BattletechModders / BattletechModders/Abilifier

Feature Suggestion: Improve display of pilot skills in pilot Barracks/Contract card

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Dominant language
C#
Stars
5
Forks
4
PR merge metrics
No merged PRs in 30d

Description

By default, Abilifier maintains vanilla BattleTech's use of only 3 slots for skill icons in the pilot card that is used in the barracks and Lance deployment screen:

![Vanilla lance setup screen](https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/Cktyb1Ufyx2uKYSAIWBvmx-dQw8=/0x0:2822x1594/1200x0/filters:focal(0x0:2822x1594)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/10712417/lance_1.JPG)

In vanilla, this works, because there's a cap of 3 skills per pilot. However, as the number of combinations goes up, this behavior becomes less useful:

![MechWarrior with multiple skills and a pilot card only showing the first 3 abilities they have](https://staticdelivery.nexusmods.com/mods/2388/images/647/647-1674829265-1937699596.png)

The first 3 skills of each pilot will be displayed, which may or may not be the most informative ones when it comes to selecting a pilot for a mech.

Expanding the icons to 4 is not practical, as at least one mod (MechAffinity) uses the empty space for a hover trigger for a popup.

Potential ways to improve this*:

- Exclude certain AbilityDefs from counting towards this via ID exclusion list
- Have a toggle in mod.json to display the skills with the 3 highest `"ReqSkillLevel"`
- Some kind of popup with a text only list of assigned skills?

*Theoretically, setting some of these to `"IsPrimaryAbility": false` would fix things, but that would defeat the point of making sure the player is aware of all the major pilot skills in the level up screen.

Contributor guide

No contributing guide indexed for this repository

Research direction

No files, tests, or entry points are named. Start by locating the pilot card used in the Barracks and Lance deployment screen, then compare the proposed exclusion list, highest-ReqSkillLevel toggle, and text-only popup alternatives. Done is not defined because the issue does not choose an approach.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
csharp
Domain
game-dev
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
30/100

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