Alchemy window task

[Chris]

I think Skyrim's improvements are great and should be be emulated. That would mean greying out ingredients that are known not to produce anything with the ones you've already picked for brewing. So there would be a behind the scenes list of tried combinations.

Problem with that is there's some fundamental differences with how Morrowind's alchemy works. In Morrowind, it's possible to fail at making a potion because of your skill/luck, not because it's a bad combination, and you implicitly know when a certain combination will produce an effect.

It does highlight a nasty flaw with MW's alchemy, though. Your alchemy skill determines what effects you know about an ingredient, but when you're in the alchemy screen and matching up ingredients, you magically know which combinations will produce what effects. What's the point in hiding the effects in the inventory if you still know them when working in the alchemy window? It just adds tedium as you select and deselect dozens of combinations of ingredients to find usable potions at low levels, instead of being able to quickly match them by looking at their list of effects and filtering the available list of ingredients based on the effects of already-selected ingredients.

[Lazaroth]

Hi,

I registered today to give some feedback on 0.15 and on this.

The main thing I wanted to say is that it looks good but has some margin problems.
- The ingredients go further to the right than the scrollbar.
- It looks a bit weird that the ingredients and the effects don't align at the top.
- Name is too far to the right.
- Chosen ingredients / apparatus windows should align better to the right with the big window below it. E.g. by adding more space between or resizing something.

[Lazaroth]

I did the changes I mentioned above (in 30 mins, because I was bored) to the alchemy window and thought I'd share them.
I don't know how to properly reference labels however and I don't know if it's allowed to even rename them, so that will most probably need to be fixed.

Old:
http://scrawl.bplaced.net/perm/alchemy2.png

New:
http://img209.imageshack.us/img209/64/alchemy.jpg

[Okulo]

Looks much tighter.

[scrawl]

It looks good, but you can't just add new labels or rename them because they won't have any translations. So we can't add any new gameplay-related labels until we have our editor. Only use the labels that reference a GMST ( ${someGMST} )

[Tarius]

I like that layout.

[Lazaroth]

Only use the labels that reference a GMST ( ${someGMST} )

Which is the part I have no clue how to do and need explained.

[scrawl]

example:

Code: Select all

./esmtool <path to morrowind.esm>  | grep GMST -B 3 -A 3 | grep ingred -i -B 3 -A 3

yields output:

Code: Select all

Record: GMST 'sIngredients'
  Value: 'Zutaten' (string)
  Dirty: 0

use in layout:

Code: Select all

<Property key="Caption" value="#{sIngredients}"/>

[Lazaroth]

Thanks, although will not work that good on Windows.
This however will:

Code: Select all

esmtool "c:/path/morrowind.esm" > output.txt

I fixed the GMST references, did some tweaks and removed a layout bug with the scrolling.

http://img593.imageshack.us/img593/7020/alchemy2.jpg


There are a couple of issues with the layout of other windows. Is this something I could take a look at?

[scrawl]

<Property key="Caption" value="#{sSelect} #{sIngredients}"/>

While this expands to "Selected ingredients" with the english ESM, you can't assume that it will produce a correct sentence with other languages. For example, in german it will say "Auswählen Zutaten" which is rubbish. I suggest to remove that label like I did in the original layout.

There are a couple of issues with the layout of other windows. Is this something I could take a look at?

Sure.

P.S. feel free to start a new thread.