Inventory Interface, Management, and Additional View Options

[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.