Inventory Interface, Management, and Additional View Options

This is all fine and dandy, but it doesn't do us any good if we can't even log in.

In FFXI we could save our macros and settings to the server. I would realy like this option as I play FFXIV on 3 different computers. Having to redo macros for the same characters on each comp is annoying. Any way to just save the macro-hotbar-character equipment lists? If not, what is the file that saves it locally on each computer?

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Originally Posted by Camate

Happy Friday, everyone!

I have a very nice update from the UI guru himself, Hiroshi Minagawa, so please check out what’s to come for the item sort feature.

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Thanks Camate for the update. Is there any indication when Patch 2.1 is scheduled to come out? I know patches are supposedly on a 3-month cycle but any chance the first patch will be an exception (kind of like how Guild Wars 2 and Rift had large patches that came out pretty fast initially...)

Thanks!

Please, apply this also to guild bank...
It's insane, to store an item on guildbank you have to manually drag it, press YES, press YES again and then it will be stored... When you have to store 40 items, it will be a LONG task.
More insane, the guild won't "auto-stack" multiple items, you have to manually find the other item and stack it, which is insane if you have 3 full tabs. We require an easy way to insert items in guild bank, like right click on item => store it in first free slot in bank OR put it on stacks of same type, if one is found.

This is the correct way to handle it.

Thank you. I came here looking for a way to sort my inventory. I look forward to patch 2.1 :)

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Originally Posted by Aiph

In FFXI we could save our macros and settings to the server. I would realy like this option as I play FFXIV on 3 different computers. Having to redo macros for the same characters on each comp is annoying. Any way to just save the macro-hotbar-character equipment lists? If not, what is the file that saves it locally on each computer?

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As this thread is mainly intended toward inventory-related feature requests, revisions, etc. I'm not sure how your request applies. It is a good suggestion, but I'm worried that it is a bit off topic to this thread and may get lost in the rest of the posts here. You may be better off finding a similar thread, regarding the hotbar or macros and re-post there!

Edit: Nevermind. Apparently I'm still asleep. I read it like five times and on the sixth I finally saw reference to the equipment lists. You can ignore me now. XD

We really need better Retainer management:

- Let the item tooltips display the quantities stored under each retainer. Example:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/...temTooltip.png

- Let us see our Retainer's inventory even when not at a retainer bell. We could also have a Call Retainer ability. This would alleviate traffic in the very spare spots where there are bells right now.

- Let us craft from our Retainer's inventories! if combined with the "Call Retainer" ability, retainers would become more like what they are supposed to be: assistants. Call them by your side to help with crafting.

- I would like to see a way to transfer items from our inventories to the right spot in a Retainer's inventory. Suppose you mark each Retainer bag for a specific Item Category. Then you can click a button that says "Send items to retainers" from your inventory, and the items would automatically go where they are supposed to. Completely customizable. Example:

I would set bag 1 for Retainer A to hold lumber, bag 2 to hold ingredients, etc. My personal bags are full; and so I click "Send items to retainers" and all the items that have a category in one of my retainers get automatically moved to the pertinent bags. This is a system that Guild Wars 2 has in place and is incredibly useful. I hope the team will consider it.

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Originally Posted by Camate

Happy Friday, everyone!

I have a very nice update from the UI guru himself, Hiroshi Minagawa, so please check out what’s to come for the item sort feature.

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I sing praises to the twelve!!! GO UI team go!!

/cheer /cheer /cheer!!

I do not see any reason that we should not have an infinite inventory with a list view just like every offline FF ever made. It makes no sense to say that I can carry 30 sets of armor, but I cannot carry anymore. What's wrong? My character's invisible caravan said no more? If we want realistic inventory management, then allow the characters to have what they can equip, a small bag of items, and perhaps one extra weapon. Don't like that idea? Neither do I. So give us an infinite system that has a different tab for each kind of item/armor.

For all of you that say you don't need this... Keep selling all your items and don't use it.

I am happy to hear that they are adding an inventory sort function at the least though. I would have thought that would have been fixed before the end of the first Beta.

Please, please, please ACKNOWLEDGE this UI issue!

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...isplay-Problem

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Originally Posted by Koreos

We really need better Retainer management:
- Let us see our Retainer's inventory even when not at a retainer bell. We could also have a Call Retainer ability. This would alleviate traffic in the very spare spots where there are bells right now.

- Let us craft from our Retainer's inventories! if combined with the "Call Retainer" ability, retainers would become more like what they are supposed to be: assistants. Call them by your side to help with crafting.

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I like it... very good idea IMo.

I was about to start a thread about inventory management. Currently the vast amount of crafting materials makes inventory management a tedious job. I fully support all the suggestions in this thread and I think the most beneficial ones would be:

1) Allow usage of crafting materials in retainers inventory

OR

2) Make a separate inventory for sole purpose of crafting materials.

The UI in this game is probably the most amazing and diverse UI in any game. I wish 1017 would go away so that I could play with the UI :(

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Originally Posted by BlossomRose

This would be cool if we could ACTUALLY PLAY THE GAME.

Making UI changes is pointless (no offense) when a large majority of us can't even log in to their servers to enjoy the UI. Can we get an update on THAT instead? Will the 5000 users per server restriction ever be lifted to something more playable and considerate? When is your upgrade to the hardware happening? Is our weekend going to be a waste or can we hope to get to enjoy it?

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Wrong thread! Channel your frustration in the appropriate thread.

I was wondering f there was a ways to change the "In game menu" bar for when you are not logged in game. For example since most of us can't log in now we could be creating macros and changing in game prefferences while we wait for the servers to be back up.

It may not belong in this thread but I'm not sure where else to mention this. How about you guys add an inactivity timer. If someone is inactive for 10-15 minutes, simply log them out. I know people that log in, and even if they leave the house just keep their avatars in game standing doing nothing so they simply won't have to deal with re-connecting. IMO, very unfair for people who are actively trying to play and cannot.

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Originally Posted by Faile

It may not belong in this thread but I'm not sure where else to mention this. How about you guys add an inactivity timer. If someone is inactive for 10-15 minutes, simply log them out. I know people that log in, and even if they leave the house just keep their avatars in game standing doing nothing so they simply won't have to deal with re-connecting. IMO, very unfair for people who are actively trying to play and cannot.

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Yeah, not really the right thread for that--even if it is necessary. Check out this thread: Institute Temporary AFK Kick Timer, it is by far more pertinent to your suggestion!

This looks great, really liking the addition of text commands and addon on support :D

I'm certain it's been suggested elsewhere, but having some kind of indicator within the Armory Chest of the items that are currently associated with a Set would be wonderful. I don't think it would be necessary to know what items are being used in a particular Set, just have a colored outline perhaps around the items that are being used in any Set. It would be really helpful when sorting through your gear, trying to figure out what can be sold or turned into materia. I have definitely had several instances where I've sold, converted, or traded an item that I was using in a Set that I didn't have equipped at the time.

I'm not sure if this falls under #2, but I would love some sort of quicksort button, that sorts items by their use (in my inventory as well as my retainer's). Ie: sorts all cooking items in a list, then all tailoring items, then blacksmithing items, etc.

For items that overlap I guess the game would just have to decide which group to put them in?

Greetings, everyone!

Hiroshi Minagawa has another very informative post about the reasoning behind using icons for inventory items as opposed to text, as there has been some feedback stating that it's difficult to tell what's what by only looking at icons and would like to see it styled more like shops with text.

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Originally Posted by Hiroshi_Minagawa

Item Name Display Modes

Why is it that the items in your inventory are only displayed as an icon? :confused:

There are two main reasons why we've made it so items in your inventory are displayed as an icon.

• We want to maximize the display without taking up too much of the screen.
• For ARR, displaying an icon uses way less memory than displaying a name.

Due to these reasons, we've adopted an icon display method for certain item display windows. We have a text-based method on our task list, but the timing for this is currently undecided.

For those of you who can't agree with this decision based only on this short explanation, please read the below in-depth explanation!

There are a lot of times where you'll have your inventory, or armoury chest, windows open along with shop windows as well as your character, trade, and other windows.

When running the game at the minimal resolution of 1280x720, even if we were to change the item icons to text and make it as small as possible, the text lines would still take up a large column width.

With a small icon on the left, the text of the item name, and additional information such as number of items in the stack, the window width would have to be 1.5x larger than the current inventory window.

In the case of the gear set confirmation window, looking at the Japanese version, there appears to be some room that can be eliminated from the right-side, but the reason for this is because the item names for French and German are extremely long.

*By the way, the longest item name in the game is over 60 characters long.

While there were comments mentioning that if the item name is too long, we can have an ellipsis to truncate it, but for other languages the end of a word often shows the grade or special characteristic and if we truncated it this would result in it looking like a list of the same item names.

Additionally, the larger issue at hand is the latter one involving memory. When it comes to UI, the bitmap images are used for both icons and text that are loaded by memory, but the number of elements to display a single item are far less when using an icon than using a string of text.

Unlike a typical offline RPG, it's necessary to have the proper structure to allow for multiple windows to be displayed at any given time or place in an MMO. If memory management and image asset management isn't set tighter than an offline RPG, it will become laggy and not function properly.

The amount of resources that can be utilized for game designs where they can avoid menus during battle screens and such is very different.

*For those of you who are interested, please try an press the b, c, p, j, m, i, u, y, h, and k keys in succession on the PC version to open up multiple windows. There will gradually be stress placed on the system, but there almost no RPGs that exist that are designed to allow you to play the game with windows displayed like this. Being able to do this – for example, when fighting a primal – is a special characteristic of an MMO.

Taking a holistic approach to the circumstances and limitations here, we made the decision that it would be best to display items in inventory and Armoury Chest with icons. With that said though, while it will be difficult to do for the PS3 version, it is possible to have a separate option for text display in the PC version.

If only 10 icons are displayed with text, then we could separate the tabs into categories and it just might be possible to do this for the PS3 as well.

Currently, we are in the midst of stress testing the final large component of the UI that is constantly displayed on the screen – the alliance display. Once we've finalized this we can start taking a look at display variations and customization for existing features, but until then I apologize for any inconveniences and appreciate your understanding.

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At least the text display is in the list of tasks. That's all I care about to be honest. The reasoning behind having the picture based system at launch is fine, but it still doesn't make it any better of a system. It takes longer to do basic tasks.

I read this and I'm stuck on how it's possible that text somehow uses way more memory then a picture. No matter how much I read, I can't understand how that's possible

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Originally Posted by IveraIvalice

I read this and I'm stuck on how it's possible that text somehow uses way more memory then a picture. No matter how much I read, I can't understand how that's possible

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Same here.

FFXI had a working inventory where a mini-icon was displayed along with a short-hand version of the item name. How is it even remotely taxing for FFXIV to do the same thing, when FFXI is running on an archaic engine limited by the PS2?

I see the dev team throwing around "memory issues" for a lot of things, but they aren't explaining why. Not to mention, the game has memory issues in many other places that seem to be ignored, while useful functions are denied for this reason.

Inventory icons is one of my biggest frustrations in this game. As a gatherer I can end up with an entire bag of ore that all looks the same. HQ/NQ and I have no idea what I'm looking at. This is even worse on my retainer where I store it all.

I WASTE so much time looking for stuff.

To be perfectly honest I really don't care about memory issues, or text size, blah, blah, blah. All I know is that the current icon system sucks and needs to be improved.

A suggestion: WAY more granular sorting. Using my ore example. If I could sort ore by level and by HQ/NQ, my problem would be solved. But sort would have to be intuitively easy. No crazy menu with tons of options. I don't know how to make this happen, I'm just saying it would solve my issue without needing text.

But barring any drastic sorting improvements, icon inventory is going to be a thorn, no a sword, in my side. ARGH!

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Originally Posted by IveraIvalice

I read this and I'm stuck on how it's possible that text somehow uses way more memory then a picture. No matter how much I read, I can't understand how that's possible

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Are you a programmer? If not, then it's not easy to see the obvious. I fully understood his explanation. You may not agree with this, but if you look at the trend in MMO games, this is exactly what they've done.

"When it comes to UI, the bitmap images are used for both icons and text that are loaded by memory, but the number of elements to display a single item are far less when using an icon than using a string of text. "

Is each letter in a text its own bitmap image or something?

I personally enjoy having just icons. More work on uniqueness for them would be good though.

I just want one big list.... ; ; with auto sort.

I appreciate the detailed explanation from the developer. Nevertheless I'm happy text display is on the list of future enhancements. I would vastly prefer this. As others mentioned, too many icons are the same and cannot be distinguished by a glance. I spend way too much time looking for items.

I dont think Ive ever seen a game that used text for inventories, so not sure what to think of this.

PS3 limitations.

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Originally Posted by Na6

"When it comes to UI, the bitmap images are used for both icons and text that are loaded by memory, but the number of elements to display a single item are far less when using an icon than using a string of text. "

Is each letter in a text its own bitmap image or something?

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If you are really interested in the explanation: Bitmaps (or other such images) can be stored as a pixel array or as a vector of vectors (same thing when compiled). Because of this, there is a fixed size and number of bits used for each pixel in the bitmap. Each pixel can be expressed in a compressed version and uncompressed at compile time. Strings have a variable number of character, which each take the space of 8 bits. Because they are also not fixed size, they must be expressed in a dynamic structure (an object) before they can be used. The overhead for the classes and any polymorphism is very large. As was said before, a programmer would have easily understood why this statement was said. But not everyone here (even though they think they are) are programmers.

yeeeesssss auto sort please.

Thanks for the explanation. I think I understand a bit of what you're saying. I can remember some bits from a video I watched on compression now.

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Originally Posted by UBERHAXED

If you are really interested in the explanation: Bitmaps (or other such images) can be stored as a pixel array or as a vector of vectors (same thing when compiled). Because of this, there is a fixed size and number of bits used for each pixel in the bitmap. Each pixel can be expressed in a compressed version and uncompressed at compile time. Strings have a variable number of character, which each take the space of 8 bits. Because they are also not fixed size, they must be expressed in a dynamic structure (an object) before they can be used. The overhead for the classes and any polymorphism is very large. As was said before, a programmer would have easily understood why this statement was said. But not everyone here (even though they think they are) are programmers.

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As a programmer, I'm still a bit (haha!) incredulous that a 120 byte string, or 240 bytes in UTF-8 (based on the longest item name being 60 characters) is going to take up more memory than any bitmap in the game, even compressed. Though I haven't looked at the size of their image resources. Most modern programming languages treat strings objects as immutable once they've been created, and those strings can be interned so that they use less memory on a system where each string is effectively a copy of one already in memory. There are certain trade-offs, obviously and this isn't the thread to get into it. However, even if it isn't shown, I have my suspicions that the name and other textual data is being prefetched any way for handling the hover text. So again, while the memory usage is higher, it is misleading to imply that the difference is significant enough to make a difference.

Regardless of that tangent, there were plenty of other points that were made that do make sense.

I for one am happy that a list view of some sort is on their radar.

The image is already stored locally. What ends up in game is a panel holding a reference to the image. So yeah, a string ends up using more memory in this case.

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Originally Posted by kimoi

We need list view. I can't tell you how many times I've hovered over the mess of my retainer's inventory looking for the difference between dodo eggs, chicken eggs, and iron ore.

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You know, it's funny (sad) that in 1.xx everyone just had to have the bag view like from WoW, and those of us that said, "No the list view is better and more funcitonal for sorting purposes." were summarily dismissed. Now it's all flip flopped.

I think the auto sort in this game is absolutely terrible. I can never find what type of item I need to turn in for my levequests so I just started putting specific items in its own tab. Fishing in general has a lot of fish that look exactly the same so I squint at the screen to make sure I "hand over" the right fish. It's rather annoying.

i mean i really don't mind the pictures or the grid much... but its the sorting and tabs that make it so frustrating just moving things.. I mean an hour just to organize a full inv? crazy talk/

The only problem I have with the inventory is the sorting. This applies to both the armoury chest and standard inventory. Implementing a sort by quality or level function would help to cut down on the chaos of what it currently is.