Definitely a fun idea. The item management in game is absolutely marvelous already.
But thinking back about the former ideas in this post, especially the ‘container in container’ problem got a good solution.
While games like DayZ and other ones are already working with a type of inventory management for each container seperately (A good start) it would make sense to have a similar system in CDDA as well. Sure, there can be some tedium if done ‘wrong’ or rather… not properly, but it would add a lot of feeling to the game, especially from the survival standpoint.
Since right now if a container is destroyed, the items are randomly choosen which fall to the ground is more then annoying, quite often even deadly for no good reason, there should be a change to be able to organize your inventory in a way where one can stop this problem.
The solution I thought up is actually rather simple for the player, but I don’t know how hard it would be to implement:
Each container has their own volume and is a bracket or special spot in the inventory. It shows how much it can contain, and while having a starting volume it changes accordingly to the items added. It would give a player the ability to take a second backpack and store it in a backpack for instance, but only as long as it’s empty, or at least not filled up a lot since it would move over the volume limit of the holding container.
This prevents endless container ‘stacking’ for one part, as well as giving the ability to choose freely where the contents are stored. Got 2 Backpacks, one heavily damaged and one in mint condition? Important items into the good one, not so important ones into the ripped.
This definitely needs a sort of management system as well, my idea would be a sort of labeling system, for instance a plastic chunk, one charge of a soldering iron (to melt it together when attaching it) and a permanent marker, spray or anything like that gives the ability to rename the said Item into whatever is wanted.
This would not only bring an end to the tedium of endless inventory management, but also deepen the immersion into the game whole by a lot, and given the already present interface should be only a minor undertaking for it, probably scripting the framework is the hardest and most time intensive part as only a basic system is present at the moment.
Together with the ‘visual’ outfit screen it would be much much more accessible for new players, as one of the most common problems by watching others playing the game is something overly simple: forgetting where one item is and searching it for a uselessly long time.
