
RPG: armour & weapon, MP, HP, Gold
Adventure: List of collected objects
Scrolly Shooter: lives, score, panic bombs // lives logic not yet implemented

could there be an exp bar and level up logic too?

other than that, seems fine to me

Good question. It would be possible to show exp and level in the hud, but not to do the level-up logic. This reminds of a shelved inventory idea that might be useful and quite general -- allowing n of an inventory item to be replaced by a single more valuable one. e.g. collect 4 apple quarters and end up with an apple.

The other side to this is that modifiers should be triggered according to the number of items carried (in this case, level number). This is something I'll see about adding soon as it looks like it will be useful in other cases too -- the one that springs to mind is showing more arrows on the back of the archer in the Bowman cart.

OMG! I am so paranoid that this is all an April Fools trick!!!!

Well if it isn't I would like to ask:
will there be a separate attribute like command that can scan exactly how much bullets you have in a specific weapon? So I can make a quiver in the back of a character change when they have a specific amount of arrows?

Also I am having a problem with a specific cartridge : here
I don't know why but I can't upload it, and when i tried the first time it prevented me from accessing the Lexaloffle webstite completely, for a whole month. I had to upload Point Crash 2.0 in March when it was due in February.

I have been messing with multiplier controllers lately, and notice that players HUD for 2 players looks same as for 3 players. Meaning that it seems that HUD for P2 is overlapping HUD for P3. So been able to manually adjust that would be nice.

it is not an april fools joke, I saw his vine about it 5 days ago.

thankfuly at least here were safe from april fools jokes

Cool.
I like it

hey great progress zep, i aint been on thee ol bbs in awhile, looks like alot more can happen with these options. Is it possible with this to have power, say, a car full of petrol that runs out? or a powered up magic item which wears out but needs replenishing?

just a thought :)

Ehm... I just swapped over from an old version (1 year ago or more), and I wonder if there is no more music ingame?

In my old version (that is overwritten now) there was music ingame and while navigating through the menu. oO

What about a button that takes you to an inventory screen like from the old legend of Zeldas? Aside from that, I'm very excited for customizable HUDs! I assume that means you can change the visual representations for health on your HUD and such as the like... Also! What about a lives system? ;)

zep, when is next update coming? I would be really happy if the id bug is gone, even if tis just that.