1080p summary supercut (Patreon)

before the jump to 1080p, the summary screen looks like this:

there's a lot of information to communicate on it, and so in order to fit it all in, you can switch between the skill and items/arts pages with the shift button.

after the jump to 1080p, the summary screen looks like this:

...okay, painful.

yet... what is a setback, but an opportunity in disguise?

i've played a number of fire emblem roms in the day. and one of the things i've noticed-- though i couldn't tell you from memory which it is-- there's a bit of delay when clicking into the summary screen on some of them. it's not much... maybe half a second at most.... but i feel it.
now, i may be a bitch,
pause,
but when clicking around and commanding units, i feel like that half a second is actually a little bit prohibitive. it doesn't needle me quite the same way that, say, an unskippable animation does, but if i am in flow figuring out a strategy i feel the difference between that half second and one the games where the summary load time instantaneous. i've noticed it enough to have that preference. FE gamers, you know what i mean? which titles am i think of that have that delay?

anyway, in starlight's demo, the summary screen takes a second of screen transition to load. this irks me.

beat. scene change. an apartment in mid-evening. the cat is on the desk again. 

another thing, perhaps more unique to the pre-DS era of FE games, is when scrolling down the list of units in the enemy team and you see one, that, say, has an item that drops when you kill them, you have to close out of the screen to see where they are on the map. and then load back into summary,
then keep looking.
close, re open.
rinse, lather, repeat.

..but there is a solution, isn't there?

what if we took the summary screen... and just... pushed it into the battle?

this looks messy because it is doing so whole-sale, no other tweaks for the resolution change yet. but you can see what i go for here.

by making this viewable within combat, we entirely skip the half second loading times in and out of the summary scene. it is near-instant, just the way i like.

let's do some adjustments now. first, the easy stuff, just by the numbers:

sprites are positioned and... well, now that we have this extra space, we do not need two separate pages! all relevant information can be contained directly within one area here. this will also simplify the code a lot.

but we have some issues. the core durability runs into the circle scene because it's more bent than it was before, and although we can't see it in the above, the mana costs of arts will do the same on the bottom. at the very least i see i need to use the empty space below the description and move the items and arts up. 

so that's done and the core is adjusted too. the sprite wheel is also fixed for the new number of units displayed. there's empty space at the bottom i had an idea for, but while i'm working on the core section i realize that, i don't entirely know what i need from that space yet and it is a bit cramped. perhaps it makes more sense to put that at the bottom instead and give more room to the stats, including a couple ones which i struggled to fit in before.

core info is switched to the bottom, and it's now easier to see the move, range and attacks of a unit, which is the big stuff. the core bit isn't very pretty, but i expect to come back to it later once we get to progression systems, so i'm not worrying about it too hard for now.

there's a bit of work to clean up things like the controls-- oh, i forgot about those, those are a whole other post... ah well, next time-- but this is more concise, better available to the player, and tidier code-side now without multiple pages in the way.

we can also do a full scene still if we need:

that's a lot of empty space on the right. for now it's whatever, but i expect to be using it quite liberally down the line when we get to, say, things like skill trees. we'll see what happens.

anyway, one more show. let's go back to what i was saying about having to always close the summary screen to see where the unit you're looking at is. this isn't the best demonstration because the test map is so small and has most of the units close together, buuuuuuuuut

awkward gif cropping too, oops. anyway, the cursor and camera can now move to highlight and select whatever unit you rotate to and pull up on the summary screen.
hopefully this helps everyone get a better, quicker look around the battlefields.

up next for me is the combat scene. up next for you... who knows?