I've got an idea for a mod, and I'd like to know if it's possible. I love this game, but the one thing that's really irritating is inventory management. The only way to sort items beyond your inventory at the moment is to make piles. These piles can't be automatically categorised or searched, and you can't easily pick an item you've buried in the pile a while ago. Plus, the crafting system can't say 'Oh look! You can craft this with the stuff in your pile'. COTW means I no longer have to trek through several floors to retrieve my piles anymore, but I don't think that's enough. My idea is to make a mod that can see your entire inventory – including a storage system to replace the piling system – and be able to sort and manage everything easily and take the tedium out of this game. Other features I'd like: Vendor trash sorter – checks items based on your build and tells you whether you have any use for them – plus a function to dispose of them buy selling or skolling, based on sell price. Crafting tree – Shows you what you can craft from base materials, for example with the correct recipe: 18 iron ingots → The Hexaxe of the Magic Axe Lords Potential crafting recipes – Calculates the potential crafting abilities your build can have including skills and items and takes that into account when showing you what you can craft and what is vendor trash. I'd like this to be part of the games interface, but I’m thinking that this might not be feasible, so maybe a savegame editor would be the best solution. I'm thinking the items could go on a specific tile in the Pocket dimension, so if something goes wrong with the mod you can retrieve the items. I may never have time to create this, but I want it to exist, dammit. So does anyone know if this can be done?
If you are fluent enough with programming, yes. But had you been, you likely would not have asked this question.
Things we can't do; - Change UI - Make new floors - Teleport - Check for values (items, health, craftables etc) - Use (concrete) logistics - IF THEN ELSE is only possible with buffs, and those buffs can only be applied through hitEffectBuffs and such, and those can only be used in skilltrees or on items, or on other buffs, and most of them are broken aswell. Yea. And yet people make nice mods with it.
Not really. They do know how to change it. It's just that changing a hard-coded UI after everything else had been made and the program/game is released tends to require much more effort than it is worth. Of course there are exceptions (which is why I used the word "tends [to]"), but Dungeons of Dredmor isn't one of them. Whether that is because they wrote it via some weird hax in the first place or if it's because they simply lack experience (due to it being their first "big" released game) is not something I am concerned with, but either way we get back to the fact that it's possible but not really "worth it", effort-wise.
The UI has changed quite a whole lot since the game came out, you'd be surprised. But it's always a painful thing to do.
Basically, yeah. The UI of Dredmor, unfortunately, was not built with iteration in mind - at this point it is essentially a giant jenga tower of janky code and any programmer who is forced to work with it has to be talked out of The Corner Of Despair afterward. Nicholas has remarked several times that he wouldn't do it that way today, and the UI system we're using for CE will be significantly easier for us to work with. Alas, the time investment required to change the Dredmor UI without breaking other things is prohibitive, and the studio is focused on making Clockwork Empires right now; UI changes (And indeed ANY non-bugfix changes to the game) are extremely unlikely for the time being.
You can think of it as a kind of demented assembler language. Better than intercal, at least. Which makes me wanna start a thread.
The OP is correct, however, in that something HAS to be done about the inventory system. Because inventory management IS tedious and the pocket dimension IS NOT enough. I really hope that the developers do something about it at some point. That's sad to hear. If they spend ANY time at all working on Dredmor it should be on this. In my opinion the inventory system is the single biggest problem with the game and a much more pressing issue than bugfixes; Given the choice I'd rather have a version of Dredmor with an unlimited inventory than one that doesn't crash every half hour and syncs properly with Steam.
