Handy Features of the Interaction Menu (Patreon)

Hi!

Today, I’m gonna show you some very useful features I added to the interaction menu this week. Let’s get into it! This post is for Patrons only so please don’t share it, thank you!

Interaction Menu Feature: Searching

Earlier this year, in a Patreon post, I shared some ideas I had for the interaction menu in Paralives. Well, now they are no longer just ideas and I added some of them to the game!

In Paralives, just like in real life, some objects will have a lot of interactions. A computer, for instance, has so many things you can do with it so the interaction menu for it will be very full. Being able to search an interaction by name will be very useful in those cases, when you can’t remember in which submenu an interaction was!

The search feature in action. We don’t have objects with a ton of interactions yet but imagine that there would be a lot more interactions, many of them into submenus. The search feature would come in really handy then!

Interaction Menu Feature: Pinning

Next, I added the interaction pinning feature. It could also be called favorites.

A lot of the time, you end up doing the same interaction on a given object. For instance, when clicking on a bed, most of the time, it will be to select the Sleep interaction.

Now, you will be able to pin one interaction per type of object so that it visually stands out when opening the interaction menu. But most importantly, this pinned interaction will now be mapped to a shortcut. In addition to left-clicking the object and browsing the menu to select the interaction, the object can be right-clicked to add the pinned interaction to the interaction queue without even having to open the menu!

In this GIF, I simply right-click on the floor to run towards the clicked position, without the need to open the menu to select the Run interaction. This works because I marked Run as the pinned interaction when clicking on the floor.

Interaction Menu Feature: Build Mode Shortcuts

Sometimes, you want to tweak an object in your house but it’s a bit of trouble to go into build mode just to do a small change and then come back to live mode. That’s exactly what I told myself when I added some small shortcut buttons in the interaction menu to:

Start moving or rotating an object

Change the colors of an object

Delete an object

These shortcuts in the interaction menu should allow you to quickly tweak an object in your house without needing to go into build mode.

More buttons might be added in the future here like:

Duplicating the object

Changing the texture and material of an object

And other object related customization

These buttons won’t be here when opening the interaction menu after clicking on a character (because you can’t move or delete a Para!) but they could be replaced with character specific buttons like:

See character personality sheet

See skills

See relationships

See outfits (or edit outfits if we clicked on one of our household’s character)

That’s it for today. Let us know what you think in the comments and have a great weekend!Alex

EDIT - January 10, 2023: This post is now public. Feel free to share it!