Shop Item Listing

Is there a way for a shop to display the stats of an item prior to you buying it? For instance, in the game I'm working on the shop has about 45 different weapons types with unique statistical bonuses. This is all a moot point if the shop doesn't display the weapon stats.

I suppose I could put the key bonuses in the item description, but I would prefer to fill that space with cool flavor text.

I suppose the other option is for the game to come with a text file spreadsheet of all the weapons and their various bonuses. That would be pretty old school.

Any ideas?

You pretty much covered the options. One other suggestion, though: have the items on display at the shop and allow the player to examine them. This adds flavor as well as allowing you to display as much info as you want.

You can also use the NPC-tells-you-about-stuff approach, but that always seemed a little hokey to me.

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Mega Tact v1.1
Super Penguin Chef
Wizard Blocks

Don't forget about custom menus and slices.

I'm pretty sure you can do anything with custom menus and slices - if you're willing to put the work into it.

For something like this it may not be worth it.

Yeah, I did the spreadsheet thing for Tales 1, and I plan on including it in Tales 2 as well. I think it is helpful for the user to be able to sort equipment either by stat bonus OR by who can use it, which spreadsheets make easy.

In Tales 2, the custom menu system is used for all shops, allowing a lot more flexibility, but I'll admit to you right away that it's not particularly fun to put together. I would never have done it if I wasn't using a custom item system to begin with.

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I am Srime

This sounds interesting, but I'm not sure exactly what you mean, or how this could be accomplished. Would you elaborate?



Yeah. I'm hesitant to get involved with that. This project is ambitious enough already without trying to develop new scripting skills too.



This seems like the route I'm going to end up doing. The problem is, people don't ever read game documentation. Hmmm.

I really want to have some kind of equipment stat display in shops as a default built-in feature. I just haven't gotten around to trying yet...

I think what he means is, you'd place npc's representing the items in the store, on the shelves at the store.


I drew a picture to help show what I'm talking about.

This is an excellent idea. Thank you for the helpful image. Unfortunately, my stores are several vending machines containing nearly 50 items each. Meaning that it wouldn't be terribly practical in this case.

I'll file that way for future use though.

You have gun vending machines? That may be the worst idea ever conceived of by man.

Anyway, Spoonweaver's diagram was spot on. Unfortunately, there's not much you can do with your vending machines.

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Mega Tact v1.1
Super Penguin Chef
Wizard Blocks

You could use custom menus to do this. It's very complicated, though, and would take a lot of effort.

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My website, the home of Motrya:
http://www.jshgaming.com

I disagree. There's an easy way to do this with custom menus: put the textbox IDs into the menu item extras.



That's off the top of my head, so it's not necessarily 100% correct, but that's the general idea.

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Mega Tact v1.1
Super Penguin Chef
Wizard Blocks

Assuming you want the custom menu to be the vending machine itself, the scripts to control buying would be a bit of a pain, especially if you want the player to be able to buy more than one at a time. Once you get it set up properly though, it could work for any vending machine. I'm sure we could help you set this up.

One other thing that sucks about doing things this way is that you'll need to make all of your shops menues, necessitating a lot of back and forth between the menu editor and the item editor to see what itemIDs you want to sell, their value, etc. And you'll want some simple way to keep track of what textboxes belong to what items - in Tales 2 I set off an entire block of 256 text boxes just for this purpose, so that they'd be easily callable from a script. This is very helpful if you plan on having a large game that uses various vending machines throughout.

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I am Srime

I made this mockup with the slice collection editor (here is the slice file)

My idea is that we could simply list the stat bonuses in the empty space on the right panel.

Now, here is the nifty bit.

The right and left arrow keys don't actually do a danged thing in the shop right now, you just use the up and down arrow keys to scroll through the list. I could make it so when you press right while you have an equippable item selected, the cursor jumps over to the right panel, and focuses on the stat bonus. Then you can use the up and down arrows to scroll through the list of stat bonuses, which would usually be short, but could sometimes be longer than would fit on the screen.

Not only that, while browsing the stat bonuses, we could show a little +3 or -2 or whatever on top of the heroes who are allowed to equip the item (as compared to their current equipment's stat bonuses)

...Oh yeah, I also forgot I wanted to squeeze in a display of how many of the selected item you already own.

This is rapidly getting over my head. Keep up the dialogue, I'll read a bit about slices and custom menus this week and hopefully make some sense of both these ideas.