A truly intuitive inventory system, is it possible?
Type
Improvement
Description
Preface:
I find myself a little baffled by the inventory systems of some roleplaying games these days, doubly so by Neverwinter Nights 2. Now with the vendor and the loot windows, we have a clean list of items, it's easy to read what the items are and to scroll through them. However, the player bags are quite different, utilising four blocks of icons.
I could understand this if this were cohesive but even the magic bags seem to utilise the same system as the clean loot window, by default. This is simply odd. I'm surprised that that system isn't available for the player bags at least as an accessibility option, as for a person with either poor sight or a poor memory (both of which I have) it might be helpful. I find the default player bags to be a little unintuitive and cumbersome, so I try to get magic bags as soon as possible but they're far more rare in the game than they should be.
The new magic bag sizes in the latest patch do help but I have an idea I think might be even better.
The Idea:
What if the player bags used the same system of display as the loot bags? Where the item names are visible and thus finding particular items in a more speedy manner would be less painful. Instead of having that block of icons there with the four-button selector at the top, it could simply be a loot window. Yet this brings up other questions ...
The loot window doesn't exactly sort anything, yet the vendor does (into neat little categories, no less) and poking at the store.xml, I had an idea about this. I'm not exactly good enough with Neverwinter Nights 2 yet to implement this myself and therefore I don't even know if it's possible but picture this: Instead of the four bag buttons, there would be buttons which are tiny versions of those the vendor has. Clicking on one would show the items of that category that the player has.
So clicking on the armour button would show the player's armour, with the list of the armour category sorted in the same way (possibly by the same code) as the vendor sorts its display.
If there is no list sorting code on vendors, perhaps a simple filter could be introduced to put the displayed items into alphabetical order or something like that.
Another flaw in this idea I realise is that concentrating on the categorisation for a moment, the categorisation itself could be clever illusion of sorts. I would imagine it would be simpler to implement a real categorisation system rather than kludging something like that togther though and if the categorisation system is real, it's whether that could translate over to the player's inventory, antoher factor I have no clue about.
Wrapping Up:
I realise that this might be a huge project, depending on what's already available in the Neverwinter Nights 2 API but I find that inventory systems such as the one I've described are often the holy grail in RPGs and MMORPGs. I've observed communities of RPGs which can be modified try to create this kind of organisation for their items with varying degrees of success and considering store.xml, it might just be possible to rework that code into the player inventory, so a lot of the work towards this idea might've been done already. I don't know.
I do believe however that for accessibility alone, this kind of inventory would be an absolute boon to a lot of people, even if it involved a whole bunch of files that had to be spread between the override and the UI, it'd still be wholly worth it in my opinion.
Posted by Alaster Wolf at 2007-01-07 14:41:31 Voted 10.00 on 01/07/07
The idea of grouping/sorting items in the bags would be a great thing. It would help a bit if there would be more bags (with less item capacity) so that at least you can group items by bags.
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