Inventory Interface, Management, and Additional View Options

[OnyxStrife]

I'm so confused.. I don't know if i'm missing something because I'm insanely tired or what, but I kinda wanna know what you guys are talking about with the inventory icons.

You can easily see what the item is by hoving your mouse over it. I don't think I've ever played an MMO where the inventory was just text. They're always similar to the current system. Hover over the icon and the text pops up telling you what it is.

[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.

[Daedrik]

Maybe if they added a more discernible color scheme to the icons it be a lot less time consuming to look at, with time everything will come quicker anyway.

[h0tNstilettos]

What could really solve this problem without adding text is to add various inventory sorting options, like alphabetical, item type (with sub-types like stuff for a certain class, etc), newest, oldest, etc.

This would make finding what is needed extremely easy.

On top of this, any time you need to hand something over for a levequest or similar thing have it work the same way as side quests and story quests where the only items shown in your inventory when you go to complete quest are the ones needed to turn in for quests. For some odd reason levequests don't do this so you have to search entire inventory for the item they want. I think it's levequests I'm thinking of, or whatever type of quest where it makes you search your whole inventory to turn in.

[Raydeus]

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.

So, why not just keep the icon based inventory for PS3 and give the other additional options to PS4 and PC which have no memory issues?

[SkyRed]

The inventory is a major flaw in the game in my opinion. It's very poorly designed, especially when you compare it to an inventory similar to the one in gw2, like the bank with slots for every crafting materials or the ability to see all you items at the same time in a big list of slots unlike the 25 per page which is absurd and would even make an auto sort function (that actually works) a complete mess. Fix this and I'll be a happy kitten with 1/3 of my main issues with this game fixed.

[Fellswoop]

The Performance of Text Vs Image isnt SQE fault this time Blame DirectX and GPU methodology. Icon or Text does not matter what does is a smooth server , less load and a friendly compact interface .
Take people that like Overhead Playername+Mobsnames . The amount of data needed to display these is higher than people expect have these on in a large fate and watch your GPU,CPU cook.

Text Rendering had always been costly in any 3d environment.

As for Text in a image based enviroment its a case of Number of Render Calls + Render States if you want to pack an image of every line of text and mouse over state and in a good quality font you will hit bottlenecks of Processes or Memory usage. Plain Line Text will Bog the Client down its a 3D realtime app not a word processesor that can cope with 10 fps.

[Tamlin]

Or another simple solution: add a search box to the inventory where you can search for item names, and then have matches highlighted.

[chitster042186]

Icon is like one thing to load in memory queue if you thing of it that way and text means it has many individual characters to load and display. I can see why they did it, they just need to some how make the icons more unique or some sort of border color system or number/letter/dot system kind of like they do with the dye dots.
Like for gear sets, a dot coloured with the class colour to let you know it is used. I would find this handy.

[Efrye]

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

Why doesn't this post have a gazillion likes already? This is so much more important than text vs. icons!

If we end up with a text inventory that's still divided into four bags, it will be just as useless to me as it is now.