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Old 10-13-2010, 06:49 PM   #7
silvarilon
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Re: Preferred inventory type

Smart. Our system is too "intelligent" to work properly. Items have a density, and a size (in square meters), from that the weight is calculated (and you could calculate other things, like "does it float") and the dimensions are calculated.
Containers, similarly, have those properties, but also have capacity. The capacity sets the dimensions, unless the container is marked as "flexible" (so an empty sack would only take up the space of a sack, while a full sack would take up the space of what's in it as well. But a treasure chest would always take up the same amount of space)

Rooms are also containers, so they have a capacity. As are characters, effectively what they are carrying is just "what is in the character container" and those carried items interact with the world in the same way that an item in a treasure chest interacts.

Problem is, this is too florid. Get the density of coins wrong, and a pouch of coins will take up a few square meters of space. Or maybe would weight a ridiculous amount.

Someone orders a new sword? Sorry, you can't post it to them, it won't fit in the postal package. No option for "just wrap it in brown paper and tie it with string" unless we specifically code that. Even though a sword isn't particularly heavy (well, not heavy enough that they can't post) - it's just clumsily long.

And the end result? Not much benefit to the game. If we had an encumberance rating for the size of the items, instead, that'd be much easier. "You can post anything of encumberance 4 or less" and be done. Which might mean lighter bone swords can be posted when steel ones can't, but that's no worse than the current problems.

And man, I need special commands to figure out the mass, density, etc. of items, because builders don't know what the appropriate values should be. It just makes their job unnecessarily harder.

I love your clothing descriptions. We've also got the "long description" issue, but I don't really see it as a problem.
Our clothing, like yours, is layered. Wear boots over socks, and someone looking at you won't see the socks. Players also tend to only wear the clothing they want showing, so they'll wear "a jacket" and just pretend there is a generic shirt underneath that isn't worth mentioning in the description. So if it's long, it's probably because the player wants to show off all the clothing items.

We also don't bother describing how the items are worn. So "Bob is wearing a shirt" but not "Bob is wearing a shirt tucked into his belt" - halves the length, and in most cases it's obvious how an item is worn. That does cause some slight problems on items that aren't traditionally worn, or can be worn in multiple ways (if I'm wearing a handkerchief, is it over my face like a mask, or around my neck, or tucked into the pocket of my dinner jacket?) - our clumsy hack to get around that is to change the name of the item. So there would be a command to wear the handkerchief as a mask (something like "wear my handkerchief over my face" and you'd wear it, but it would become something like "...is wearing a handkerchief mask" or if they just wore it normally "... is wear a neckkerchief" and so on.

Mmmm, same with us, we don't count based on items, we either restrict based on covered location, or weight, or total space taken up.

But I guess the concept of "slots" still applies, when comparing between games. And we do have slot-like restrictions, like "You can only be wielding one weapon per hand" (although you can be *carrying* as many weapons as you want)
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