Potion Creation Screen

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lgromanowski
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Potion Creation Screen

Post by lgromanowski »

Greendogo wrote: I think we can make the potion creation process less strenuous by having an effect filter. You have a four column box somewhere on the potion screen that has all the effects that you can see from your ingredients and your alchemy level* in the second column.
*effects you see are limited by your alchemy level

At the top of the second column are a right and left arrow. The left column contains effects you want to filter in and the right is the effects you want to definitely exclude.

Now, for most potions it would be simple enough to just find restore health and include it and you would be good to go provided you have two different ingredients with the effect. However, if two of your ingredients have restore health and they both have drain fatigue you'll have a negative effect. But you have a third ingredient that has restore health and does NOT have drain fatigue. Well, now you have a simple way to add one with fatigue drain and the other one without, thus eliminating the negative effect from your potion easily without searching through a hundred different ingredients.

On the other hand, if you want to use only three ingredients, but want three different effects, you can easily search through all of your ingredients to find each ingredient that each has two of the three effects. For example, ingredient one has A and B, ingred 2 has B and C, and ingred 3 has effects C and A. You could always do this in vanilla Morrowind, but now it would be a lot easier.

Here is a visual illustration of how this effects box would look:
Image
*Note: I didn't include a resulting ingredient because I don't know of an ingredient off the top of my head that would satisfy the requirements.
Here, the effect for "Water Walking" is included and the effect for "Drain Fatigue" is excluded. Only the ingredients that fit that description would show up in the "Ingredients" column, which is just a fancy way of saying "Search Results". There is one thing that I didn't mention above: If you Include/Exclude an effect, only effects that are on items that satisfy the previous Include/Exclude requirements would show up. This way you know right away what other effects you're dealing with when picking out multi-effect ingredients.
Chris wrote: This would end up kind of a cheat, I think. If you don't have a high skill in alchemy, certain effects from items will be hidden from you. If you could just click to include/exclude certain effects, you could find out what effects an item has even though your character wouldn't know, thus making the "discovery" of an item's effects a moot point.

Maybe if the include/exclude only worked off of the effects your character knows about, it could work. But it definitely shouldn't be influenced by the unknown effects.
Greendogo wrote:
Chris wrote:zoop
Yes, this was the plan. I mention it in the first paragraph. ;) If you don't limit based on the alchemy level, the system wouldn't just be smoother, it would be a cheap hack.

Edit: To be more precise, here's the line I'm talking about:
Greendogo wrote:You have a four column box somewhere on the potion screen that has all the effects that you can see from your ingredients and your alchemy level in the second column.
Edit 2: I changed the first line to better reinforce my intent.
nicolay wrote: What I know for sure is that we need to do _something_ with the alchemy screen. This is one of those things I wouldn't mind improving before 1.0 (not necessarily with your system, I mean the alchemy screen in general.) The interface for making potions is one of the most clumsy in the game, and it's one of the things you do a lot too.
Greendogo wrote: Here's some primitive pseudo-code for this behavior:
Starting from empty Include/Exclude matrix
1. Check Ingredient's Available -> Make list of All Ingredient Effects
2. Check Alchemy Level -> Eliminate from the effects list all the effects that you shouldn't see based on your level.
3. Display all effects in the resulting list

Now you make your selections:
[Include]/(Exclude) effect A -> Eliminate all ingredients that [don't have]/(have) effect A from list
Display updated list.
[Include]/(Exclude) effect B -> Eliminate all ingredients that [don't have]/(have) effect B from that list
Display updated list.
Choose appropriate ingredient.

===Addendum===
I think it would be necessary to also include a "Reset" button to the Include/Exclude at the top between the left and right arrows so that it is easy to start all over again if you want separate effects in the potion.

Edit:
nicolay wrote:snip
I agree. I want an effects sorting system, so if no one else wants to put it in, I'll end up doing it anyway. :roll: But if anyone else has any other ideas, then this is the thread to post them!
sir_herrbatka wrote: And I have no freaking idea why there is no button with big "Create as much potions as you can!" Why I have to keep clicking like crazy just to create 100 new potions?

And I would prefer something like Alchemy Commander - split screen with ingredients with selected effect on left and the rest of ingredients on right. Click on wanted ingredient to add, click on create potion to create potion, shift+click on create potion to create as many potions as you can.
raevol wrote: I think the trick would be to have the ingredients you are carrying available in the main potion window. Having to go to a separate dialog to select them is irritating. If they were all sitting there in a pane and you just clicked the ones you want and they were added to the current potion, that'd be much quicker.
sir_herrbatka wrote: Agreed. OTOH Mortar and your whole alchemical set can be hidden under button - I never, ever wanted to change mortar or alembic. In fact I never carried more than one set at once.
Greendogo wrote:
sir_herrbatka wrote:Agreed. OTOH Mortar and your whole alchemical set can be hidden under button - I never, ever wanted to change mortar or alembic. In fact I never carried more than one set at once.
Yes, that's a very good point! It would save space on the GUI
sir_herrbatka wrote: So I just sketched up something.
http://img137.imageshack.us/my.php?imag ... screen.png

-Red: all ingredients (or maybe unselected ingredients).
-Blue: selected ingredients (filtered the way greendogo mentioned or in a simpler manner).
-Yellow: chosen ingredients, and maybe alchemical set icon on the left.
-Green: magic effects and maybe potion name at the top.

More or less this is my idea for the interface. ;-)
frost wrote: It would also be cool to have the ability to save recepies for future reuse (recepies that match available ingredients are highlited in a special way) and 'select one of N previously boiled potions' menu.
sir_herrbatka wrote: Recipes should be stored on the ingredients list(?).
Greendogo wrote: It would be interesting to see all of our ideas designed into the potion screen without being overly cumbersome. Anybody out there willing to come up with a streamlined implementation?

To be honest, I tried doing it myself, but I couldn't get it neat and concise enough to post. I literally have 4 drawings that look like a complete mess and a diagram that stopped making sense a long time ago sitting here on my computer.

On top of my private disaster here, there are still other features that would be a boon to a potion maker. The stuff we've discussed here is only a fraction of the potential improvements we could think of. If anyone has any new ideas, speak up. If we could find a few major changes that we all strongly react to, then we could probably see a larger picture of what is really important in potion design.
Star-Demon wrote: Reduce you desires to bulletpoints and we take an N number of the most favorite ones.

Or, we do a voting system I was introduced to...

Vote round one put as many bulletpoint you want.

Round two you get only one.

Take the winners.
sir_herrbatka wrote: Ok, let's get back to this.

From the top to the bottom:

Dual screen (total commander like) view
Right = all available ingredients + all saved recipes at the beginning of the list
Left = selected (somehow by filter) items + recipes that we can create at the moment at the beginning of the list

Click on the item to add to recipe, click on recipe to... aaaaaaaaaaaarhhhg. This is oblivious.

Alchemical apparatus under single button. Right next to it ingredients in one row.

Name of the potion field | Create potion | Create potions (press to select how many potions you want to try to create) | Save recipe | cancel

that's my idea.
Hircine wrote:


Click on the item to add to recipe, click on recipe to... aaaaaaaaaaaarhhhg. This is oblivious.
you mean obvious?
sir_herrbatka wrote: :oops:

Don't ever trust spellchecker. ;-)

PS
i'm not sure if the create potion and create potions is the right solution. Maybe it should be one button "Create" and you will be able to create as many potions as you can by holding shift while pressing it. If you want to create less potions you should not add all ingredients. Advantages: more MW like + more slick look OTOH it would be more clicking.
sir_herrbatka wrote: One more thing.

I guess that filter is not so effective when there is plenty of magic effects. Although it works good in KDE file managers it won't work well in potion creation screen.

IMHO it would be better to have a option to press right mouse button over any ingredients to move that ingredient and all ingredients with at least one common effect with that ingredient to the left panel.

Right mouse button on left panel over ingredient to remove that ingredient. Should work fair.
Hircine wrote: i don't see why we can't have a potion screen that works like oblivion's one.
less clicking to search for compatible ingredients.
but perhaps better with recipe saving or something.
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