Inventory Interface, Management, and Additional View Options

[Zezlar]

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.

[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

[KariArisu]

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

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.

[Discordia]

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

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.

[Quesse]

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!

[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?

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

[UBERHAXED]

"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?

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.

[Na6]

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.

[ZhangoSqu]

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.

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.

[Nightshade1]

*snip*...it is misleading to imply that the difference is significant enough to make a difference.

It's more about how the information is accessed, than what the size of the information obtained is. If you have a list of say 1000 icons to work with, its less taxing to process 100 pulls from that system than 100 strings from a 300000 list of item names (also consider the item information being pulled at the same time for each slot). On a single player this seems almost trivial, but on larger scale of thousands of players being able to access this information simultaneously the data usage grows considerably (even more so with players that are focused on their inventory almost non stop for things like crafting). Less data usage equates to lower spec'ed systems needing less adjustments. Better for everyone all around.

I'm fine with a icon based inventory system. Perhaps that just because the games I've played the most in the past have always used one.