How to defeat 75 items restriction

[Sonny]

Hey. Everyone knows how bugging this item restriction is, partially if you (like me) carry ton of medicines, weapons and ammo during your raids… I had one of my rare genius insight moments, and came up with this:

Right now, the inventory is a mess of small letters, big letters and symbols, and is limited to 75 items, since there are no more letters and symbols on keyboard.

My idea is partially inspired by devious way how devs managed to beat number of items on one tile, ie adding more characters after intial letter. I also hate to press certain key (people call it Shift, I call it nuisance) and frantically search for symbols while messing up if the item is big letter or small… So, here it is, number-letter system.

Game would start using usual (SMALL!) letters, a-z. After running out of alphabet’s small letters, it would add one number in front of a letter. Let me draw it:

Weapons: (x is the item’s name)
a x
b x
c x
d x
e x

Food:
f x
g x
h x
i x
…
You get the idea. Now, after running out of small letters, it would add numbers:
…
x x
y x
z x
1a x
1b x
1c x
1d x
…
1x
1y
1z
2a
2b
2c
…
Up 'till 9, then 0 (zero). This gives us 260 characters to work with, and if someone is able to get over 260 items, then it can start using big letters. Choosing of item would be done by pressing one key in case of small letter, and number, letter (like 1,a) in second case, without need to confirm anything with Enter.

So, what are your opinions?

[woflsipder]

I don’t care how or why , i just want the item limit dead and suffering for eternity in the pits of hell.

[i2amroy]

We’re actually juggling some prepatory stuff that needs to be done to remove the item limit right now (namely getting the game to reassign old inventory letters instead of choosing new ones). Once that’s done it should only be a small step to removing the item limit, especially since the majority of the framework is already in place.

[Inquisitor_Dust]

Didn’t Cataclysm used to have a multiple page inventory? Why not bring that back (or make one, if it wasn’t)? I feel like that’d be much easier than having 100s of different key combinations.

[i2amroy]

Didn’t Cataclysm used to have a multiple page inventory? Why not bring that back (or make one, if it wasn’t)? I feel like that’d be much easier than having 100s of different key combinations.

It already has a multiple page inventory, but that doesn’t mean that each page has it’s own set of characters, rather just that if you have too many items to fit on one page it extends the same list over multiple ones.

[Otaku]

Didn’t Cataclysm used to have a multiple page inventory? Why not bring that back (or make one, if it wasn’t)? I feel like that’d be much easier than having 100s of different key combinations.

Because that would mean that my lighter is not always “?” and that my crowbar is not always “o”.

They are currently working/planning to work on a container system for carried items. So first you would have to open your backpack with “a” then select your lighter with “?” or crowbar with “o”.
This way there is 75*(number of clothing items with inventory space), which turns out pretty high. But I guess if that too is too little than this suggestion might be taken into consideration.

Also the container based system inventory would prevent you from splitting up that shotgun between your pants pockets and your polo shirt.

[Zireael]

I like the idea and it’s good to hear about the fixes.

[kevin.granade]

The leading proposal is very similar to this, specificially:
(by default) it assigns lower-case letters first, then upper-case letters.
Once it runs out of those, it starts assigning lower-case letters with a prefix.
There can be many prefixes, so it can cycle through a lot of them.
Basically it’ll do:
a b c … x y z A B C … X Y Z, 'a 'b 'c … 'x 'y 'z 'A 'B 'Z … 'X 'Y 'Z ;a ;b ;c … ;x ;y ;z

This’ll do um, thousands of inventory items.

By NOT-default, you’ll be able to configure the key assignments.
high-priority-identifiers "abc…xyz"
low-priority-identifiers "ABC…XYZ"
prefixes “,./;’[]-=`”

To have even more focus on avoiding the shift key, you could do something like:
high "abc…xyz"
low “” (NONE)
prefix “,./;’[]-=`ABC…XYZ”

The important thing about this is we’ve been getting reports that some of the readily available keys on an en_US keyboard aren’t so convinient on other layouts, so it needs to be configurable, because YOU know what keys are easy to reach.

We’ll probably switch to using the same system for every interface where you chose from a list of items for consistency.

FYI, the number of characters this allows is the number of items in the identifiers list MULTIPLIED by the number of prefixes, so by default that’s 5211 = 572, even if we skip the capital letters, it’s 2611 = 286, which now that I think of it, we might just go with in general, I think `a is better than A personally, we’ll need to play with it a bit.