Items are in! They appear both in the inventory and on the ground, and can be used, picked up and dropped. Now, they don't show up though normal game play yet, but they definitely work. I've tested a health potion, and similar effects should be easy.
I'm thinking of modifying the enemies to, instead of always dropping money, having a chance of dropping items up to about the same value... next step for me is to find a way to allow dropping/using items without entering the inventory screen first. I'm thinking I may (at least for the time being), try making the inventory screen come up and then act as though the "d" or "u" key had already been pressed, but we'll see.
What I really need at this point though is a good way to move the items and enemies into external files. I think I may have to either start working on an editor/viewer for the data files, or maybe find a nice, small INI or XML library, as either format would be easy enough to use, although XML is probably overkill for this.
Oh, and before I forget, I also set up a "[l]ook" action that let's you see what all is on the square you're standing on.
[EDIT]: Okay, before I move the enemies into external files, I'm going to start with an internal vector to hold them cause I realized that the external files will be near useless if I don't have a better way to populate the levels than the current "spawn 10 Giant Rats" static setup. So, I'm working on figuring out how to get the game to know about how many of what monster to spawn.
What I've got so far (spoiler'd for length):
It'll need to take not only the strength of the monsters and the player into account, but also the size of the map. I've run a few tests, and the average number of floor tiles in a single, generated map is about 1000. Now, for the time being, I'm going to stick with the (very low) difficultly level provided by the current "10 rats" at the start. So far, the math looks something like this...
There are about 1000 accessible tiles on the map.
The player has an average of 22 health
and his stats average at 7, and total at 35
The rats have 10 health
and their stats average at 3, total at 15
Just for reference, the guards have 15 health
and their stats average at 5, total at 25
A couple rating systems I've come up with:
Add health to the average stat - 29/13/20 (player/rat/guard)
Add health to the total stats - 57/25/40
So the current equation looks like this...
Method 1 (Health+Avg. for difficulty check)
For the rat:
Player*Difficulty_Mod = 1,000*enemy
( 29 )*Difficulty_Mod = 1,000*( 13 )
29*Difficulty_Mod = 13,000
Difficulty_Mod = ~450
For the guard:
Player*Difficulty_Mod = 1,000*enemy
( 29 )*Difficulty_Mod = 1,000*( 20 )
29*Difficulty_Mod = 20,000
Difficulty_Mod = ~690
or if Difficulty_Mod=450, Player has to be ~44
Method 2 (Health+Total for difficulty check)
For the rat:
Player*Difficulty_Mod = 1,000*enemy
( 57 )*Difficulty_Mod = 1,000*( 25 )
57*Difficulty_Mod = 25,000
Difficulty_Mod = ~440
For the guard:
Player*Difficulty_Mod = 1,000*enemy
( 57 )*Difficulty_Mod = 1,000*( 40 )
57*Difficulty_Mod = 40,000
Difficulty_Mod = ~700
or if Difficulty_Mod=440, Player has to be ~90
From the looks of things, method one seems far more balanced. I'm going to sleep on it and think on it some more in the morning... besides, somehow I have to get it to populate it with the proper number of enemies too...