Further thoughts on inventory and controls

boni and I had a discussion about the inventory and interaction controls with the conclusion that the interface is currently still not intuitive and simple enough.
The main idea was to get rid of the two-hand-system (old thread from Matthias) and have the right-click for interaction with the landscape to increase analogy to the inventory interface.

The idea is now as follows:
You have one inventory object selected at all times - and you can use it like your are currently doing with [Left-Mouse-Button].
You can switch between your current and last used item via a hotkey (for example Q), which should make up for the sword-and-shield situation. (like the quickswitch CounterStrike and other ego-shooters have)
This also allows the inventory to be moved to the bottom of the screen, for better mapping with 1-9.

What to do with the right mouse button?
The right mouse button would replace the current interaction control (Space + Number).
Clicking would open a wheel-menu (similar to the old contents menu, more more into this direction) containing all actions that the Clonk can execute at the time (context sensitive like the actionbar: picking berries, grabbing a lorry, untowing from the rope tower, …).
Space would still be a quick-access key for interacting with lorry/chest etc - possibly not for more sophisticated actions like plucking berries, though.
Notice that the location where you click does not make any difference to what the menu contains (except from possibly a “show info for this object” entry). The middle of the menu opens at the mouse position though. This means you only have to click and drag the mouse a bit into a direction.

What to do with the hand animations we have?
Since there is the notion of a “last used object”, that object can be shown in the other hand and carried there leisurely.
When you use the “switch to last object” key, the idle hand would become active.
That would also make the shield-and-sword-situation more appealing visually (like it currently is).

This means we’d also implement an animation-layer for the hands into the animation system. As it is now, every weapon has to differentiate the hand it’s in and call the corresponding animation, which is really bothersome. In the future the weapon would just tell the animation-system to play the “SwordSlash” animation, and the animation-system would play the left or right hand animation for it, depending on the active hand.