A New Inventory

The save/load feature has exacerbated the inventory management problem. The item drop rate is kinda high, and players generally tends to hoard items. I feel like the inventory UI (one of the earliest feature implemented) is becoming more and more inadequate.

Meet the new icon-based UI: (The icons themselves are still more or less placeholders at this point.)

Here is what an inventory might look like after some use. Note it is possible to leave holes and create your own "island" of items for convenience. It is still pretty messy and hard to find stuff right?

That's where the filters comes in. It darkens/dims non-criteria items rather than creating a sub-list of items that met the criteria (Ill explain the rationale at the end).

Pretty good, but we can do better with sorting:

SortA does an alphabetical sort. It's meant to be used in conjunction with the filters:

SortB does a sort by type, then alphabetically:

The motivation behind the dim/highlight approach instead of sub-list approach for filters is because the sub-list approach leads into some non-intuitive and ill-defined behaviors. Let me explain via example:

Suppose if you have an inventory of 10 items. You apply a filter of some sort that leaves you with a window of 4 items. You swap the position of item 1 with item 4 in the filtered view. What should the unfiltered list of items look like? Or even worse, what if you drag item 1 to an empty slot in the filtered view, say slot #7. What should happen once filter is switched off (or changed to a different filter)? Keep in mind that slot#7 in the "real" list is occupied but is empty on the filtered view. It's not very obvious, is it? There are several possible arrangements depending on my implementation.

I believe this un-intuitiveness of filters is the culprit behind many "item disappeared" reports.

The other thing I am doing along with the new inventory UI is an upgrade of the internal inventory system. The original inventory system had some design deficiencies, for example, not able to properly support "holes" in the inventory, among other things. I was able to workaround the problems, but it is getting increasingly cumbersome to support new features. So a refactor is in order. Anyhow, it is almost done, I am only mentioning it in case bugs related to items and inventory pop up in the next build.