The 75 objects limit

What is your defence (iam2roy, Pthanlocy and other self organizers) about micromanagement. Having to sort everything yourself would increase the workload of the average survivor without much gameplay improvement. That would be kind of redundant to add (like they discussed with bathroom trips for the survivors a little while ago). What are your thoughts?

Sorting is a preference, and currently, I am quite capable of playing the game with an unsorted inventory. It just takes me a bit longer remembering where the hell everything ended up. Being someone who relies on a lot of tactile-spatial cues to navigate/do basic shit/remember to breathe, placing something myself ensures it’s memorable to me. Micromanagment speeds up item retrieval for me later, and I would rather prepare my belongings beforehand and not bumble about backpack lists later.

For those not caring about it, it would be nice to see items get auto-placed in containers in such a fashion that those containers are filled more or less efficiently. (Since bag-packing can turn into a nasty game of tetris when you’re overburdened and still trying to carry it all, I can see why some would find it tedious.) A sort button of some variety would probably meet most people’s needs, for those not wanting to micromanage more than one or two items that didn’t quite get backpack’d efficiently.

Hell, you could just have a button for inventory overview that lists items alphabetically by their name (not their symbol since some would be assigned twice). As long as the auto-packing did most of the work to squeeze items into inventory so the max amount of stuff fits, alphabetization is a system many people are familiar with and would probably be pretty happy navigating.

Pros micromanagement: useful memory aid, speeds retrieval and planning of item use on short notice by setting up gear in advance (I often forget about items I have not explicitly packed myself).

Pros computer-sorted: max use of available inventory space, more items available, alphabetical list could speed retrieval too. More time spent figuring out what to do with items, less time where to put them. Still able to find things fairly well without pre-meditated packing efforts.

I don’t see any reason both a user-preference sorting system and a auto-sorting system cannot be used. The way I see it working is as follows (assuming storage clothing is treated like containers):

Survivor Todd has on him cargo pants, a trenchcoat, one military rucksack, two backpacks, a belt rig, a fanny pack, and a holster. So 8 containers of clothing.

Without player intervention, auto-sorting is used. One way of doing this is, upon picking up an item, the computer notes the volume of the item and places it in the container with the largest total storage, which would be the military rucksack. If the military rucksack cannot hold the item due to a lack of space, the computer looks at the container with the next highest storage. However, Todd has two backpacks, so which to choose? The computer would choose the one that is lowest alphanumerically, or the lowest letter/symbol (or highest, as long as the computer knows which to pick next). If backpack 1 is d and backpack 2 is e, the computer looks at backpack 1 next, then backpack 2, so on and so forth. If it goes through all the containers the player has and cannot find a suitable container, it returns the message, “You have no room in your inventory for (item)!”

It can just as easily go from smallest storage to biggest, and that’s the more efficient option. The reason I opt for the opposite, however, is that I’m assuming that the player would be dropping his backpacks to fight should he be a melee character or overburdened. As most items grabbed and auto-sorted would be random loot, food, water and other not-immediately important crap, this would allow the player to get rid of as much weight as possible in one drop command, as opposed to having to leaf through his cargo pants to drop those extra batteries he doesn’t need that are pushing him just over the weight limit. I also assume that if a player picks up an item he wants to equip and/or keep close on his character, he would move the item from his backpack to one of his other not-dumped containers, and having it go from biggest to smallest means the player doesn’t have to drop crap out of his other containers to fit the item he wants to keep close. Basically convenience, at the expense of efficiency. If the player wants to micromanage, he can always shift things around in his containers.

An option besides auto-sorting could be player-preference sorting. The way this would work would essentially be a screen similar to that of the one you use to determine what layer of clothing goes over or under what. You have your currently equipped containers visible in columns, and you have a ‘unsorted’ column, which contains all the type assignments of items there are. From here, you are able to move the categories from the unsorted column to your containers, to indicate what your preferences are for which items go where. Drugs to cargo pants, tools to trenchcoat, CBMs to backpack 2, Firearms to military rucksack, etc. Anything the player doesn’t care about, he can leave unsorted. I’m not exactly sure how, but it would be helpful if it were possible for the settings to be remembered so that when a player drops and picks up his rucksack he doesn’t need to reassign the categories that that rucksack had.

Now, three different kinds of situations can occur. The player (Todd still) attempts to pick up a welder. The computer first looks at this sort of preference chart to see if the player has set a preference for tools. The player has set a preference for tools to be placed on his belt rig. The computer checks the volume of the welder vs the belt rig’s available storage. There’s enough room, so the welder is placed in the belt rig and the message, “You put the welder in your belt rig,” is displayed. That’s the first situation. For the second situation, Todd doesn’t have enough room in his belt rig for the welder. The computer then falls back on the auto-sort system as above and his rucksack has enough room. The welder is placed in his rucksack and the message, “You put the welder in your military rucksack.” is displayed. This would alert the player to the fact his belt rig can’t hold the tool and he should either find another spot, make room for it or just leave it where it is. That’s the second situation. For the third situation the player has no room in any of his containers for the item, so the computer checks the preference first, then the auto-sort preference, then returns the message, “You have no room in your inventory for welder!”

Personally, that would seem optimal to me. I wouldn’t have plastic bottles clogging up my cargo pants pockets when I don’t want them there even if I didn’t give a rat’s ass about preference, and when conditions are favorable and I do care about preference, I can get drugs in my pants pockets with my lighters, so I can take a puff or hit to help me out in a close combat situation. I’m not exactly sure what a container inventory would look like, nor do I know where development is at atm in regards to it, but I feel good about the system I mentioned above. YMMV.

Huh.

I rather like that proposed scenario. Highlights nicely the point where computer intervention and player intervention meet up or overlap.

I agree that that would be a nice over lap but her examples are strictly single item pickups. What would the computer tell you if you pick up a crowbar and a steel frame. Lets say the crowbar fits. It displays “You put your crowbar in your backpack”. But the steel frame does not fit. So it would say “You have no room in your inventory for steel frame!”. This is fine with just two objects. But lets say you are picking up your medical supplies from your base, in which case you have over 9000 meds (for example). Would it display all 9000 lines of text, in which case many lines would be lost at the bottom of the text displayer. That would seem a bit much. So do you want to elaborate on your ideas so that the coders reading could get a better sense of what you mean?

If you were picking up a stack of 9000 vitamins it would display “There is no room in your inventory for vitamins [9000]!” If on the other hand you attempted to pick up 9000 different items (Which would probably break even the new container code), then yeah, it would print that message 9000 times. But that’s not really different from what it does now anyways. As for the steel frame, I don’t think it would display a message if you picked up the item with empty hands/it can only be carried in your hands. Rather it would move straight to the “Would you like to drop your X to pick up Y?” message, and if you say yes then it does that and if you say no then it gives you the “There is no room in your inventory for X!” message.

As Raital outlines, we’d want a heuristic-based system by default, supplimented by manual overrides for scenarious we can’t handle automatically. He presents a workable algorithm, is it the one we’ll use? no idea as I haven’t even looked into it yet. But really, if done right we can very easily tweak the algorithm used, and possibly even have different user-settable heuristics for stashing items, so getting it perfect up front is less critical.

What we have to be really careful about is making sure the UI and internal API for it is really good. For UI, I’m thinking the (toggleable with an option) default would be to heuristically stash the item, and the pickup UI would have an override for manually selecting where the item goes instead of using heuristics. (we don’t want to force you to stash the item and then move them, especially since part of the container inventory system is that there are different move costs for putting/getting items in different containers). The pickup UI needs changing already, e.g. adding “pick up X of selected item”, so it’d probably be something similar to that, which is a pain because at some point you might end up with “+5g” or something to pick up five of an item and stash them manually, but the DEFAULT would still be just “g” to pick up all of item g and stash it automatically. If you want to micro-manage everything, I think this would be option-worthy, so you could flip the default to manually chose a container every time you pick something up.

There is a more complex (optional) UI we could add that would let you set preferences for various items, so you could pin an item type to a given container type or possibly even a given container, then that item type would automatically get stashed in the matching container if possible. This is optional because it requires user intervention, though it’s possible we’d implement part of the default heuristic system by populatng a default list, which the player could then modify.

RE: failing a pickup operation, I think we’d want to either pickup as much as you can and then notify you (once) that you’re out of room, or check first and notify you that you can’t pick up everything you’ve selected. Also the pickup UI could have an indicator that lets you know when you’ve selected more things for pickup than you have room for. This really doesn’t have anything to do with containerizing the inventory, it’s a UI issue inherent in selecting multiple items for pickup in one operation.

Hmm, with UI involvement considered, this entire setup seems fairly fleshed out.

I’m excited :B and will wait patiently for other priorities to get dealt with first, of course.