maiden mica
For a few years now, the amount of powerups available in the game has been rising without end in sight. Event after event, storage is becoming more and more of an issue partially because of them - and because of how they won't stack together coming from different sources.
There is also the issue of <=5min powerups, pressing you to constantly refresh them while farming and keeping your inventory filled with them. A suggestion that has been made multiple times (see https://discord.com/channels/751016369516052550/1233794640939843594 and https://discord.com/channels/751016369516052550/1332901562808275017) was to make a menu to allow for automatic use of certain powerups.
I wish to push this idea further: create a menu where powerups can be stored, with no stack limit. It wouldn't really function as an inventory, as once the powerup is put inside, it cannot be taken out - essentially becoming soul-linked. But it would also fix the stacking issue, since now we only care about two things: the ID of the item, and the amount. It would simply be a map of these two things.
For every stored powerup, a small panel with the item icon, name, how many are stored, a button to activate once, and a toggle button to enable/disable auto-use.
This would massively help with inventory space, and be a huge quality of life improvement.
And should there be in the future a limit on how many powerups can be used at the same time, simply add that limit to how many auto-uses can be activated at once as well 👀
As for the implementation of the auto-use, this doesn't even need to add more work on the server - just have the client send a packet saying "hey I wanna use this powerup" whenever it receives a packet telling it that said powerup has run out (or whatever way the client knows when to remove the buff in the list of active items)
For powerups with a cooldown, two possible ways to handle it: either do not allow them to be stored in this menu (easy, little to no extra work required, and shouldn't be too much of a drawback as there isn't a lot of them), or make the whole thing trigger and obey the associated item cooldown (not sure how much work that would be 🤷)
autumn patio
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