A strange idea of mine for an inventory system i guess (weird stack based inventory)

Kritikill

I've seen inventory systems discussed lately and i have my own idea, while I'm not sure if its good or bad I still want it out there just in case...
The idea is basically sort of a stack based inventory that can fit at least one of each item in the game (kinda)
it works kinda like this:

you can have 1 stack of every single item in the game, let's assume the game has 10 items for the sake of simplicity.
it works kind of like if you had

---

_________________________________________________________
|.....INVENTORY - search for item:_____________...................|
|.filters: weapons/ingredients/potions/food/whatever........|
|.more filters: rarity or something/price/blahblahwhatever..|
|.sort by: alphabetically/rarity/price/coolnessidklol.............|
|________________________________________________________|
|..Cool Sword 1/1............................................................. |.._..|
|..tomato 4/60...................................................................|..|| |
|..healing potion 1/10.......................................................|..|| | <-- supposed to be a scroll bar
|..simple bow 1/1..............................................................|..|| |
|..iron ore 102/2000..........................................................|..|| |
|..apple 5/20.....................................................................|..--..|
|..magical magic thing 1/20.............................................|......|
|..potion of strength 1/3....................................................|.....|
|..some rare useful drop 1/2.............................................|.....|
|_________________________________________________________|
|.......more menu stuff maybe idk............................................|
__________________________________________________________

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as you can see there are 9 items in this scuffed inventory i made, but as i said there are 10 items in the game in total, lets say the tenth item is a mana potion with a max stack of 5, but since the player has none of them the inventory
won't show "mana potion 0/5" since it's just clutter.

with this inventory system you won't ever run into random garbage issues since it can contain every single item in the game, but every item has its own stack size which should also make stuff easy to balance later on, apples op? reduce max stack size!, 1 cool sword isn't enough? make the max stack size into 2.
i think it would also be pretty cool in the end game, where people would have lots of items and still have a nicely sorted inventory.
imagine this in a game with hundreds or thousands of items, that's why it must have good item filters and a search bar too.
hopefully one of the developers sees this idea, even its bad I'm just happy its floating in some dev's mind just in case.

Ludullu

I expect this for storage, not for inventory. Definitely don't want infinity bottomless inventories.

Kritikill

NiKr wrote: »

I expect this for storage, not for inventory. Definitely don't want infinity bottomless inventories.

maybe you could start with smaller max stack sizes and increase them by a certain percentage every 5 levels or so.
this isnt actually infinite as you cant have like 5 billion "iron" or something, you can just have room for any kind of item like this, i think the weight systems or amount based systems are starting to get kind of old and have no real gameplay value usually, and since this is a game this inventory system should not necessarily be realistic, but it definitely should be useful, comfortable, and fun.
so i still think its something to think about.

Ludullu

Kritikill wrote: »

so i still think its something to think about.

It won't serve its purpose though. You can drop gatherables and processed goods on death. So no sane person would ever utilize the "you can carry any item in the game at the same time" function. At which point any dev time required to have this kind of inventory system and make it work properly would be uselessly spent.

But I do support this kind of system for storage, because I'm a damn hoarder and want all the things.

Depraved

I like it in other games but idk if it will be a good fit for ashes, since people could just fill their inventory with garbage just to have a lower chance of dropping something valuable on death

Azherae

Depraved wrote: »

I like it in other games but idk if it will be a good fit for ashes, since people could just fill their inventory with garbage just to have a lower chance of dropping something valuable on death

This. There's a few other issues with it, though the implementation is possible, it slows down some optimization, and depending on your server architecture you really want to optimize inventory transactions quite heavily.

On the other hand, sometimes the only reason you need to do that is because you were using a weight based system in the first place, so it's complicated to judge.

As for the 'searching' aspect, sometimes it already works like this. It's somewhat easier to just tag 'all the inventory a player owns anywhere' as theirs and then just update 'which container or storage that item is in' because then you're just changing a specific flag, but this can ofc lead to duping in certain cases and ironically 'avoid it' in others.

I don't think one would want stack limits in your storage systems though.