Guild of Writers

So I was mulling around ideas the other day and I struck upon one regarding items and storyline progression.

In Uru you can discover journals and notes, clicking on them picks them up, you're then presented with a GUI of sorts, in the case of notes it's a texture of said note, with journals it's the cover.

Now my idea was, what if there are clickable objects in the game, say in my office there is a pocket watch. We could technically use the mechanism for the notes to present an ability for someone to inspect the watch further. Upon clicking the watch can be presented as an image, allowing for a closer look, perhaps there is an inscription on the case that pertains to a puzzle on another Age.

Any thoughts?

You mean, the way it works in point'n'click adventures? I think that should work fine in Uru, too. /me reminds looong hours of "searching the hotspot"

Okay, this going to be a pain for those of us using wine to play Uru as the cursor is broken there and you can hardly distinguish the hotspot from the non-hotspot cursor

Ahhhhhhhh - When you succeed we would be on the way to having Real Myst available to walk around in

That's a mechanism that worked really well previously, and I don't see why it wouldn't work here.
I do have a tiny technical consideration though for the Plasma hackers here: How do GUIs impact performance? They are textures, but how are they loaded? Or rather: 'when'? Most (all?) of the Cyan GUIs are stored in separate PRPs, is there a specific reason for that? Is there some paging mechanism here so that the GUI is loaded/unloaded only when needed?

Most. Not every GUI pop up has it's own prp file in Uru.

I can't give a specific reason why Cyan did it that way. As GPNMilano pointed out in the 3DS Max thread when I was talking about this, you can just have a camera that points at you object.

The only reason I can think of MIGHT be (and I stress the might part of this):

The crumbled up note on the desk in the Baron's Office uses Dynamic Text
The texture used for the object that is laying there is not as good as the one you need for you popup
Placement of the "click-off" panel.

However, those reason seem to me to just be why it's a good idea to have the GUI camera else where.....but not as a seperate prp file.

As far as what Tweek is talking about, I think it should not be a problem at all.

You do not need to make a separate page for each GUI. If you want to keep things organised, it is highly recommended.
The only requirement is that the GUIDialogMod is referenced in the PoolObjects of the SceneNode. I discovered this while trying to add a GUI to my Pahts shell without creating new pages. It works with no issues in Uru.

@Aloys: Many page GUIs are just big textures, but other GUIs such as the KI and Nexus are more than just 3D planes with a texture applied. The Nexus GUI exists in 3D space (when you fetch a book, it partly covers the edge of the GUI). I imagine doing proper 3D GUIs is harder for design reasons, but it should be possible to have a pocketwatch pop up without being a big texture.

That... sounds really, really awesome. =D

What I am really concerned about is the memory footprint. A big texture for a GUI might be on a separate page, but I guess it is still loaded with the rest of the Age at the beginning or is just loaded when clicked on?
Because if you start to have many of those (and in high resolution) it will quickly increase the Age memory footprint. At which point some kind of paging might be a good idea..