Adding custom widgets to AAO
Posted: Tue May 05, 2020 10:24 pm
Over in this topic, we've been considering the idea of adding custom buttons/widgets to the touch screen. An example usecase might be including the magatama outside of investigations, or implementing Perceiving. There are, however, a massive number of issues that would have to be worked out, both with the specifications of the new feature as well as its implementation. I wanted to create this thread so we can work out some of these issues.
As a starting point, here are some things that we should remember to think about:
As a starting point, here are some things that we should remember to think about:
ThePaSch wrote:I agree that a feature like this could be pretty useful. I don't like the idea of "hardcoding" an action into the widget, though - that would make it rather inflexible (if, for instance, you'd always have it redirect to the same frame, regardless of where it appeared). We might have it point to a variable, but then there could be issues if the variable isn't defined at the point the widget is called. We have to consider where and how to define what the widget actually does when it's clicked, while keeping it as flexible as possible.
There's also an issue with the specific implementation of making them available to the player. I'm guessing you mean the new actions would show and hide indefinitely, respectively. As far as I'm aware, there's no other action that displays anything on either the top screen or manipulates the bottom screen for longer than the frame that action is defined in. There's a plethora of concerns - it'd have to play nice with the save/load system, there's the potential for softlocking the player if they're redirected to a frame that should have had the widget appear in a frame beforehand (and requires its use to proceed), we'd have to consider how it would work with investigation scenes and/or cross-examinations, and a lot more.