Castle Magic lets you detect almost everything else, but for some reason, there's no way to detect a player mouse-clicking or 'X'ing at an object. Why is that? Is there some foundational issue with adding an interaction to a non-interactive object?
The mouse-click isn't even necessary. A simple "Press X To Interact" prompt, like talking to the school trees, would be fine.
Here's an example - On my farm, I have my dog and his "food dish" parked near the front door. If a player stands next to the "food dish", it flashes and plays a "dog barking" sound. If the player finds one of the dog biscuits scattered around the farm, then a player detector or room detector can play another dog barking sound to alert her of a connection between the dog biscuit and the "food dish".
At this point, the way things currently work, I have two choices. I either automatically "give" the dog biscuit to the player (with appropriate effects) or I wait for the player to figure out what trigger I've used to simulate "picking up" the dog biscuit. If I want to be really blatant about it, I put in a jump detector and a sign with the word "JUMP!" on it, which in my opinion is a really silly way to have to do things, or I put in a menu chat detector and wait for the player to experiment with trying to figure out which of the 200 or so menu chat options might cause the dog biscuit to do something, which seems equally silly, IMO.
Any way you look at it, the inability to either flag to the player that "this is an interactible object" or to communicate HOW to interact with it make the whole thing an exercise in frustration on the parts of everyone involved.
Yes, I can "force" the player to pick up the dog biscuit, and that will of course work as far as it goes, but it also removes the most important element of the whole experience, which is that I want the player to CHOOSE to pick up the dog biscuit.
If a Magic Interaction Detector existed that effectively turned every housing item into a potentially interactive item, then there'd be the bonus that the "activate interactive item" treasure card could be linked to the Magic Interaction Detector to automate its associated action if there were circumstances where that was a useful thing to do.
