It sounds like you are feeling frustrated because you would like your requests to receive the same degree of enthusiasm and assurance that you have seen others receive? And that you would like more certainty in what the responses are promising?
If it may help, I can give you the facts on what I know to be true about the inventory system, and what, conversely, is simply my hope.
<h4>This is for sure:</h4>We are making all the actions in the game encapsulated and independent of the things that trigger them. So far only the Tweak and Rebuild tools remain to be converted to this "Action" framework. By Monday all the Foldit tools will be "Actions".
We are connecting up those Actions to macros, so that you can create a sequence of Actions that will be performed automatically. This is already functional, to the extent that today I witnessed the creation of a "backbone walk" macro and saw it running in the game.
<h4>This is likely:</h4>Once we have our Actions all nice and encapsulated, it is likely that people will begin thinking about how we can best take advantage of this new infrastructure. The first obvious step I'd imagine would be to make hotkeys assignable, which would require rewriting the way hotkeys are assigned and creating an interface for choosing hotkeys. Perhaps the developer who implemented macros would be the one to take care of this, perhaps not.
The second thing I imagine might happen is to make actions assignable to any mouse button. This would require a more significant addition to the interface to allow you to assign functions to mouse buttons. I know I will push for this, and I imagine that Seth would too, but I cannot guarantee when it will happen, as to the extent that there is a hierarchy of decision-making on the Foldit team, I am at the very bottom of it.
However, I know that there is a nontrivial amount of flux in the way the control scheme is headed, as there have been experiments with a new selection approach as a result of implementing the macros. What this means is that now is probably the best time to suggest and experiment with new control schemes, before it solidifies again.
<h4>This is what I hope:</h4>With such a transition point in Foldit's interface, I can imagine changes as drastic as completely redesigning the lower
left menu with the actions tab to be modular and customizable, to be entirely feasible and likely to occur. The sum of the changes I've mentioned so far - hotkey settings, mouse button settings, and modular actions palettes - make up what I refer to as the "inventory system".
I'm pretty sure that at least some of these inventory system components will be implemented, if not all of them. What I don't know is whether they will be combined in any coherent or organized way, into a unified "system". I also don't know if the appropriate attention will be paid to usability, game design, impacts on level design, graphic design, whatever. I hope that it will be.
The feasibility of your suggested change would only depend on the existence of a way to assign actions to mouse buttons, which I think is very likely to happen, though I don't know when.
But there have been many suggestions for this tool or that tool, to which I have replied that once we get an inventory system set up, those would be great additions. What I envision there is a consistent and more-or-less automated way to take a new Action, created perhaps through a Macro by combining atomic Actions or by a developer implementing a new Atomic action from scratch, and add it to the game packaged with a name, a description, icon, any associated tutorial puzzles (which would require a level editor also) and maybe even a cost in Foldit points (or whatever) that you can earn through playing the game. The new tool would be added to a catalog of tools that would be easily browse-able and search-able both in-game and on the website, and could easily be downloaded to your game, organized into your tool collection and from which you may assign it to a button, hotkey, and/or slot in your actions palette(s).
That's what I'm hoping for. You tell me whether it will ever happen.
"Show me a game of this calibre (sophistication) that uses only one
button, I'll show you an old game or one that isn't terribly successful."
Sure thing: World of Goo. My favorite example.
But yes, the idea is not too restrict players to one button, simply to make it possible. I mean, if I can't even conceive of a one-button mouse control scheme for a game, that's a problem. But in my imagining, that possibility would be a mere side effect of a much greater system scaling to an arbitrary amount of complexity.
