Agree, not quite happy with it, but I do think not having a separate node will be for the best, so need to figure out the best way to do it without it.
Like a gray box under Bayleaf and Fennel that says "child | parent". Bayleaf's "parent" handle would connect to the Fennel's "child" handle.
The problem with this is that "Bayleaf has a child" is one fact that you could choose to focus on in a dialogue, and "Bayleaf's child is Fennel" is another, so each of those needs to be available on the card*, and if someone has more than one child, I want an entry for each, not several lines coming out of a single connector, or we're back to the mess from the first mockup where everything was coming out of a connector at the bottom of the card.
I like this, but will you be able to expand the snapshot to see a bigger version while also highlighting elements? Seems like it'd be too small to be all that useful otherwise.
Yeah, you'll even be able to jump completely back into exploring the past at that exact time and place!
though maybe it could be useful to sometimes combine the fading-out of irrelevant info with the highlighting of especially pertinent info?
Possibly! Did you have something particular in mind? o:
* You select one of the labels on either side of the dividing line in a grey box separately, not the box as a whole. The dividing line is not necessarily the final design, because there might be more than two things that belong together, so I probably have to go with some kind of substack thing instead.
If you remember way back I talked about the snapshot mechanic storing information like this:
A system of "verbs" allows NPC's to see not just who is in a photograph, but what they're doing (such as hugging each other, or being dead). They can then react accordingly depending on what they are shown.
So I only showed intransitive verbs in the mockup, not acting on anything else, but for transitive verbs involving objects, you'll get things like "Fennel | hugging | Bayleaf" or even "Yarrow | chopping | tree | with axe", so I need the nodes to be able to express all of this, and to let you focus on any of these facts ("it was Yarrow chopping", "it was chopping Yarrow did", "it was a tree Yarrow was chopping", or "Yarrow used an axe to chop").
I'm wary of tying it to English word order, not to throw a wrench into localisation, so I need each piece of information to be presented in more or less the same way so that the interface works universally. I think a tree structure would work well for this:
Yarrow
|
+--> chop
|
+--> tree
The question is how to get the instrument ("using an axe") into this structure. It can't just be listed with the tree because Yarrow wasn't chopping the axe like they were chopping the tree, they were chopping
with the axe.
I could split it into two separate verbs, "Yarrow | using | axe"
and "Yarrow | chopping | tree" but then we kind of lose the direct connection between the chopping and the axe, plus technically they could be holding the axe in one hand and doing the chopping with their other hand using a machete or something, who knows?
I think I want a separation between incidental stuff (maybe Yarrow is "wearing | hat" at the same time but it's not relevant to the chopping) and completely coupled stuff like this.
The instrument could just be on the same level as the verb, perhaps bringing back that line, since it's basically adverbial.
Yarrow
|
+--> chop | with axe
|
+--> tree
It looks a little convoluted when we only have one thing like this, but it's very consistent and extendible once we get multiple simultaneous verbs and/or objects. Plus we can use the line when people are doing something together as well, and it can be recursive!
[subject(s)] Oregano | Ginger
|
+--> [verb] carry | [adverb] with stretcher
|
+--> [object(s)] Fennel
|
+--> [verb] dead
Managed to solidify this right here and now in writing this response, so thanks again for the back and forth!
What does this mean for the parent/child stuff where the "subject" is already specified by the profile node itself? My idea before, the reason it seemed a bit backwards, was that basically on Bayleaf's card, Fennel was the subject of "being Bayleaf's parent". But I agree this is unnecessarily confusing, and profile nodes don't have to be organised just like situational nodes—there's a reason they're separate node types after all.
That said, I think info entries on profile nodes should still be internally consistent, and not every piece of info is going to be an interpersonal relationship, so what makes the most sense to also convey things like "Bayleaf works in the café"? I think inverting the whole relationship (e.g. "child of Fennel") is tricky to reconcile with this, but I think we can change the presentation to make it clearer, and make it like a list of facts (e.g. "parent: Fennel", "workplace: café") instead of "Fennel | parent"?
It also needs to encompass having only half the information, like "parent: unknown" or even "unknown relationship: Fennel" (bit too long to fit, needs work).
Another change is to make any lines referencing a profile (including the parent/child listings but also most subjects, objects and perhaps even adverbial props) just connect to the profile node as a whole, and not its corresponding listing (so "parent: Fennel" doesn't connect specifically to Fennel's "child: Bayleaf" but to the top or bottom of the Fennel node).
Whew, sorry for writing so much!
Gives you some insight at least!
A final thought is that I think lines between nodes should probably be faded out when no node is focussed, and then only lines connected to a focussed node will fade in with that node and those connected to it, to combat mess.
To finish this off, an updated mockup (excuse the discrepancy between Tarragon's snapshot picture and description, don't wanna make a tree-chopping picture just for this):