Inventory Revamp

Although I have my exams coming up, I've hit an unusually productive streak of coding - I'm in the process of revamping the inventory completely to follow conventional roguelike standards and to enable full control via the keyboard as well as the mouse.

This is the new design at a glance:

Pressing the key associated with the inventory slot now displays a detailed description of the item (the same information as was presented previously via the mouseover):

I've also implemented multidrop (accesible by pressing d):

Here I selected three items to drop by pressing their associated keys. Pressing ENTER then drops all the items:
I'm also going to implement similar type of funationality for eating food ('e'), reading scrolls ('r') and drinking potions ('q'), as well as for wearing and removing jewellery, weapons and armour.

If you like mouse control, you'll be glad to know I've left in the current method for dragging-and-dropping items.

The New Inventory

This is the new inventory UI. It is still drag-and-drop, but now when you mouse-over an item, its full details and description (if known) are displayed. Also if you mouse over an item in the backpack, the appropriate slot on the equipped list is highlighted. To drop an item, drag it onto the drop icon on the bottom right (I'm not quite satisfied with this being the only way to drop items as it currently is, so I'll probably implement a 'drop' command).

The Orange Item is an Artifact. Artifacts are the most powerful items in the game. Standard non-magical items are white, minor magical items (if known) are green, more powerful ones are blue and then purple. Unidentified items will always appear in white. Potions have a colour scheme of their own. Cursed items (if known) are red.

Yes, the colour scheme is very World of Warcraft-ey. It works. Why not use it?

Progress Report #6

Well, its been quite a while since the last one of these posts, hasn't it? (June last year in fact.) Although I've been busy doing other things for the last week, I've managed to get a few bug fixes into the code, and did some behind the scene coding on the targeting system.

But now I have a decision to make. Here is the current inventory screen:

My question is this: What is the best way of implementing "Drop Item" functionality? Currently, items can be picked from the main game window by pressing 'g'. Items are then worn/wielded etc by dragging and dropping (via the mouse) on the inventory screen (which itself is accessed via the 'i' key. But dropping items? Many Roguelikes have a separate interface for dropping items, but I'm not sure I want to go down that route. I do want however to keep the interface as simple as possible. Thoughts?

Things from Roguelikes that would be useful in real-life #1: "Cotton Socks of Ooze Slaying"

I was playing about with item generation code earlier, and I found this unexpected item, which appears to particularly useful in case our brave little '@' is ever attacked by giant mutant verrucas or something :

This is an artifact of the way items will be generated in Kharne. Just like in MMORPGs, there are different "quality levels" of items, from Junk Items such as broken dolls that are there mainly for flavour through Common items like your standard short sword, through increasing powerful magical items all the way up to Epic and Artifact Items. Magical items have got certain "enchantments" placed upon them, and these enchantments are (in most cases) randomly generated. In the above case, the socks have two enchants on them - one of increasing AC (which worn items tend to have), and increased damage against oozes(!). The code at the bottom, "]27ENCH_ACENCH_SLAYOOZE" is used as a unique identifier for stacking purposes.

Does anyone else have any examples of similar useful items?

(incidentally, the above screenshot shows the current state of the inventory screen with graphics turned ON. At the moment I'm aware it breaks one of the rules in my previous posting - that of keyboard and mouse equivalence -being heavily drag-and-drop based; any released version will have much better keyboard control functionality, of course)