Consumable Animation

[ac-arcana]

Some games play an animation when you consume an item, for example a med kit. This animation can be interrupted by other actions and must be completed before the consumable actually takes effect. Thoughts on this for Cogito?

[Phazorknight]

Was thinking about this too, but a lot of the decisions on how to implement this are very game-specific
(interrupts being one thing, but also what happens with active wieldables, carried objects, etc etc).

Nonetheless I'd like to attempt this one day.
Would probably approach it something like this:

• New inventory item class (something like AnimationConsumable)
• Parameters that define what can and cannot be interrupted on use with some booleans.
• When used, other actions etc are checked and -depending on setup- interrupted, carryables dropped, wieldables unequipped, etc.
• Consumable use animation plays and it's defined other effects happen.

[ac-arcana]

Just brainstorming in the approach. An alternative approach might be to make the consumable as a wieldable instead? It should technically be mostly doable with this method already, shouldn't it?

[Phazorknight]

Yes, for sure. It depends on what kind of behavior you want, but using wieldables is definitely an option.
You'd probably want to set it up to chain stuff like equip → primary use → unequip, then also add some logic to reduce the quantity of the inventory item.

[brian-holsters]

I'd go even further and make everything wieldable honestly, with the default secondary_action being to throw the item.

[Phazorknight]

Now looking at how the Wieldable_Throwable was realized, could use it to create a WieldableConsumable as I'd probably call it.
@brian-holsters I could see the WieldableConsumable having the behavior you described, but I won't change every item to this behavior. For me, this falls under game-specific design, so I'll leave this up to devs on what kinda item behavior they want to use.