http://download.blender.org/documentati ... ers_ui.pdf
It had some great ideas and quotes. It made me start thinking about how these ideas could be incorporated into a game. That's when I realized Lugaru had incorporated several of them.
Since I didn't see discussion about the user-interface blogpost in the first page, I decided to create a new thread for my musing about the modality of Lugaru's user interface.These plagiarized and butchered quotes are originally from Jef Raskin (The Humane Interface):
"A human-machine interface is modal when (1) the current state of the interface is not the user's locus of attention AND (2) the interface will execute one among several different possible responses to the gesture, depending on the system's current state."
The same button is used to crouch, sneak, roll away, to roll in air, to land softly, to evade attacks, to initiate animal run and to initiate counters. While I enjoyed this three button configuration (attack, jump, tricky stuff) immensely, after reading the article I can see why evasion and at least SOME counters have to be controlled separately. It shouldn't be possible to accidentally attack when you tried to evade.“We cannot pay attention to both system state (in or out of fight) and our task at the
same time, which leads to performing a gesture appropriate to one mode/situation (grabbing an enemy's leg) while we are actually in another mode/situation (trying to roll away from a group of enemies). "
There's at least one more instance where shift doesn't de-escalate or protect you from harm. Pressing shift when you are about to land will cause you to smash into a rock, face-first!, not roll away unharmed as I expected.
If shift was changed to react into jump ending, it should also affect wall-jumping. Press shift to land feet-forward, and then jump to launch away, +direction keys to affect directions, +attack to change it into a wall-kick. It should also be possible to do a wall-jump straight from Leg Cannon, or at least a little counter-move that leaves you standing instead of on your back.
This is also why the holding down of an attack key was so useful: you didn't have to pay attention to WHEN you'd attack, you just decide that you will attack as soon as possible.“We cannot pay attention to both system state and our task at the same time."
Perhaps an attack that has been "readied" for a while would be automatically executed when an enemy is close enough. The benefit would be balanced by 1) the lower damage and 2) by the long time it takes to initiate an attack and the wait until it reaches the auto-hit stage. You couldn't just spam the auto-attack in a battle; instead, it would be situational. An example of a situation where it would make sense would be sneaking behind an enemy to perform an insta-kill. It's the sneaking that's supposed to be hard, not the ability to choose between a punch and a stranglehold!
Happened to me a lot in Lugaru.For me, Leg Cannon (Direction+attack+jump) became really intuitive, but changing into animal run always felt a bit awkward, especially when I was trying to quickly get away from the middle of a fight. Perhaps a direction+attack+shift could be used instead, or in addition to, the shift+direction+unshift system. On the other hand, attacks are already changing into attack+direction+unattack, so there.
One Overgrowth concept I haven't yet heard about is the ability to pick up items. Spesifically, how it works with the new attack (grab) button. Will Grab have shift-key's countermoves and q-key's weapon functions from Lugaru, or will there be a separate key for interacting with items or weapons? Since the former would be impossible to just get a knife in mid-fight, I guess it's the latter. In that case, how many weapon buttons are necessary? Q and E worked well enough and covered everything that Lugaru needed, but that's still two buttons for just four actions: picking up a weapon (q), throwing a dagger (q), dropping a weapon (shift+q) and sheathing/swapping a weapon (e).
The theory is very interesting. I'm sure you (the Wolfire team) are already familiar with some of the concepts, but I wasn't, and since I was making this thought exercise anyway there was no reason not to share it with you.