3D Third Person Interaction Ideas

Xer0botXer0

Senpai
Good day Everyone,

I'm thinking of a means to interact with the environment..

Anyone provide some light on how Skyrim/Witcher handles interactions ?

From what I recall you look at something and if it's in range then text appears with a key to show you howto interact..

But what if there's multiple means of interacting with something ??
 

Khao

Member
When you say "multiple means of interacting with something", what kinds of interactions are you talking about?
 

NeoShade

Member
The simple answer would be list a key for each possible interaction:

Code:
Press [E] to open door.
Press [R] to knock on door.
Press [T] to kick door down.
Of course, you're going to quickly run out of keys to press. Screen real-estate is also a concern.

You could instead have an "interact menu" that the player can scroll through. When the player approaches a door and presses the interact key, a list of options appear on screen that they can scroll through and choose from. This means that multiple interactions can all be controlled using only standard menu navigation keys, which are probably already mapped. The big problem here is that it could be immersion breaking, as whenever you want to interact with something, you have to deal with a menu.
 

Lumenflower

Yellow Dog
I'd suggest that if you have more than two actions you could take, you should implement them into whatever dialogue system you have in place (if you have one that is). If not, give players a list and let them scroll with the arrow keys and choose their preferred action from it, as @NeoShade suggested. I don't think it would break immersion as long as the player weren't having to do it constantly. If every single door pulls up a menu asking how you want to open it, then yes you need to consider a different approach.

Dark Souls offers another approach which is to have one button to interact, and a second to toggle which action you'd like to take. This is helped by the fact that the game is designed in such a way as there aren't a huge number of things you can interact with at once. For example if the player is standing in front of a bonfire and there is a message on the floor as well, they can press the action button to rest at the bonfire, or they can press the toggle button to instead show the cue for reading the message. Then if they press the action button, they will read the message instead. I've never seen three actions happening on top of one another, but I imagine you could just press the toggle (though it's no longer really a 'toggle') button to cycle through available options without opening a separate menu.
 
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