In EQ, you could move your spells around in the book as you wanted to.
In WoW, your spells and abilities were organized by tabs--everyone's alike.
In Skyrim, inventory was tabbed, but again, not customizable.
In subnautica, you can label your lockers as you desire, though the space to do so is limited to X number of characters.
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For Pantheon? I have a dream... a dream of a more robust, customizable banking, inventory, spell, and abilities system!
I would really like to have customizable tabs for these things, and anything else that stacks up. Of course, not for the paperdoll. Arm slots are arm slots, and chest piece is chest piece... but maybe I like my fast cast heals by themselves and my group ports by themselves and my self ports organized by themselves.
Perhaps I like all of my iron in one tab because I just hate to bring it out, and I like my "shared resources" that are used for multiple tradeskills on their own tab (think berries in EQ--cooking AND brewing uses).
Everyone has their own way of doing things, and if we could be allowed to do it our own way... man, that would make me positively giddy. :D
((I tried hard to find this topic already with multiple searches. Sorry if it's a photocpy of someone else's. I did check!))
I am all for as much customization in the appearance and organization of the interface as possible.
Even with some flaws, I like the customization options in EQ2s interface. I could change the sizes, locations, labels, and even whether or not certain screens appeared at all, on most items. This enabled me to concentrate on what was important to me.
Although I would find this really nice to have as well, I'm willing to bet it would be viewed as a tad too complicated for your average gamer to utilize like you describe, not to mention difficult to execute for their UI programmer(s) when you consider all of the different systems to account for. When your team is small, and time continues marching relentlessly toward release dates, requests like this are likely far fetched when they're still probably trying to get the polish rolling for all of the active & confirmed game systems. (banking, trading, acclimatization, perception, looting, communications.. the list goes on..)
I can see it being simple enough to make tabs standard and then space for added, customizable tabs. Once that's there, then they can let modders take up the rest of it. So long as the important stuff remains server-side, letting me have my tab names client-side is a simple matter. Modding the UI isn't a big deal, as long as all the important things that allow for cheats are server-side.
I feel like devs don't utilize their modding communities to best advantage outside of Minecraft, lol.
I just hope for the ability to search through bank spaces and inventories. It annoys me having to look through bags and overlooking stuff. Maybe even a bit of a fuzzy search so we can find things we may not know exactly how they're spelled. A space to type in something to search for, and highlight the items in your bank/inventory that match. You could instead filter them out, but I prefer highlighting because then I see where it is in relation to everything else in case I go searching for it again.
What I would love to see is a customizable bank like most guild banks have in most games. Take neverwinter for example, if you look at the guild bank there is like 6 or 7 maybe 8 tabs, and the guild can label these as they please.
I'd be able to label all my stuff out, such as stuff that has just nostalgic value to me. Like for instance in EQ, when I played my evil iksar SK, I collected heads... Yeah that's right, you heard it, heads. I had the head of every single race possible. Including the heads of some giants, and cyclops, really anything that dropped a head, i hunted it and I collected it, so I had like 4 bags full of all kinds of different heads. I can't tell you why, I just felt like it, I felt for an evil iksar, it was necessary to do evil things, and collect the heads of my victims, so in his case, i would have labeled it like head collection or something, then the next tab could be armor, because i don't like to throw away good old armor for whatever reason lol. Then one tab for crafting, and another for whatever, you get the picture. I like to have everything organized.
The way I look at it, allowing players to organize their belongings as they wish can only be a good thing. It doesn't give anyone an advantage over others. It doesn't detract from the social nature of the game. Having to search through pages of inventory to find the one item you want is not fun. It's not the type of "challenge" that Pantheon is going for. It's best to come up with ways to minimize those types of time-wasters so that players can focus more on the fun aspects of the game. I guess that's the definition of "quality of life improvement" haha. Everyone has their own way of organizing things, so the UI should be as flexible as possible. Having everything organized just as I want it is a beautiful sight to behold.
I'm definitely for some UI customization, but within reason. I have seen screenshots of some people's UI in other games where their screen is absolutely covered by chat windows, ability buttons and inventory... Talk about losing immersion. I enjoy being able to use my skills/abilities without having to stare at cooldown counters or soley playing a game via text windows (waiting for "*** begins to cast a spell." so I can interrupt it within .5 sec) but on the flip side of that, I don't want a text alert across my entire UI either.
EQ1 (originally) made managing your inventory quite the task, and from what I gathered in the few videos that I saw, inventory management will be a part of the game experience... managing skills/spells on your hotbar in EQ1 was a magnificent challenge that was completely obsolete in EQ2.
I'm hoping for a balance of UI customization and maintaining immersion. With the thought and effort the devs are demonstrating in their other decisions I have faith in their abilities to accomplish this.
I'd be good with tabbed organization, even if it was a static number of tabs. At least it's an improvement over the giant mess of inventory/bank organization.
I forget what game it was, but anytime you'd swap out an inventory item, it would place the item you unequipped into the first empty slot, rather than the one you just removed the equipped item from, that was annoying, because if you wanted to re-swap, you had to find the previous item elsewhere in your inventory. The bank was the same way.
Amris said:In EQ, you could move your spells around in the book as you wanted to.
In WoW, your spells and abilities were organized by tabs--everyone's alike.
In Skyrim, inventory was tabbed, but again, not customizable.
In subnautica, you can label your lockers as you desire, though the space to do so is limited to X number of characters.
-----
For Pantheon? I have a dream... a dream of a more robust, customizable banking, inventory, spell, and abilities system!
I would really like to have customizable tabs for these things, and anything else that stacks up. Of course, not for the paperdoll. Arm slots are arm slots, and chest piece is chest piece... but maybe I like my fast cast heals by themselves and my group ports by themselves and my self ports organized by themselves.
Perhaps I like all of my iron in one tab because I just hate to bring it out, and I like my "shared resources" that are used for multiple tradeskills on their own tab (think berries in EQ--cooking AND brewing uses).
Everyone has their own way of doing things, and if we could be allowed to do it our own way... man, that would make me positively giddy. :D
((I tried hard to find this topic already with multiple searches. Sorry if it's a photocpy of someone else's. I did check!))
I used to spend forever organizing my shielding spells in one group, my teleport spells in another group, my nukes..etc And the spells that are too low or old would be relegated to the back of the book. Would be nice to easily sort these into recognizeable groups
Iksar said:My spellbook in EQ was always chaotic, I always tried to keep my current go-to spells on one page but there were so many situational spells that would get lost in the pages like see invis/levitate/invis to undead/ etc.
I would love some solid spellbook organization tools.
The EQ spellbook was a disaster lol. Many classes gained spells too rapidly to have any reasonable hope of being able to keep them all organized. And at the very least, I wish we could have just click-and-dragged the icons instead of having to constantly right click everywhere. I suppose it was better than nothing, but just barely. I personally tried to keep spell lines together, but usually gave up pretty quickly. (See also: http://pantheonmmo.com/content/forums/topic/5199/spell-naming-conventions/view/page/2) I trust Pantheon has grown beyond such antiquated UIs.
Anyway, we actually already know that the Living Codex (Pantheon's spell/ability book) will already be somewhat organized. Whether or not it will be customizable is a different question. Let's see what we know so far...
From the FAQ:
"The Living Codex serves as a ‘spellbook’ to manage “Essential” and “Transcendent” spells and abilities. The first section of The Living Codex is labeled “Essential” and will contain the host of standard abilities characters can naturally learn throughout their lifetime. The second section of The Living Codex is labeled “Transcendent” and is built for the scribing and intensifying of powerful Prime Scroll abilities. Spells and abilities that are learned from Prime Scrolls and stored in The Living Codex as “Transcendent” abilities. The Prime Scroll will only fill the top portion of each page; underneath, there will be three empty sections that the player can mark with special items which will further enhance the primary ability. These three sections are detailed below:
• Seal of Amplification
o Amplifies the bonus modifiers from Mana Climates that affect the Primary Scroll’s mana color. More powerful seals will increase the bonuses.
• Brand of Resilience
o Lessens the negative modifiers from Mana Climates that affect the Primary Scroll’s mana color. More powerful brands will decrease the penalties.
• Signet of Synergy
o Applying a Signet of Synergy to an ability will unlock different class-specific synergy effects that can be used in combination with synergy effects from other classes, sometimes to awesome effect. However, the Primary Scroll ability must be capable of synergy effects and not all are."
So there's already two tabs separating the main ability types. It doesn't really seem like that aspect will be customizable. I don't really see why one would need to anyway, but I'm sure there's at least one person out there that would. Furthermore, I think it's unlikely the Transcendent portion of the Codex will be very customizable. I could be wrong, but it seems to me like the layout of each page is pretty locked in, while the only thing you can change is the signets that affect the abilities themselves. Again, I personally think that's okay because it already seems pretty well organized, but we'll see in Pre-Alpha. At the very least, I would hope that we be able to change the order of the pages if there is only one ability per page. Hopefully it doesn't automatically sort them alphabetically or by most recently acquired. And if it does, allow us to rearrange the order however we want.
We don't really know how much customizability will be offered in the Essential portion of the Codex, and that's probably what most people are concerned about because those are the abilities that will be used more often. It would be interesting if you could add and name multiple tabs within the Essential tab and change the configuration of the abilities on each page, which I'm sure is what the OP is hoping for.
Related: http://pantheonmmo.com/content/forums/topic/2798/spell-book-suggestion
Elmberry said:I really like how the spell book seen in latest game play looks like together with the inventory. However I have some suggestion regarding the spell book which I hope you can look into when you have some time over. I know you are far from finished.
1) I would like to be able to quickly go to certain pages in spell book. Buttons (attached below the book) to either go forward/backward pages: First page, 5 pages forward/backward, 20 pages forward/backward, Last page
2) Be able to either sort between Levels/Names/Type of spells in Ascending/Descending order with 2 clicks bottom of book (small toggles).
3) Filter buttons or tabs (attached to right edge of book) similar to Heroes of Might and Magic spell book but better: Filter buttons which also suits for the class (sorted as described as in 2).
Example EQ necromancer:
DD tab, DoT tab, Snare tab, Fear tab, Summon tab, Buffs tab, Utility tab, Other tab
4) Top of book informs you about the filter + status you are currently using for the spell book. The page number should of course always be showned.
Example 1:
Level 3, levels, asc Which means Level 3 spells are showned, sorted by levels in ascending order
Example 2:
DD, names, desc Which means Direct Damage Spells are showned, sorted by names in descending order
5) Be able to set how many spells you want to see on each page (with one click on toggle buttons bottom of book).
2 spells per page with visible description
4 spells per page. One spell per row with name of spell and type of spell (DoT, Healing, DD, etc). If you however cursor over icon you will see more detailed info.
8-12 spells per page (as in old EQ). Only spell icon with name shows. If you hower cursor above icon you will see description.
Curious if this is still on the developer's minds about making the spellbook easier to manage. It appears from the latest streams that the spellbook is very similar to EQ where the latest version of the spell is further along in the spellbook. Are there any plans to help alleviate the organization as your character progresses?
I thought I remembered them mention on one of the recent streams that you will likely be able to Right click on a slot on your hotbar and a popup menu would appear where you could have a list of your spells (probably categorized) and select it from there and it would put that spell in that hotkey slot (ie Memorize it). I am imagining that you might be able to customize that categorization and tweek your menu how you want it broken down.
And since we are dealing with modern tech, I'd imagine there would be a way to say hold down a key like ALT or something while going through this menu to get a tooltip popup for whichever spell your mouse is hovering over so you can make decisions in case you don't have your spell names and descriptions memorized.
Porygon said:It shouldn't matter what order your spells are in, once inside your spellbook. Like in eq I'm sure there is a right click search option like goofy stated.
Wouldn't you need to know a spell name to search for it? I think it would be easier if, say, I wanted to compare my various buff abilities, I could just click on the tab for buff spells and they would all be there. Same for heals, crowd control, damage abilities, etc.
Naunet said:Porygon said:It shouldn't matter what order your spells are in, once inside your spellbook. Like in eq I'm sure there is a right click search option like goofy stated.
Wouldn't you need to know a spell name to search for it? I think it would be easier if, say, I wanted to compare my various buff abilities, I could just click on the tab for buff spells and they would all be there. Same for heals, crowd control, damage abilities, etc.
In EQ they added a feature where you could right click the spellbar and it brings up a bunch of categories and you follow the little arrows to the ability that you wanted. The spellbook became much less used after this was implemented and just became a house for your spells. So I guess I'm wondering if this is how it's going to be in Pantheon because I haven't seen anyone use that function yet (if it's in place). While the EQ-style spellbook is quite nostalgic and awesome, is it the best solution? I don't know.
All I know is that it was quite tedious in EQ trying to organize everything. Even when the right click function came into play it still didn't allow you to compare the spells like Naunet was saying. You'd have to manually find the spells and bring up their description windows.