Cogmind Beta 12 Feature Voting (Patreon)

It's time to have your say in Cogmind development! Okay, aside from the usual complaints, suggestions or begging ;)

As usual, the winning entry will be among the features/content included in the next major release (Beta 12):

• Full mouse UI for machine hacking: A set of mouse-driven menus would be added giving keyboard-free access to every single machine hack, including all (known) manual Trojans/brute force hacks. Technically this menu system would also be available and of use to keyboard players as well, listing every option. This feature would be optional, and by default probably on for Adventurer/Explorer and off for Rogue.
• Revamped combat log: The combat log was thrown together shortly after the 7DRL in 2012 to satisfy player requests, not really designed for Cogmind's modern form. I'm honestly not sure how it would specifically be improved (I don't even use it myself, much less want to suggest that people read a bunch of even more cramped text rather than watching what happens on the map...), but there have been multiple calls to do that in the past, so everyone can offer further suggestions if this is chosen, which I'm sure would be quite a process of its own.
• Inventory filtering: Quickly filter your inventory contents by type or other parameters, to reduce the number of items shown there and find things more quickly. (This is an older pre-Beta 11 concept, which may no longer be all that worth it considering that inventory sizes are much more reasonable now, but I'll leave it on the list anyway.)
• Item database: Although the current item gallery provides access to discovered item info, it was originally intended purely for ASCII art viewing (the first versions didn't even allow the info window!), thus it isn't great for quickly looking up info about items since that wasn't what it was designed for (although note that you can hit the first letter key of a target item's base name to skip to that section in the gallery!). A new interface would make it much easier to explore known items. (As of Beta 10 this may no longer be very high priority considering aoemica built the amazing Cog-Minder, but again I'll leave this on the list in case you want to express support for it.)
• Built-in lore searching: A new in-game interface would make it possible to search for references within the lore, and if feasible maybe even highlight key terms and make those interactive as well.
• In-game score history data and leaderboards: Instead of scorehistory.txt (which is now ancient and most people probably don't know about or use it, or just use the website...), stat overviews of future runs would be available via a new interface in the Records section  (including sorting by score rank or time). With this I'd also try to add in-game global leaderboard support.
• Achievement progress indicators: Checkable progress towards unearned achievements in the current run, list of win achievements still available in the current run, list of achievements that will be earned if the run is won, and more.
• In-game access to most advanced.cfg options: The majority of Cogmind's options are actually in this external text file (and described in the manual), but a separate menu system would be added to give easier access to most of them.
• Full-screen "overmap": View the entirety of a map all at once (or almost an entire map in the case of very large ones). Would likely be compatible with the new map comments feature. I've talked about this and showed a preliminary demo on Patreon before.
• Revisit garrison interiors: Add new garrison layouts, as well as a chance to encounter random events there. (I've wanted to do this for quite a while, but it always gets deprioritized compared to other more relevant content, since this would be pretty involved on its own.)
• Player-submitted item/mechanic: We've done this once before, but if you'd like, for Beta 12 we could again have all of you submit ideas for a new item or mechanic, which like last time I'd vet for feasibility and write into implementation proposals, then everyone gets to vote on the one to be included in the game. This is actually how we got Siege mode back in the day :P

Everyone is encouraged to vote for more than one option. Voting is open and ongoing until I cut it off at some point, probably some weeks away since there's a lot of other stuff going on in the meantime.

Remember that anything that doesn't make it might still become part of the game one day, it'll just take [much] longer, or can be voted in for the next release, since I generally revive the same list, though sometimes with a few removals or additions...

News

The previous post was also a poll, that one just gauging patron preference for Unchained vs. Scraptown:

Scraptown led throughout, though it was somewhat surprising how Unchained always held at about 40% of the total. Looks like now we pretty much have two reasons to start with Scraptown, not just due to majority support, but also the reasons outlined in that post.

Beta 11.1 is mostly done, just gotta decide a feature cutoff for that and release it. Since it's likely we're going to have an 11.2 anyway, the exact cutoff probably isn't too important, though .1 will be mostly just fixes, while .2 might be more tweaks and a bit of new stuff, whatever I couldn't quite fit into Beta 11 itself. In the interest of getting fixes out there in public, let's say some time later this week.

Also this week I'll be streaming 7DRLs. Not sure which ones yet, but having finished streaming my latest Cogmind win (with a new build type!), it's finally time to get on those and see what kinds of interesting roguelike creations came out of the jam this year.