Darchias said:It probably wouldn't be super complicated to have every item have a weight value and a volume value and to have bags with varying capacities for weight and volume, then going with a 'list' style inventory rather than a grid of boxes, but I'm guessing it would mean all the current work on the inventory UI would have to be scrapped. That doesn't really seem feasible at this stage of development. I guess my biggest concern for using weight and volume calculations for inventory is that it would unbalance the crafting professions vis a vis material collections, with Woodworkers and Outfitters being disproportionally affected compared to Blacksmiths and Stonemasons, who already have weight as a larger concern.
Weight is enough of a concern, I don't see volume being particularly important in this case, though admittedly I do rather like the concept of having the magic bags specialize into having more volume or more weight reduction, that's a really interesting idea. It would be an excellent plan... in some other game. I believe it's a little late in development to change the inventory system so thoroughly.
I've seen highlighted text posted by a lot of people in a lot of different threads. The game is at best in its second round of Pre-alpha testing. I would guess that we will be unlikely to see Alpha before July 4th and beta 9-12 months after that. In Pre-Alpha everything is in placeholder/working theory mode so that the core concepts can be tested and iterated upon. Each round of feedback could cause massive changes to the core game much less subsystems that are more or less placeholders that you need some form of functionality out of to access the core mechanics.
The only reason there is as much known about PROTF is because Brad and Co. have a very clear goal and direction as well as historical model to iterate from. Long term though I doubt all that much we have seen from the streams will make it even to alpha much less to launch.
No offense intended toward you at all Darchias, you just touched on one of my personal pet peeves, second only to “x class in EQ was best at y and in PROTF x class needs to still be the best at y”. To your actual statement yes I think the backpack inventory would work best as a list rather than as squares. Easier to sort and search as well as simpler to program and scale based on screen resolution.
The meanings of Alpha, pre-Alpha, and Beta testing has changed significantly over the last decade or so, primarily because different companies use it to refer to different realities of game development. In the traditional view of Alpha-testing, you would be entirely correct in that it is certainly not too late to do a complete UI overhaul if they so chose. However, as game development has gotten more advanced and therefore more resource intensive, dev teams usually become more and more reticent to do drastic system changes.
Likely, the current UI will be fairly close to completely changed by launch. This isn't the difficult part of implementing this system. The complex part comes from the fact that they have to assign a volume and weight to literally every item in the game. This isn't something that can be done automatically considering the complexities of the fictional substances they will doubtlessly make higher-end items out of. Bare minimum, most items will take several minutes to determine their weight and volume each, and there are thousands, maybe even eventually tens of thousands of items in the game. Even using time-saving methods like assigning a density value to fictional metals and such so that it is a percentage modifier off a baseline (All Longswords share a volume, Steel weighs 5.5lb, Adamantine weighs 220% of steel so an Adamantine Longsword weighs 12.1lb.) there has to be double-checking and rechecking to ensure that the weight and volume ratios of differingly shaped items are consistent among materials. There's the complication of what unit of measurement to use for volume that could consume an entire two-hour meeting between at least four people.
There's the complication of shape. Do they use a box around oddly shaped items and calculate the box, or do they use the 'water method' of calculating precise area and use that value? What about size restrictions? A greataxe being held by an Ogre and a greataxe being held by a Halfling obviously shouldn't have the same volume, but if we bring in magically resizing gear (which will obviously be the default. Never a good idea to race-restrict high-level raid drops, after all, unless it's a gimmick generalist piece,) how do you calculate their volume in the inventory? If the Ogre is handed the greataxe by the halfling, is the volume retained until the Ogre equips it, does it's volume remain the same, or does the volume change the instant it enters the possession of the Ogre? If we're talking about volume like it matters, why is the Ogre's inventory the same size as the Halflings? An Ogre-sized backpack would obviously have a much larger volume capacity. Are small races going to be square-cube lawed into having a miniscule inventory in comparison to larger races beyond what their lower Strength would suggest?
What about crafting materials? Now in addition to adding more work onto the poor Crafting devs in order to make sure results aren't any heavier than their components, but you've now made the cost of crafting more heavily tied into the physical size of the piece being crafted. Large armor, crafted for larger races, are now two-to-four times as expensive to make compared to smaller suits. You also tie the hands of the crafting devs when it comes to material requirements for eventual larger crafting projects like barricades, furniture, and vehicles.
When I said it's too late in development to implement the system, I wasn't saying that it was too late the change things. I was saying this system you proposed would need to be built in from the ground floor to even have a chance at working. It's not a complicated bit of script, which is what I said in my previous post, but it's a huge undertaking. If you had proposed this one year ago I would have said it might have been too late to implement. This is a ground floor, basis for an entire game system idea. You can't just throw this in to another game. I'm sorry if I wasn't clear.
Thankfully the team have posted that this will be a much more traditional development cycle rather than the current industry norm of paid early access to a so called alpha. We don’t really agree on how difficult it is to assign volume on items as they are created and only a very small fractions of items have been created. A fairly simple table could be used to populate the volumes as a best fit comparison, about 50 different volumes should cover the majority of items doing things like all longswords have x volume. I would round fairly liberally too just to keep it simple.
As for the sizing I would also do away with large and small armor and weapons. It doesn't really do anything for game play other that limit what players can pick and of the current races only Halfling could really be considered small and Ogre large. Everyone would have equal access to the same backpacks so actual carry capacity would be uniform only the racial starting stats would be different and that’s just a function of racial differences.
Diameter (cm) Milliliter
Pea 0.75 0.22078125
Marble 1 0.5233333333
Shooter Marble 2 4.1866666667
Golf ball 4 33.4933333333
Racquetball 6 113.04
Baseball 7.5 220.78125
Softball 9.5 448.6929166667
Child Soccer ball 16 2143.5733333333
Basket Ball 24 7234.56
Beach Ball 30 14130
I would use a table such this to do a best fit for miscellaneous items and a rough “if I crumple this up” fit to clothing slots. I would then double the cloth volume for leather and chain and triple it for plate . Then I would make a material density chart. When I make an item I select its approximate volume and its material type and I have a weight and volume to put in the item file. The item creator can of course modify this number if there is a reason too but most likely there will not be a need to.
All weapons will have an assigned value but you could honestly steal the d20 OGL break down of Light, One hand, and two hand weapons then the damage type of piercing, slashing or bludgeoning to create a simple 3x3 volume chart for weapons. You can add a spear/polearm category with 2 materials and a volume % of each material. A bow would fit under the 2 hand weapon bludgeoning made of wood.
Between these two tables and possible trade goods that have very easy rectangular volumes you should be able to quickly knock out volume values for everything.
Whilst it would be interesting and I don't want to poop on your idea, it would involve many fundamental changes to a lot of core concepts in MMORPGs, not least the G part. Games are supposed to be fun and fantasy games are supposed to be heroic.
I don't think I'd find it heroic to have to wheel a handcart from encounter to encounter in order to carry all the salvageable/saleable armor and weapons I'll get.
I don't think I'd find it fun to have to organise inventory lists, packing crates and book consignment space on a caravan to get crafting materials to my workshop.
And that puts in mind just one example of the problems if you make one thing 'realistic' when other things aren't: If I have to spend considerable thought and time in organising transportation of crafting materials, but then the actual crafting process is a few button clicks, the crafting practice is 99% moving materials and 1% fun making stuff.
In reality, taking a day to organise and transport materials is only worthwhile because the crafting of a piece of armor might take a week and those materials would keep you going for many weeks. Given we don't want to spend a realistic week game-time making a suit of armor, do we want to spend a long time organising transportation of gear and materials because our backpacks are realistic?
So, unless we want everything else scaled up accordingly, simply changing backpack mechanics is pretty unbalancing, never mind not really fun/heroic. Having even mundane backpacks behave 'magically' is, imho, totally in-keeping and necessary in a fantasy role-playing game. Adding anything like realistic limitations would have massive implications to the rest of the game. It's not just a convenience.
disposalist said:
Whilst it would be interesting and I don't want to poop on your idea, it would involve many fundamental changes to a lot of core concepts in MMORPGs, not least the G part. Games are supposed to be fun and fantasy games are supposed to be heroic.
I don't think I'd find it heroic to have to wheel a handcart from encounter to encounter in order to carry all the salvageable/saleable armor and weapons I'll get.
I don't think I'd find it fun to have to organise inventory lists, packing crates and book consignment space on a caravan to get crafting materials to my workshop.
And that puts in mind just one example of the problems if you make one thing 'realistic' when other things aren't: If I have to spend considerable thought and time in organising transportation of crafting materials, but then the actual crafting process is a few button clicks, the crafting practice is 99% moving materials and 1% fun making stuff.
In reality, taking a day to organise and transport materials is only worthwhile because the crafting of a piece of armor might take a week and those materials would keep you going for many weeks. Given we don't want to spend a realistic week game-time making a suit of armor, do we want to spend a long time organising transportation of gear and materials because our backpacks are realistic?
So, unless we want everything else scaled up accordingly, simply changing backpack mechanics is pretty unbalancing, never mind not really fun/heroic. Having even mundane backpacks behave 'magically' is, imho, totally in-keeping and necessary in a fantasy role-playing game. Adding anything like realistic limitations would have massive implications to the rest of the game. It's not just a convenience.
I actually see a mass/volume based single backpack system to be a lot simpler and faster than 8 primary inventory slots that can hold backpacks which then have both item size limitations and 4-10 volume slots.
Let me put it another way. If we assume that PROTF will have closer to a start of EQ bag options then your average player can turn their 8 volume slots with a max weight of their strength as their carry capacity into 80 unit volumes and a carry capacitiy of 133% of their strength in carry capacity. Bags with a weight reduction higher than 25% were very rare and expensive, I should know as I mained a monk my entier EQ carrier (don't tell a monk EQ was not an inventory management game).
So the status quo inventory for Pantheon will be 80 unit volume and 133% of your strength. Which I agree is about the right target outside of fancy backpacks. What I am less keen on is that a plate breastplate and a diamond ring both have a unit volume of 1. I could pick up 80 rings and only be at a total weight of 8 lbs but one breastplate is 10-25lbs depending on size and style. 80 10lbs breastplates would weight 800lbs which is way more than you can actually carry. For every 100 character strength you can carry 130 breastplates in your handmade backpacks.
This is not a proposed idea this is EQ1 fact before I believe PoP.
In a volume mass system one handmade backpack would have a volume of 70000ml based on my previous chart, going on the fact that a true week long hiking backpacks holds 70L of volume. A ring is going to take up 0.5 / 70000 means the backpack could hold 140000 rings which would weight 1400 lbs if a ring weight 0.1 lbs, realistically though most weight more like 0.01lbs which would drop it to 140lbs. If I crumple up one of my heavier shirts into a ball without squeezing it is about the size of a childs soccer ball which is 2143ml and I was proposing that plate be 3x the volume of cloth so the 10lbs breastplate would take up 6400/70000 ish which is almost 11 breastplates which would be 110lbs. I might be over estimating the crumpled volume of a breastplate but its not super far off.
Now when you start working in advanced weight reduction bags and or expanded volume bags your possible inventory changes. But as of P99 inventory management is very much a thing and not just for monks.
Btw the ideas for pack animals and wheelbarrow is not for in dungeons or active combat in any way. It is specifically about renting the tool to take it to a resource location to collect enough material in one run to save you 10 or more trips with just your backpack mass/volume based or slot volume with mass alike.
As for moving bulk items around in crates something similar is going to be needed if fast travel and mounts are very limited and both banks and auction house/merchants are localized rather than linked. It will be a case where you need to figure out how to get your resources to your crafting station and it may be part of the game to plan where you are going to skill up based on the combination of a crafting station and access to raw materials.
Would love to hear Brad and Corey's take on this but I know they are both super busy with Pre-alpha and wouldn't want them wasting their time commenting on something they most likely have not yet decided on. Though if Corey needs a volume pass data entry intern I'm available nights and weekends for the low cost of prepaid game time, its not right for me to offer a labor intensive idea and not be willing to put in the labor.
P.S. WTB some way to put graphs in on this board without needing to host an image somewhere else. I can say 5000 words with the right graph or table.
I'm honestly not really picky about how they choose to approach player inventory. I thought EQ handled it just fine tbh. However, I feel like this idea is a lot like how things worked in UO, at least how it was in its early days, and I always liked that system as well.
But if I had to guess I'd say they're very likely just going to mimic EQ's system, which is fine by me. But it doesn't hurt to have a few alternative ideas in the mix, I suppose. :P
shuk said: A good inventory management system is critical. Hard to make them functional yet interesting but not tedious. This has some good ideas. I always kinda like Diablo inventory, where basically a large item takes more slots but it's visually represented too. My main gripe is having to spend a lot of time organizing my bags. I'd like some intuitive options to automatically flag and sort certain items on pickup, that sort of thing.
Diablo realistically had a sudo mass/volume system as you could still pick up too heavy of objects but they did differentiate between the size of a ring and a suite of armor, though in my opinion nowhere near enough. Square based volumes are also very difficult to search and organize efficiently and frankly take up a ton of screen space.
If the backpack inventory were simply a scrollable, sortable list with a simple icon, a name you could hover over to see the stats, a mass value and a volume value, very little work would be required to find exactly what you want and you would not need to play Tetris with your inventory squares.
I would consider going so far as to have items like an herbalists pouch that can hold up to 100 plants without changing weight or volume and can be placed in the backpack. Putting herbs in your backpack would auto place them in your herbalist bag. Realistically anything with a negligible volume and mass should be able to go into a sub container within your backpack. That sub container would have a measurable mass/volume representative of a full container and would have its own dropdown list within the backpack list
For purposes of item movement I would also include a few “in hand” slots, maybe the full 8 from the current UI, that you use to pick up items and decide what to do with them, have on hand for trade skills or use to trade with other players. I’m sure there would be a limited reasonable volume for the hand slots and you would still be limited in max by your carry capacity.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts,
Trasak