This is something that I’m currently in the middle of developing, however I’d like to hear user feedback before I get too far in this.
I look at the Inventory screen, and while it works just fine for the typical 80-character-by-24-character default display, there’s large amounts of wasted space when you enlarge it. Everything is printed in only two columns, with a rather limited width, so a large amount of the horizontal space you get goes to waste.
My first proposal was to create a sort of grid view, wherein there’s only one column, but items in the same category would populate to the right before going any further down. However, as “wielded weapon(s)” only had one item in it, there was a lot of wasted space there, and trying to reformat how an item is displayed ended up creating a huge mess (in both code and the game screen).
What I’m proposing NOW is to give each category its own column (with wielded and worn occupying the same vertical space). Each column would be of a fixed width (perhaps 35 characters wide, I’m making up numbers) so the original sizing would more closely match the current state of the interface (and/or the category filtering presented in the AIM), however a larger game window would allow for the user to view more of their (potentially expansive) inventory without sifting through pages due to the inefficient use of screen space. Nothing else (such as item printout) would change.
In multidrop mode, the column that usually appears for the stuff you’re dropping would become it’s own column on the far left, which is always visible.
For example:
┌───────────── Wielded ─────────────┬────────────── Tools ──────────────┬────────────── Food ───────────────┬────────────── Books ──────────────┐
│ m ++ burnt out Louisville Slaught │ a matchbook (20) │ n \. vacuum-packed veggie chunk ( │ k To Serve Man │
│ │ │ │ │
├────────────── Worn ───────────────┤ │ │ │
│ d ++ pair of socks │ │ │ │
│ f || pair of winter boots │ │ │ │
│ a \. boxer shorts │ │ │ │
│ b ++ jeans │ │ │ │
│ │ │ │ │
│ │ │ │ │
etc etc
Thoughts, concerns, rants, raves, and/or jeers?
