A lot of small victories

So, last post was kind of a cry for help and while I did get reactions on Twitter, I have not yet been bale to have the scene management my way. I'm going to let that rest for a moment and revisit that when I feel like it and focus on some of the other things I need. More specific, I focussed on the health system inventory and the inventory for characters.

For the health system, I dreamt up a simple class that tracks current values and maximum values for health, fatigue and oxigen. There's a couple of methods to get the values, edit them, and make calculations to find out how far the respective bar should be filled when I implement it. I have the code for the bars on the shelf from my older iteration of this game and I'll add the oxigen to the mechanics for when the player is under water (so later). 

It is nice though to have a little thing under my belt after the scene problems. It makes the project go on. Always nice to have things that you know are going to be alright to keep the pace and help motivating, because I might not look it, but I'm human after all, and that is what seems to work with us.

Another thing that I made is the framework for the inventory system that I can use with both the player and NPC's (and maybe even things like chests and cupboards). Any inventory holds only two fields: an amount of coins and a list of objects. That's what a certain inventory can be. It then has a number of methods to control the amount of coins and to add, remove and find objects, plus a number of methods to exchange stuff with another inventory, like selling, buying and finding out if either of the inventories has enough money to buy an object that the other one may or may not have.

While that all is kind of theoretical, I wanted to implement something practical, so I got the inventory to get to work.You see this shiny red ball right in front of you? Take a look at it and see the crosshair focus and change shape as you get closer. When you get close enough, there'll be a message that you can pick up the ball and when you press E, you pick it up. That entails adding it to the inventory, setting it inactive in the scene and showing some message in the GUI. 

Now that I picked up the ball, and I am able to pick up other things (I'll wait a bit before I implement other interaction types), I can start working on the inventory display to show that I have something. Another thing is implementing the healthbar and fatigue bar and then I'll start working on the minimap. If I have that, I'll have most features that I had in the older game, but then better structured.

Glad to have something to cheer about now. I'm sure I can fix the problem I had this weekend.