Can auto-pause on inventory screen be made optional?
The_Baffled_King
Member Posts: 147
Is it reasonably feasible to give the player the option to have scripts continue running when they are accessing the inventory screen? In other words, the option of re-instating the classic BG1 behaviour?
I sort of imagine it's either relatively easy, or very difficult, to make a high-level optional adjustment like that, and I'd be curious to know which is the case. And if it's relatively easy, I hope consideration might be given to making the functionality available.
I accept that auto-pause on inventory is beneficial to new players - I found it useful when returning to BG via BG:EE after a gap of nearly 20 years - but I increasingly think that the option to remove it would add a tremendous amount of value to the game for players interested in such a feature.
So, the request isn't borne of nostalgia, or any dislike of change; it's that I remember the added challenge and realism of real-time inventory management, and it would be great to have that option. Classes with extra quick weapon slots would get a bit of a boost, as would monsters such as basilisks, which are a bit of a joke when you can just autopause and grab an item that gives you immunity to their gaze.
I sort of imagine it's either relatively easy, or very difficult, to make a high-level optional adjustment like that, and I'd be curious to know which is the case. And if it's relatively easy, I hope consideration might be given to making the functionality available.
I accept that auto-pause on inventory is beneficial to new players - I found it useful when returning to BG via BG:EE after a gap of nearly 20 years - but I increasingly think that the option to remove it would add a tremendous amount of value to the game for players interested in such a feature.
So, the request isn't borne of nostalgia, or any dislike of change; it's that I remember the added challenge and realism of real-time inventory management, and it would be great to have that option. Classes with extra quick weapon slots would get a bit of a boost, as would monsters such as basilisks, which are a bit of a joke when you can just autopause and grab an item that gives you immunity to their gaze.
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Yeah, I guess so. More's the pity!
That's great, thanks! My mind just wasn't thinking about the issue from that angle - I was sort of thinking that the engine "knew" what you were doing and therefore whether to pause the game. I guess that modding what the inventory button does is doable. If it's possible to add a toggleable setting, along with the other auto-pause on/off options, that would be amazing.
On the minus side, UI modding seems like a massive pain unless you already know what you're doing. I haven't seen any modder resources that deal with UI modding in the same way the IESDP does with, say, opp-codes, triggers, and actions.
EDIT: Okay, I see now that there's info regarding UI modding on the Beamdog forums that I just hadn't looked at before. That helps. Thanks again for pointing out the UI mod option.
Likely, you will also need to put "e:GetActiveEngine():OnLeftPanelButtonClick(0)" before the Infinity_PushMenu part to ensure other windows get closed.
If you want to forbid pausing during the opened window you will need to find 'INVENTORY' menu and edit its onOpen a onClose properties (you also may want to add "modal" property to it). Create a dummy button and add "on pause" property to it and then play around with this piece of code.
if not worldScreen:CheckIfPaused() then worldScreen:TogglePauseGame(false) endYou may also want to forbid the pause button by some boolean, and change its value in onOpen and onClose.Just posting here as I forgot to say thank you for your second post - so, thanks!
Before you posted, I'd looked at the UI info in these forums, from which I found the EEEx docs which were really helpful for also listing EE features. So I'd got to "Infinity_PushMenu('INVENTORY')" from there. That change left me with two problems:
(1) I had to go through another step to get the inventory items to actually update - I think it might have been that I had to click on the creature itself after clicking the portrait to change the party member whose inventory screen was displayed;
(2) Getting the inventory menu to close. It didn't just toggle on-off, nor did it close on the return to game button - with just the single change I'd made, to close the inventory it I had to open the map window.
I'll come back to what you've written once I come back to this - I mostly wanted to know if it was feasible, rather than get it done.