Jolt Country

I don't know how many of you have taken a gander at the text games available over at skotos.net (sign up for a 30 free account if you haven't), but the interface I've seen used has at least one cool feature...in the bottom right corner is a display showing the current area of the map you're in, with a red X denoting your position. Clicking on this partial map (I think it's a 48x48 graphic they use, but there's one for every part of the map you may end up in) pops up a map of the entire level (I'm using the layout from Castle Marrach as an example, but I know it's used in at least one other (upcoming) game, "Lovecraft Country."

I'd just like to know if such a thing is possible in Hugo.

It's possible to do a Skotos-ish layout of sorts, probably, but there are currently two things that I can think of:

1) The Hugo "main" window is the width of the screen, always. This is for historical/technical/porting reasons and should probably be remedied at some point, but that's the way it is now. So Hugo game screens to date have been horizontally separated vs. vertically.

2) You can do mouse input, but not while the player input is active. There are a couple of approaches you could take to deal with this, probably, such as having a single-key command like >M activate the menu, etc. It's just not as graceful as the integrated input line/mouse input the Skotos screen seems to have. Or, you could put menu choices in the context menu similarly to how Necrotic Drift does it. Again, however, this isn't portable across all platforms.

--Kent