LE REQUEST: INVENTORY Re-Design Based on 3D Char Portrait

[NexusMan77]

Anybody who played Dungeon Master for Bard's Tale, or any of the old classics, will remember the 2D paper character and if you clicked on your sword icon, you could put a new sword in it instantly. It was slick. It was hip. It was so 1970's. Now game designers want to do everything the hard way, make menu navigation like a journey across Skyrim's complex mountainous terrain, filled with potholes and pits and pit vipers. It's ludicrous to have the best game ever made to be so backwards compatible to the very industry that created it. Those Bard's Tale games paved the way. Today, the designers sit in their tombs with a toilet plunger stuck to their faces as they contemplate, with both hands tied to their chair, the pressing question of our day: "How can we make UI design so unweildy and uncomfortable for PC users that they will throw away their PC's to buy the redundant consoles with their tired and weary controllers, forsaking all expediency, in the name of allowing us, Bethesda, to make the very most amount of cash possible????" No, I'm not a conspiracy theorist.... I'm just angry at the designers who made an Inventory system so stupid as this in the most advanced, awesome RPG ever made.

 

So how would this work in today's Skyrim if I could see the Mod created by you tireless mod-makers and geniuses who are there to forsake the almighty dollar in the quest to upgrade these games for only the honorable mention of your names?

Here's how ....

 

You TAB-Right-Click your Inventory... a huge full screen portrait of your character appears in 3D with clickable buttons laid out in a completely square array for head, arms, hands, feet, waist, legs, body, neck, etc etc ....

 

Your cursor starts by highlighting the word at the top "Text mode" in case you want to look through it the way the game does it now. If not, you click the arrow keys (or WASD or arrow keys on the PC) to move your cursor to the item you want to study. Every clickable body part falls on even gridlines so the console versions can rapidly move to the proper body part without having to do complex gyrations (think about the messed up Perks system how it can't go 45 degrees, so you end up moving up and down and left and right and flying off onto other Perk trees entirely just trying to nail down that one perk you want to read about, it's atrocious) ... so every body part fits on a square grid, left right up and down. The grid-click control is very sensitive and rapid. You can get to the feet icon in milliseconds and click on it.

 

At this point, every possible item that can interact with the feet shows up. If you can't wear an item without enormous penalties due to not having that speciality (like heavy armor), its sorted to the bottom, everything you can use is at the top. It's then further sorted alphabetically. All the items have been renamed to make sorting easier, to something like Meat, Raw - Meat, Cooked - Meat, Burnt ..... and thus tend to cluster. (If you are trying to eat something, you can click on the icon of your mouth to see your food items.) Items are further identified by date of acquisition (in game dating) ... with green being for new items, blue for 10 days to 30 days .... and then white for everything beyond that ... Thus, all NEW items show up first in your inventory, the way you would WANT them to do... so you can identify them, study them, and do things with them immediately after finding them.

 

Say that you are changing weapons: You point your mouse and click on whatever hand you want to fit the weapon into. Immediately a list comes up with graphic in the 3-paned window beside the name and it is compared against what you are currently wearing so you can see the difference.

 

In the same Character Potrait Screen (for Inventory use), there are a number of additional icons, like a forge (for all the things relating to forging) and an alchemy icon (for alchemy items) and a 2nd icon next to your mouth for Potions. Every conceivable way to sort the object you possess graphically would be represented. You simply click the icon on your character that you are trying to modify and all the related items populate as mentioned above.

 

If you want spells, you click on your Spellbook icon near your hip. If you want to study Quest Items only, you click the Quest Icon ... There could easily be 20 to 40 icons on the screen surrounding your body parts, but they'd all be neatly arranged (this for the console versions) but on PC, you could just use your mouse to click the icon you want (say your head if you want to add a helmut or a circlet or some head adornment of any kind) ....

 

ALL OF THESE OPTIONS ARE MOUSE-DRIVEN FOR THE PC, so you can immediately click on what you're looking for instantly, no need for the slower console method on PC, but even on the console THIS method would be far faster than the current one.

 

So how does it work in a nutshell ? Like this:

 

I want to equip my new sword i just found. I click TAB and the 4-way window comes up, I push right for Inventory and the 3D paper character is displayed with all the icons for every possible avenue of interaction with my body or inventory parts. I use my mouse to instantly click my left arm. A window pops up showing 3 panes. The leftmost pane is all the text versions and the highlighted item is your current item, and your 3D character is displayed at his arm level showing the weapon behing held there in your hand. All new items a few days or newer are arranged first. Then alphabetically. Your least useful items to your character are at the bottom of the list. You can quickly click down on your WSAD's "S" key to go down and 2nd-highlight (a different color) on "New Sword of Awesome" which in itself already green from being considered "NEW" by the Inventory mod system having labelled it as such by its date. Immediately in the 3rd pane, you see what this new sword would look like in your hand as well as its bonuses and/or detriments as compared to your currently equipped item. If you desire to equip it, you can hit Enter or Double click the Mouse and the window drops down and the new item is now in it's place. If you wish, you can click TAB and you are back in the game, and all of this took about 6 seconds at most (for one item you know you want).

 

Using this, you can instantly find everything specific to each body part. No more choosing which Genre of Item to choose, scrolling through hundreds of items painstaikenly searching for that new item you just found whose name you've already forgotten and now it seems lost in your inventory somewhere right under your nose but you can't see it. All new items are changed to green. Items 10 days or older (in game) are blue ... the rest are white or as normal for your game.

 

If all of these icons still leave's you confused at to where the item is you can click "Text Mode" and scroll the Skyrim's default way. And to boot, at the bottom, the final icon is a ? (question mark) for doing a search based on a word you choose ... you just type "sword" and hit enter and that same 3-way Pane opens as before with everything about swords populated, only this time, when you actually hit Enter, it will pause to ask you "Which hand do you want this in?" and show the left icon and the right icon. You click the one you want, and you're done.

 

Games were using a simpler version of this same system back in the 1980's, but as as games advanced, game designers thought inventories needed to advance with them. They were wrong. This is still the most useful way to do RPG games, and its more fun to see your character that you're spending all your time developing in the window. I'm totally shocked to see ANY RPG of the current age NOT have a visual of your character you are spending all your time playing, so the only way to see your character is a zoomed out retarded 3rd-person method with no way to get up close and personal to see how it looks on your body and how it affects your character to equip it. This is one of the biggest flaws of Skyrim in my opinion. The only time you get to see your character is during character creation, and even that system is flawed and frustrating, and let's face it, you are so eager to play the game you don't really care what he looks like until 10 or 15 hours into the game anyway. By then, it's too late ... except for some face-changing mods that will come out eventually.

 

WE NEED A CHARACTER-DRIVEN INVENTORY THAT WORKS WITH MOUSE ....

[sssh2]

this is exactly what im looking for, any news on something like this in the works?