[Adonthell-devel] User interface open items

[Kai Sterker]

Actually, for now lets start with one item only, the "speech bubble".

Like in the original Waste's Edge, we'll need an UI element to display
talk of NPCs amongst themselves and observations the player makes
about the gameworld. (I.e. looking at stuff). Since we haven't really
defined a style for the GUI, we can start with a simple, rectangular
box and update the visuals later.

Unlike v0.3, implementation should be on Python side, however. Also,
unlike v0.3, a time event should be used to close the bubble after a
certain duration (depending on amount of text displayed, I guess).

For the player gameworld remarks, the bubble needs to be displayed in
response to an action event. See here for details about those:

http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/adonthell-devel/2010-07/msg00000.html
and following.
http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/adonthell-devel/2010-08/msg00000.html


The real difficulty is with the NPC speech. In v0.3, where each room
was separate, it was not possible to see speech bubbles from NPCs that
were not in the same room. With the v0.4 map structure, if a NPC is on
the floor below or above, or inside a building while the player is
not, logically the NPC might still be on the same screen. Thus, any
speech bubble of his would be visible, even though it should remain
hidden.

I'm not sure how to solve this issue and whether a solution can be
limited to the speech bubbles only or needs to consider related issues
too. I.e. should characters in a closed room be visible to a player in
the same building, but outside the room? If we could determine
character visibility in general, we'd also know whether to display a
speech bubble of that character or not. (OTOH, it could be possible to
"overhear" characters in the next room talk, so clearly what's visible
and what's audible is not the same).

A simpler approach could be to add the speech bubbles to the normal
map rendering process. That way, they would be automatically hidden by
those mapobjects that also hide the NPC from the player's view.

Maybe there are other ideas? Suggestions?

Kai