Greetings,

We'd like to share a comment from Hiroshi Minagawa from the UI team in regards to the inventory display adjustments made in Patch 4.2.

Quote Originally Posted by Hiroshi_Minagawa View Post

Greetings, this is Minagawa from the UI team.

I'd like to discuss the two big requests we've been seeing from the community:
A) Keep the previous expanded display method and make it available as an option.
* Including requests to revert back to the previous display method.

B) Make the expanded inventory display as a single tab 10x14 (140 total).
Option A would be extremely difficult to do, so I'm sorry to say that there are no plans to revert it or make an option to choose. I'll explain the reason why it would be difficult in a moment.

As for option B, we're planning to implement this as an option for the PS4 and Windows 64-bit version.

* I'll go over the reasons below; but if you only want to read the conclusion, you can skip over the following section.

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Why is it difficult to revert to the previous display method?
The reason behind the new item layout goes back to when we expanded the inventory slots during 4.0 development, and goes even further back to when we designed the UI for the A Ream Reborn (ARR) version.

When we considered increasing the a character's inventory slots, we looked into the following two methods:
  1. Keep the previous database which treats 25 items as one group, and increasing the number of groups from four to six (150 items).
  2. Increase the number of items in a group from 25 to 35. If there's no stress on the load, assume we can increase the number of items available in one group.

I imagine everyone would agree that the first method is the way to go, as it would feel most natural for everyone.

During the structure development for the ARR version, we had planned to increase item slots in increments of 25. When we announced ARR, the concept screenshot showed six groups of 25. However, while ARR development continued, in order to speed up development as much as possible (while also increasing the efficiency of the save data storage) we incorporated temporary item storage (i.e. items attached to Moogle letters and items for trading with others) into the player's storage capacity to implement item-related processes and storage capacity together.

This ended up affecting us later (now). At a cost of development speed and space efficiency, it became difficult to add inventory slots in groups.

It became difficult because we need to fix (more like rebuild) features such as the Moogle letters and trading, which doesn't seem like it would be related to the addition of inventory slots.

For the first method, the parts that are affected are numerous, and the engineers involved are different, and there are many features which carry over from the original program. For this reason, we needed to actually try it out to estimate how much development time would be required for this. (There were strong concerns of this not being able to make it by the expansion's release.)

On the other hand, the estimate for the development steps for the second method was much clearer.

As a result, for the 4.0 expansion, we abandoned the first method to increase the number of groups, and decided to go with the second method, to increase the number of inventory slots available by increasing the number of items per group.

Once 4.0 went live, we calculated that the server couldn't handle the amount of communication stress that the additional increased inventory slots and character item data brought with it.

Therefore, we switched our direction to adding other methods to increase the inventory, or by converting items to a different format to store them, and stopped adding spaces to inventory and the Armoury Chest with the 4.0 expansion.
* Methods such as the chocobo saddlebag and glamour dressers.

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The introduction was a bit lengthy, but with the above in mind, I'd like to explain why we changed the display and why it is difficult to revert back to the previous method.

Because we applied the second method, during 4.0 the item information managed on the application side display and the server did not match; however, as a temporary measure until we decided how to increase additional inventory slots, we used a program to maintain the consistency of the display to make it work.

It is extremely difficult to keep using such a program to add item-related processes as we wouldn't be able to ensure the stability of the program.

So this time we made improvements and have matched the display method for the application into the database structure which was changed to increase the number of item slots, and made improvements to temporarily arrange it so it can be used on a program which can be easily expanded in the future.

Due to these reasons, it would be difficult to bring back the previous 5x5 display as there are numerous negative consequences. This is why I mentioned we have no plans for this.
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Expanded Display: Displaying 140 items at once
We believe we can do this for the PS4 version and the Windows 64-bit version and we are looking into it. We cannot do this for the Windows 32-bit version or the Mac version, as there isn't enough UI memory required for displaying the icons. As this requires a different process for each OS, we would require more time than usual for when we add new features, so if you could please wait for this.
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And that is the explanation as to why the expanded inventory display method changed.

I'm very sorry that this has caused an inconvenience for things that you have long since grown accustomed to, or how it was displayed. However as a UI Lead, I made the decision to move forward with this, as I believe this was required in order to continue adding various features.

I'm sure there will be those that won't agree with this explanation, but I wanted to explain the thought process from the development team's perspective for features being added or changed.

We'd appreciate it if you all to continue to leave your feedback.