Chapter 3: Behind the veil

Good day, dear Viewers!

Today, the highlight of the program will again be "the already boring" Inventory UI. The lion's share of time is required to polish it and bring it to mind. I will explain why I do this and why I devote so much time to the slots, panels and other UI components.

Here you can see the part of my primitive math, which determines only the behavior of the LEFT EDGE of the panel(s), which determines its behavior based on many factors. With this image I wanted to demonstrate that sometimes seemingly tiny things can hide quite a bulky content.

The focus of the last few weeks (I was out sick the first week of the March, but I'm fine now) has been making the sidebars (Storage Panels) interactive: switchable and movable. A demo of this will be shown in this video.

Next, my task was to create additional panels, as well as organize their behavior when adding, hiding and closing, which are different things in this case. To refresh the concept once again: Main Panels (hereinafter referred to as "Panel") are the key parts of the Inventory and Equipment System. Since they are universal, the player will have the opportunity to personalize each panel in their own way. For example, the player creates a Panel where he places one Storage, in our case the Inventory, and makes the panel "exclusive" by pressing the button on the top part of the panel (with the "I" symbol), after which it becomes a "pure inventory" and contains only one Storage (which is essentially what an inventory is). Then the player can create another Panel with the "+" button, and also make it "exclusive", only this time for Bulk. In this way, you can use two panels to conveniently transfer items from the "world (Bulk)" to the inventory and vice versa. This is just one example of using multiple Panels. One Panel can also be used as a "single storage", and simply drag items between the Storage icons inside one Panel - they will go to other Storage if there is enough space (cells capacity) inside this Storage. I will show a demonstration of the full mechanics of interaction a little later, when all the mechanics of items and the cellular ("tetris") type of inventory are ready.

Logically, we come to the Storages themselves and their automatic arrangement. Once closed, the Panel places its Storages in the Reserve Panel, which will store them when the Inventory Window is open at the bottom of the screen, from where they can either be dragged to any Panel, or certain Storages will be automatically transferred to it if the icon with the letter "A" is enabled (number 1 in the image). Through this same icon, you can configure which Storages will be transferred to this panel, whether to make it exclusive after auto-transfer, and which of the four Side Panels to insert Storages into. You can see some of this functionality in the video, the link to which I will duplicate here.

I sincerely hope you are not upset with the current progress, because I'm really putting a lot of time into this system so that you will have the best experience when the project is ready for testing.

Thank you.
Absent.Dogma