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I find that UI work is both incredibly rewarding once it is finished and incredibly taxing while you work on it. Ever interaction point from people requires a lot more effort than linear systems.   There are many intuitive ways that people expect things to work and making all those things work in harmony is quite a chore.   I'm not sure how much we will get done tomorrow but I do think once more of the initial developer UI is done that the experience will start to feel more tangible.   It is one thing to see an editor window updating but a whole other experience to see it live in game.

Hey Folks, Alrighty, done some updates. They ended up being more world modifications than actual action bar updates. The next steps though are pretty clear once I recover a bit more. We will hook up a simple inventory that reads our current items. When you pick up an item this will inform the game to add the item to your inventory. Upon doing this it'll check your action bars for an empty slot. If there is a slot it will place a reference to that item in that slot. Otherwise nothing happens. Then following that, we'll want to have it so when you are in your inventory. If you left (right?) click on an item, or perhaps some other key we'll see, when you use that key it will assign the item to that spot on your action bar. If that ends up not being annoying we'll stick with that for the time being.

Hey Folks, So I slightly recovered from the work week. Only a bit. But here we are! It isn't pretty but I've got the start of our action bar setup. The fields update when you press one of the keys, through the magic of events. Next I need to setup it actually showing the items you have in each spot. Probably have item pickups fill in the first open space. That's all I have for tonight though. Take care of yourselves!   actiontime.webm    

Today I think is an important time to just take a step back. Only for the day, work has been extremely rough these past few days and I'm officially out of steam. But when we come back, tomorrow I'll whip together a simple GUI to test our our action bars and throw up an image or two maybe, if the day is kind.   Take care of yourselves and thanks for the random visit, internet strangers.

It will eventually be mappable but the action bar support is added to the new unity input system. For now it defaults to 1 through = on your keyboard, but we'll eventually add in support for things like shoulder buttons on a controller. There is now an event setup that will inform all listening systems that the player has pressed one of these keys.   Tomorrow I'll be hooking up a simple UI of some kind to alternate between these. What I haven't determined yet is how we will represent our items on the action bar. I'm not sure if they will have unique 2D art made for them or not. Heck, there is nothing stopping us from making our items in the scene 2D as well, perhaps doing the ole cross cut style of "3D" 2D art.   I'll give you an example of this tomorrow.