Spell Library Upgrade: Search

[Nekoatl]

Searching for (part of) the name of a spell lists spellbooks that contain that spell, although this feature has been deprecated by the awesome spell library feature. If a spellbook has not been identified, those spellbooks will not appear in the search, and if it has been identified, the spells are already in the player's spell library, so the only way this search feature will produce results now is if a second copy of that spellbook has been generated, in which case the result will be hidden because the book is a useless item. The problem is, searching for a spell name to quickly check if that spell is available for memorization will now yield a false negative if the spell has been generated in exactly one book. Of course, players can simply scan through their spell library, but as a player's library grows, so does the time required to perform such a check. I can think of 3 approaches to restore the ability to check quickly, listed in ascending order by user-friendliness and development effort required:

1) Don't destroy books when adding spells to the library. If the spellbooks still exist, they'll still show up in the search. This would require players to expand the search to include useless items and may encourage some players to check spellbook descriptions to see the actual name of the spell.

2) Modify search to lists known spells instead of spellbooks, e.g. "Corona (library)", possibly even going so far as "Corona (memory)" for memorized spells.

3) Add a search feature to the spell library to list matching spells. This wouldn't be able to take advantage of the existing search UI, but would be more intuitive.

Any one of these 3 methods could potentially allow the immediate memorization of the spell, since the spell wouldn't show up in the search results without first having been added to the spell library.

[advil]

The spell library already has a search feature, hit Ctrl-f while in the M screen.

[Nekoatl]

Nice! But, there should probably be a note like "CTRL+F to search by name or school", as other UI pages list available hotkeys.

[gameguard]

the option 2 on OPs post is what i would like to see. The search from spell library is great, but that is one more key press. Why not just show the spell in normal search too and indicate that its from your library, and let you memorize directly from there if so.

Edit: Main problem is the current situation males you search twice for spells you may want. You search your library for a spell. Dont have it. Now you search the floor for the same spell in case it was in a shop.