Working Amnesia-Style Inventory System (In Progress)

[WALP]

Hey guys, here is the next update to the inventory system, and unless I think of something to add or if you guys suggest things it could use, I'd be ready to call this the final update. If so, I'll spend the next couple days or so polishing up the code before I ship it off to Steam Workshop and ModDB.

2 functionalities from the amnesia journal system don't seem to be there, they are not something you can live without but if you want to completely finalize the system then they would definitely be something convenient to add.

1. Press N for last picked(or was it read?) journal entry.
2. Support for Journal Categories. Amnesia had Notes, Diaries and mementos.
Most mods probably wont have enough entries for this to be wanted, but for those who do its convenient.
3. Which brings us to number 3 mementos support. They kinda only have one entry with 1 line per memento so they need a little tweaking.

Note that I write support because it is definitely a preference whether or not you like the old category/memento's system.

[Filizitas]

Would be nice to have something to actually rehear audio. Like a cassetmp3 system.
And maybe for advance you could add a weight system?
And maybe a possible Areamap?

Would make the possibilities greater.

[Mudbill]

To modernize the system should you want to go for the old Amnesia-like journal, I'd say just make a section for Notes and Mementos. Diary is pretty redundant as a separate note section and honestly just confuses the player on where each note is placed. Unless you wanna make a modder's preference thing of what they pick, I say just kill it off, or rather don't revive the Diary section.

[Abion47]

1. Press N for last picked(or was it read?) journal entry.

That shouldn't be too hard. The journal module already has a "last acquired" entry, so implementing this should just be listening to another key press.

2. Support for Journal Categories. Amnesia had Notes, Diaries and mementos.
Most mods probably wont have enough entries for this to be wanted, but for those who do its convenient.

This shouldn't be difficult either, just add an extra GUI screen and tag for the journal entries.

3. Which brings us to number 3 mementos support. They kinda only have one entry with 1 line per memento so they need a little tweaking.

I don't quite recall how the Amnesia momento system worked, so I'll have to do some research before I say if it will be a simple implementation or not. IIRC, the momentos section was basically just one-line journal entries for current objectives?

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Would be nice to have something to actually rehear audio. Like a cassetmp3 system.

I assume you mean when you put a tape into a player it plays the audio while it records to the journal? That kind of stuff would be best left handled in the map logic. The way it would work is that when a tool (cassette) is used on the proper interface (player), it fires an event to handle the playing of the audio, while it simultaneously records the entry's text into a journal. If you want the audio to play every time the player opens that journal entry, just assign a callback function to that entry's OnRead event to play the audio.

And maybe for advance you could add a weight system?
And maybe a possible Areamap?

I'm not sure what you mean by these ones.

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To modernize the system should you want to go for the old Amnesia-like journal, I'd say just make a section for Notes and Mementos. Diary is pretty redundant as a separate note section and honestly just confuses the player on where each note is placed. Unless you wanna make a modder's preference thing of what they pick, I say just kill it off, or rather don't revive the Diary section.

Better yet, how about I make it so the Journal can take multiple categories of variable names? That way the modder can decide what categories their mod needs, or if they even need categories at all.

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In addition to the above possibilities, another idea I had would be to have each inventory screen include a callback as well for if the modder wants to implement their own GUI function for each screen in the inventory. That way people who just want the simple functionality can use the default setup, while people who want more control can do so without butchering the module itself. (Not that they aren't allowed to do that too, of course.)

[WALP]

[quote='Abion47' pid='330141' dateline='1445019681']
I don't quite recall how the Amnesia momento system worked, so I'll have to do some research before I say if it will be a simple implementation or not. IIRC, the momentos section was basically just one-line journal entries for current objectives?
[quote]

Pretty much mementos is just 1 page with some stuff written like:

• The door to the storage is locked
  
• This room has a weird feeling to it
  
• I need to find a way out of here
  
• etc
  

A thing thing that makes mementos a bit different though, is the fact that the individual items in the list of mementos need to be added/triggered individually, since they are relevant at different times in the game. Fx you might have a memento added when you first start that you need to escape, then later that a door is locked when you try to open it. You also need a little icon in the corner of the screen or at the very least a sound to indicate a new memento has been added.

[Abion47]

I don't quite recall how the Amnesia momento system worked, so I'll have to do some research before I say if it will be a simple implementation or not. IIRC, the momentos section was basically just one-line journal entries for current objectives?

Pretty much mementos is just 1 page with some stuff written like:

• The door to the storage is locked
  
• This room has a weird feeling to it
  
• I need to find a way out of here
  
• etc
  

A thing thing that makes mementos a bit different though, is the fact that the individual items in the list of mementos need to be added/triggered individually, since they are relevant at different times in the game. Fx you might have a memento added when you first start that you need to escape, then later that a door is locked when you try to open it. You also need a little icon in the corner of the screen or at the very least a sound to indicate a new memento has been added.

I can add an option in the journal categories to skip the individual entry page and treat every separate entry as just a new line of text, but otherwise all that functionality is already in the module. Individual entries are added to the module by way of entry names (as opposed to entry titles, which is what you see in the game), and given the same name you can modify or remove that same entry at any time.

Also, when anything happens to affect the journal module, the player is notified via the text notification in the lower left of the screen. (Though I could add an option to display a graphic as well as or instead of text.)

[PathOS]

I always thought "Memento's" was a weird descriptor for the documents and "Hints" stored there.

[1minus1is0]

I just thought I'd throw this out there: if you are going to implement a journal system, make sure it also supports images as well as text, for the case of maps.

[PathOS]

That's a good idea. Being able to insert clue or hint-like images and such within journals would be nice. Though of course in SOMA you can pretty much scatter images all over the place to pick up and view, but combining them with text could be a nice option for those who wish it.

[1minus1is0]

Well, once we have a working inventory system it's kind of irrelevant anyway, so long as the GUI triggers are there, you can hack together just about anything.

A sci-fi PDA thingamajig with journal, map, etc is functionally the same as what OP has already demonstrated, just different graphics, GUI, and hooks in different places. Could also function similarly to a terminal.