Inventory - In Progress
Inspiration
Finding a reasonable balance between realism and fun is always a challenge, one that most servers struggle with in some form or another. Commonly inventories are just an infinite grid with a maximum weight for what you can carry, but this does not account for volume or akwardness of items. Our inventory system is not going to be perfect initially and will take time to balance and get as close to a balance between fun and realism. I have always admired the way Diablo represented weight and volume with their inventory, while not perfect it has inspired many iterations and variations using a wide variety of ways to mainpulate the inventory to help with the sense of playing tetris with items and making it easier to use.
Wanting characters to carry a reasonable amount of items, have a reason to use saddle bags and smaller bags on their person the initial design for this system will be relatively restrictive in grid size. We do not want characters hauling around cases of amunition, or weeks worth of food on them. They should not have an arsenal of weapons on them or be able to carry a minecarts worth of gold out of the mines without the assistance of wagson, horses or other helpers.
Some examples of similar inventory systems.
Escape from Tarkov
This is a great example of a system that has gone too far. While it does implement some good ideas like nested containers and the ability to freely rotate items to fit, there is just too much going on, to many small details and it feels like a full time job managing it.
Diablo 3
While Diablo is a very strong inspiration, it is far to simple to meet our needs with only two or three basic sizes for items and no use of item roation or nested containers.
Resident Evil 4
Resident Evil 4 strikes a nice balance between interesting item sizes, grid size and manageability, though still lacks nested containers / sub inventories.
Containers as a Concept
In our system everything is considered a container, and is in a container of some sort. At the base of the tree we have the world container which holds items or containers that exist in the open world environment. Each character has an associated container for their inventory, where items and other containers can reside. Example, a player can pick up a bag, that bag might contain some small items and maybe a smaller container like a wallet, which can contain money and coins.
The Paper Doll
The Grid
The playrs inventory outside of what is worn consistes of a 3x7 grid representing what the character can reasonable manage through carrying, putting into pockets, under the arm etc.
Item Sizes Examples
Large - 2x4, 3x3, 1x5
Weapons such as long arms, bows, or other difficult to cary items that take up a lot of space.
Medium - 3x3, 2x2, 1x3
Such as handguns, large bags, long melee weapons
Small - 1x2, 1x1
Wallets, loose money, compass, knife, canned food etc.