Inventory system

[fusion44]

Hey all,

I'm currently thinking how to solve bug #43 (http://85.25.66.224/issues/43). Its not hard to solve, but it shows also some problems with our current inventory system.
Why shouldn't it be allowed to have a medium sized item in the next bigger sized slot? Its kind of unintuitive that you have to let a valuable medium sized item lying on the ground,
while you have free big sized slots in the inventory. We could unify the system and assign each size different size values. I've made a small drawing to illustrate what I mean:


I'm not sure how this would work out, as we'd allow many many more items to be carried around. CEGUI supports such a system already:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMXgAM3y7MY

I don't see this as a high pressure issue, but something to keep in mind when we redesign the UI. What do you think?

[vyguera]

Four solutions come to my mind:

• Allow to add an item to a bigger or equal size slot, but not only this case but normal cases, also when dragging and dropping.
• Just not allow putting items in bigger slots.
• Make the same solution as in Diablo or Torchlight, where you have to manage the space. This is your solution.
• All slots equally size, one item per slot and no difference between small, medium and big items. Although you can do this in all solutions especcially for this you could pile an ammount of the current small items in the same slot, like potions or scrolls, from one to, for example, 20 units. Solution used in Guild Wars 2 or World of Warcraft.

Nevertheless, I suppose that using three kind of inventories (small, medium and big) is a design question you did some time ago and you chose this one becouse it's different to others and somehow the attractiveness is precisely the novelty.

[dezGusty]

I think the inventory was at some point done in a Diablo approach. I paricularly remember that I did not have to change tabs to equip the weapon during the training. I would like it better like that, as it makes more sense to carry more small items and give up one big item for that.
I think it was done initially as it was deemed easier to implement. But I'm not aware of any discussions on the design from that period.

Anyway, I support an update of the inventory system to make it more Diablo/Torchlight like. (Maybe make it more generic altogether).

[vyguera]

I can think of a small variation of third solution. It would be the same but some kind of foldable and/or moldable (in a real world) items, like clothes, could change its shape addapting it to an adjacent square or by compressing it, so it wouldn't be either rectangles nor squares.

This solution would possibly increase the probability to completely and automaticaly fill the inventory without human intervention. Nevertheless, items image would be shown deformed in the inventory. As a solution its image could also be shown in its description and/or more image could be created for every deformation case.

Personally I don't specially like this solution because of the image deformation but its there and might be the most voted.

[Jorge Avila]

Why not use a simple inventory? we might use the tipical 1 item 1 slot inventory, no big, small or medium slots.

[fusion44]

We already have the current system. I think it'd be more work to make it simple, than enhance it a little.
And I also kind of like that it adds some kind of depth to the game play.