Which one is that

Alright. I think I have the basics for the actions panel working now. It's sort of an inventory UI within an inventory UI.  Of course I wanted to make it work, but I especially wanted to really get how it does myself without referring to the tutorial that I mentioned a couple of months ago too much.  I think I do now.

I do see that my game needs some refactoring soon and while that most certainly is not the most inspiring nor the nicest thing to do, I'll have to get it over with now that my work does not cause issues that are difficult to repair yet. So probably, I won't be making much new stuff for a couple of days and focus on that.

While I do that, it does not hurt to think about small but important design things. The one I'm thinking about now is how to show an object is selected. I might have 3 identical warriors standing side by side and select one. Now what?

The selection panel with the actions thing, it will tell me I have a warrior selected, but it will not tell which one. For that I had a selection box around the warrior and that works fine, but it looks weird and crowded when selecting more than one unit at the same time, so I'll drop it in favour of some other visual cue.

I notice that nobody seems to like the box, so that is nice. I do have three options to consider:

• An object at the feet of the selected guy. This one looks nice, but only in units, because buildings and resources (the other kinds of objects that are selectable) don't really have feet.
• Something above the unit, like with The Sims. Problem here is that it might well be just like the box I had. If there are multiple units together nearby and I select one or two, it becomes hard to see which one is selected,  especially with the health bar prominently at that place anyway.
• Something in the object itself. This one is hardest to implement , because while the other two are really just turning on and off an object, here there must be more active work and it might need to be different for every object. I could try if I can draw a line around it. I just hope it doesn't make a box mess then.

Now that I consider it, I lean a bit towards a thing at the feet,  with something special for non-units. It's actually good to have differences here, because buildings, units and resources play a different role in the game. I also have to think about the fact that selecting enemy units should be different too. Enough work now.

The bus is almost at the office.  I have get ready to leave.  Have a nice day!