Re: [Adonthell-devel] User interface open items

[Michał Kaliński]

I think we shouldn't go out of our way to hide characters in rooms
other than the player. In a few games I played that did this, I found
the constantly appearing and disappearing objects annoying. It serves
little purpose in a general RPG. If someone really wants to do so (for
a stealth sequence or something), they could do that using scripts.

I'd be reluctant to make speech bubbles a part of normal rendering
process. It could possibly lead to weird results, like partially
obscured bubbles going through walls. Maybe not, I don't know much
about the renderer's internals. Still, bubbles are a gui element and
not a map object.

As for character visibility - maybe it could be determined as feedback
from the renderer? For every placeable it renders, it could set a
"visible" property every cycle. Of course it's probably a bad idea
that breaks encapsulation and good coding rules. Alternatively the
script that schedules npc conversation could use a similar algorithm
as the renderer to determine whether to display the bubbles.

Another way would be to just check the character positions. It would
prevent hearing conversation from across the map and allow overhearing
in a natural way. I'm not sure about overhearing things across floors
- a bubble coming out of the floor or ceiling could be confusing for
the player. Perhaps it could be amended by a simple check whether
there's a solid object between characters in z dimension.

I'd like to ask - will the speech bubble (and similar gui elements
written in python) become a part of core engine (which has no python
scripts as of now) or some sort of run time package?