The inventory and trader screens, with some depth (and no hitch on every click)
Look
- Frames: the inventory, stash and trader screens sit in an ornate frame: a fine stone grain, a warm glow from the top, darkening toward the edges, a double inner rule, gilt corner brackets with studs, and a crest at the top.
- Section headers ("Backpack", "Worn", "Inspect"...) run a gilt rule out to the edge.
- Item cards are raised tiles: rounded, with a soft shadow, light catching the top edge and a shade at the foot. The rarity colour is on the edge, heavier on the left, and the glyph sits in a recessed well that glows softly in the rarity colour.
- Hovering lifts a card with a glow of its colour.
- Empty slots sit sunken.
- The drawn belt weapon and the trader's selection are framed in gold.
- Inspector and tooltip boxes are recessed, with an inner shadow and a fine bronze line.
- Tabs and contracts: the trader's tabs are bookmarks (the open one warm, with a gilt foot), and contract cards match the item cards.
- Pooled cards. Every click used to free and rebuild every card on the screen, each with three new styles, a glyph, labels and possibly a rainbow. With a full stash that was about 33 ms per click on a slow CPU, a visible hitch. Cards are now built once and re-filled in place, so a refresh takes about a third of the time: about 5.5 ms for the inventory and 6.3 ms for a trader, down from about 18 ms each.
- Shared styles. Card styles are shared between every card of the same colour and shape, so a full stash costs a handful of styles, not hundreds. Mythic cards keep their own, because their rainbow animates them.
- No redrawing. The frame, grain, headers and bevels are drawn once and redrawn only on resize or hover. There are no extra nodes and nothing runs per frame.
- Trader selection no longer rebuilds the lists: it just moves the gold frame and fills the inspector.
- New test: checks pooling, hover, drag and drop through pooled cards, the stash grid doubling as a grave's, rainbows not stacking, insured marks, and trader selection and tabs.
VAEL is a co-op dark fantasy extraction dungeon crawler for PC, in active development. Get playtest news by email, or read the wiki.