Hello all,
I recently was thinking about inventories. To be honest I think they are one of the most unrealistic things in any game. Why? because nobody runs around with a board of slots or lists of items. You would throw your items in a pocket and that is all.
Please calm down your emotions. The pocket solution is real life, a game is pure fake. So it is indeed a nice gimmick to have a system that manages items that you -in real life- would find in a pocket after you washed your trousers.
Such an inventory is an incredible thing. It does not just ensure you do not loose your items while jumping from towers, swim through oceans, kill hordes of zombies or get hit by a truck. It presents you what you have so you see how rich you are right now. It can sort the items so you can see how many missiles you can shoot if you had a missile launcher. Yes, it even can even show you that you need one. It might be the luxury version that summarized attributes of the items such as value or weight so you do not need to put a calculator, pen and paper into the inventory. Wouldn’t an inventory be perfect for school?.
So what is this thread about?
A) What do you think is an inventory?
B) How should it look like?
C) What attributes should it have?
D) What operations should be possible on an inventory?
Are there different types of inventories? What do they have in common? How do they differ?
So here is my first sample:
Pocket inventory:
A) It can contain an unsorted number of items.
B) It looks like a pocket empty, in-use, full
C) size, occupation, hole size
D)
- put an item into the pocket, as long as it fits through the hole, as long as there is space
- to grab things from the pocket you have to grab the last thing you put in first (filo).
- it can show you if it is empty
- it can show you that it is full
- it can show you there is something in (but not what it is)
Trouser inventory:
consists of two pocket inventories (left and right pocket)
Be aware there is no automatic load balancing ;).
Jacket inventory:
consists of several pocket inventories with different sizes. Manual balancing too.
Oh dear. These kind of inventories are not really that funny for a game. So lets look at a rea… game-istic inventory:
Ammunition
A) Keeps bullets of a kind
B) looks like a number
C) capacity, opacity
D)
- load
- get bullet (which one seems not to matter)
What inventories can you think of?
Just for fun
Monster