I’ve been through a lot of iterations of this, and discussed with a lot of other people, but I think this is the best system to implement. It’s a bit difficult to describe, but pretty intuitive to use. It’s a category-based fixed assignment double-key-access paging system. For these images, I’ve defaulted to assuming the categories will be containers, but this is NOT a core part of the proposal, and is based on the assumption that we may end up doing container-linking at some point. The proposal works just as well if the categories are the kind we have already have, but allows for a trivially easy switch to container linkage if we end up implementing that at some point.
First, a description of the interface. In the top left is the menu title, and in the top right your weight concerns. If we use classic categories, inventory volume will also be located here as well.
In the bottom left corner is the buttons you’ve already pressed. First, the action key you used to access the inventory, and then any keys you’ve used to narrow things. Numbers come before letters, with the numbers represented the categories. More than 9 categories means additional categories will be prepended by zero (and, as an example of expansion, ADDITIONAL categories, however, unlikely, would be prepended by 00, and then 000. Not something we probably need to worry overmuch about though. Category 10 (which would come after category 9) would be written as 01. Category 15 would be 06, and category 19 would be 001.
In the bottom right corner is the current page, total number of pages, and paging keys you can press to do stuff, if needed. [<] pages down, and [>] pages up.
To select an item, you first press the key or keys for the related category, which will then narrow the screen to just items in that category. There may still be paging on this screen, though it is unlikely. When letters are assigned, if you have more than 52 items in this category, additional items will be prepended by 0, just like with the category screen, and if you have more than 104, 00, and so on. This seems relatively unlikely, though. But if you pick up 53 items in a category, the 53rd item picked up will be given the assignment “0a”. If you drop the first 52, it will still be “0a”, and you will press “0a” to access it.
When items are picked, they are added to this screen by taking the earliest available letter in that category, lowercase first. They are displayed alphabetically, however, not by this assigned number. Items will have a slight “memory” for this letter, and go back to it if dropped and picked back up (and the letter hasn’t since been taken), though this is unlikely to have much of an impact except on those who use throwing.
You can also assign “hotkeys” to certain items, giving them a letter. You can then access those items WITHOUT choosing a category - your hotkeyed items will be listed first as well as in their category and given direct letter assignments of your choice to access them. Items will always remember your hotkeys, and the hotkeys will stay assigned even if the item is dropped (visually, it will be greyed out) and picked back up, or changes normal access letter. The hotkey binding will only end if the item is destroyed or you manually change the hotkey.
Hitting an invalid value will be ignored. The backspace key will drop the most recent input.
When dropping items, if you have more than one in a stack, it will query how many you would like to drop. Either type in a number and hit enter to drop that amount, or simply hit enter (or the right number, or a larger number) to drop all of them.
