GUI Casting

More timely update this time! Here’s a screen shot of the new GUI system we just finished up in time for the weekend. The player has three pre-made spells they may cast at any time during the game, depicted as the three slots on top of the bottom large one – the spell book of marks the player currently knows.

The GUI supports full drag and drop between the spell book and each spell. You can drag around marks within spells to re-arrange them and even from one spell to another. When dragging a mark around, it will snap to valid places it can be dropped, giving the player visual feedback about where valid drop points are. Dragging a mark to an invalid spot deletes it from the spell.

Spell casting is achieved simply by pressing the left mouse button – this casts the currently active spell. The player may switch the active spell to one of the three spells with the right mouse button, cycling from left to right. This will probably be bound to the number keys 1,2 and 3 later for fast switching. As of right now there isn’t any way to tell which spell you have selected, which sucks. We will probably place a glow around the spell box of the active one or somesuch once we get UI art.

You may be wondering what the lone propel (thick black arrow pointing right) mark is doing. Well, I’m actually dragging that one around in the screen shot, but for some reason my mouse didn’t get captured with the print screen. The faded question mark runes appear on the ends of spells when you start dragging and disappear when you stop. The idea is to give the player visual hints where obvious places are to drop the rune currently being drug around. We give a little tolerance behind the scenes though, just dropping a mark quickly from your spell book to an empty spot in a spell will automatically place it at the end of the spell – so you don’t have to drop it exactly on the question mark rune.