[Help] Clashing Keys.

Alrighty, my situation is that I'm going to make spells learn-able through the holding of certain items (e.g if you're holding an Ice Crystal, you get Frost Nova) and the likes. These abilities are stored in a spellbook... though, there's going to be a hell of a lot of abilities.

Now my problem is what do I do if I end up with clashing ability hotkeys?

There's not much you can do. However, as long as you don't have more than 26 abilities, or you do have more than 26 but some cannot be in the same spellbook together, you shouldn't have a problem. Just make the ones that can't be in the same spellbook have the same hotkey. Otherwise, you're stuck.

Hm... how would using that sample of paged Spellbooks work?

EDIT!
Now that I think about it, if the spells are going to be in relative to the items... how often do people use the number keys on items?

Never. Way too inconvenient.

Alrighty... plan D or something. I think I'll have to resort to the spell books with pages OR making the least synergistic abilities have shared hotkeys.

Another workaround would be having different spellbooks for different elements. E.g, Fire Spells, Frost Spells, etc,.

Or you can just have one spell book with many pages, each page contains a different element. E.g, Next Page - Fire Spells, Previous Page - Frost Spells

I thought of that, but having to trudge through 8 odd spell books could be a bit tedious...

My other idea was disallowing certain abilities to be used with others (e.g class restrictions) and devoting certain letters to those certain abilities, but it seems a bit over the top.

EDIT!
I don't suppose there's a way to force a player to select an ability, as in click it as though they were about to cast it but still in the targeting phase...?

You could always make a few back-up spell with different keys for all your spells which clash and then when you are going to add the spell, check if a hot-key is already being used and add accordingly.

If you want, you could create 11 versions of each spell and then assign them a hotkey as to wherever they land in the spellbook:


that sort of thing. This way the hotkeys are more-or-less universal and there won't be any conflicts. Also, the users shouldn't get them that confused since they are logically linked to the keyboard.

While that idea is plausible, and I do like it, I'm not exactly sure if even Widgetizer or any of that magic could make it loading time friendly. Imagine making a map with 825 abilities, not counting anything else...

EDIT!
Your idea could work if I gave rows ability labels, actually. e.g

I might give that a go. It will take a lot of will power to make all 375 abilities, though.
____

On another note, this could be the ultimate shortcut I could never think of.

LEVELS!

Make an ability with 26 levels and simply make each one dedicated to a letter! I cannot believe I didn't think of it earlier! Since I could combine it with the class specific abilities, I could cut down on even more letters.

+ Rep to everyone 'cause I might've wasted a minor amount of time but also 'cause they contributed...

This forum doesn't seem to like Malf...

The problem with levels is that the widgetizer won't load levels past level 4 into slk.s, which will drastically increase loading time. You could make 7 abilities with 4 levels each (last one only has 2).

Or, you could do the keyboard style layout, and only use the 9 letters. Your spells will cut down to 3 spells (3 levels each) which would be a lot easier.

If you do sub-classes for spells, there is only 4 letters per class so that is 1 spell each (4 levels).

It really just depends on your game mechanics and how much work you want to make for yourself.

Well if I sort spells into the three classes, nothing past four will ever be needed... I think I COULD do a system that follows something along the lines of Primary, Secondary and Different spells (taking up 1st, 2nd, 3rd rows) but I'm sure I'll work things out.

Though I do face one problem (well a few but this is the biggest so far), how do spells order themselves in spellbooks? I DO have an idea of having 11 placeholding abilities (taking up a painful 22 icons worth of filesize) to keep the slots in order and such.

Well for one, spells have the same hotkey assigned to them no matter how many levels.

Two, spells sort themselves in a spellbook according to the order they're listed in the object editor (or added, depending on which method you use.)

I believe if you use the spellbook trick to add spells to a spellbook, they add in the order you add the spellbooks (using triggers) and then when a spell is removed, the spells after it go back one, so slot 11 is the last to get it:


Add a spell, goes to slot one, add another it goes to 2, add another, it goes to 3. remove 1 and 2 goes to 1 and 3 goes to 2.

What the... I remember making a map which the first 5 levels of the ability had one hotkey and I forgot to change the next 5...

I guess that's true. I'll have to work around it.

@ Ammorth
By removed, you mean disabled, right?

Nope, whether it's one level or 200 levels, the spell has 1 hotkey. It has different keys for Turn on/off, learn, use, etc., but they don't change with level.