Inventory expansion feature for the dcss-ca fork


Although the central place for design discussion is ##crawl-dev on freenode, some may find it helpful to discuss requests and suggestions here first.

Halls Hopper

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Post Monday, 22nd February 2016, 13:33

Inventory expansion feature for the dcss-ca fork

This idea has probably been discussed and rejected many times, so I apologize if I'm repeating anything here.

Probably the most tedious thing for me right now when playing this game is constantly having to figure out what to drop so I can pick up another item. What I'm forced to drop would usually be strategically valuable in some circumstances, but I'm forced to cut off that possibility because of limitations in how the inventory system is designed.

The modification I'm considering making in the DCSS Circus Animals fork (see https://github.com/jeremygurr/dcssca), is to divide the inventory into sections based on how they are used: wearables, wieldables, evokables, etc. Each category would have 26 slots (a-z). Many commands would be the same two key strokes: Eat item a: ea, Quaff item c: qc. General inventory commands would require one more keystroke: inventory wearable d: iWd, drop readable x: drx. The adjust command could be the same, instead of adjust inventory item c to d (=icd) it would be adjust wieldable item c to d (=wcd), same number of key strokes.

Of course there is the strange situation of items that fit more than one category (rods). In this implementation, they would be present in BOTH categories, possibly with different letters. Yes, that is lame. To me the right place to fix it is by removing / altering the items that have more than one usage profile. It just seems like needless complexity to me, and contrary to the brilliant combination of simplicity and depth that crawl has otherwise achieved. This same advancement happened when the ability to throw wieldable items was removed, and dedicated throwable items were added. I think that moved crawl in a good direction, simplifying yet not losing anything important in the process.

I'm sure some people will think that you should never have more than 52 items, and that I'm just carrying too much stuff. I've played this game for hundreds of hours, and though I'm certainly nowhere near the skill level of many of you, I still run into this tedious scenario far too often (most games). Is it really worth whatever we are gaining by forcing it into the current inventory tracking model?

Thoughts?

Ziggurat Zagger

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Post Monday, 22nd February 2016, 14:01

Re: Inventory expansion feature for the dcss-ca fork

FWIW you're allowed to wield any item (except armour, though in the past you could wield that also), and you're allowed to throw any item you like in current crawl. It just won't display the options by default if you press w or F (the letters that aren't displayed are valid options and can be listed by pressing *).

Wielding decks and wands is actually useful, since it lets you evoke them with just "v" instead of requiring V+letter.

Tomb Titivator

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Post Monday, 22nd February 2016, 14:50

Re: Inventory expansion feature for the dcss-ca fork

To me, the tediousness of extra keystrokes outweighs the tediousness of adjusting autopickup options.

Tartarus Sorceror

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Post Monday, 22nd February 2016, 15:27

Re: Inventory expansion feature for the dcss-ca fork

RE the issues crate brings up, you could wield any item with w[category symbol][letter]. Wearables would still just be w[letter]. Likewise for throwing non-missiles, etc.

Rods are still a pain.

Dungeon Master

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Post Monday, 22nd February 2016, 16:20

Re: Inventory expansion feature for the dcss-ca fork

Honestly, one of the fun things about your fork is that you're actually doing stuff, rather than having endless discussions about it in these forums, so I think you should just try it out and see how it plays. I have the impression that the inventory solutions with the most traction (not sure how much that really is) are a bit more conservative, e.g. some mechanic to increase inventory to a slightly larger multiple of 26 via a modifier or something, but really who cares.

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Halls Hopper

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Post Monday, 22nd February 2016, 16:55

Re: Inventory expansion feature for the dcss-ca fork

I've already started on an implementation. There's just one more thing I'm trying to figure out before I get too deep.

Is there really a need for throwing arbitrary items, or wielding strange things (like pizza)?

As far as wielding a wand to more easily evoke it, I have a thought about that. In my experience the extra keystroke savings is rarely worth giving up the resistances/protection/attack ability provided by the weapon I'm currently wielding, not to mention the time cost of swapping out weapons in a battle. The keystroke savings would be better achieved, IMHO, by making the 'v' key evoke the last item evoked, instead of the currently wielded item, which is exactly the same keystroke-wise as wielding the deck/wand/etc, but without the negatives. Am I missing anything here?
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Tomb Titivator

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Post Monday, 22nd February 2016, 17:06

Re: Inventory expansion feature for the dcss-ca fork

You are missing the fact that polearms are evoked with the 'v' key, and honestly all weapons and UC should be evokable with the 'v' key so you could see your chance to hit in melee: viewtopic.php?f=8&t=19151. Consider letting a player "q"uiver a wand and using "f" to evoke it. It's not a big deal though.

To be honest, if you're willing to create separate menus for certain categories of items, you would do well enough with just these two:
Read item a: ra, Quaff item c: qc.
Scrolls and potions are a big part of the game and take up a lot of space, and taking it all out of the main inventory would free a lot of space - so much space that you'd have trouble filling it. You can have one menu for scrolls, accessible by pressing "r", and one for potions, accessible by pressing "q", and you'd press ? to read the item's description - just like how the "a" and "z" menus work. It is currently advantageous to leave amnesia and such on the ground, but if that space does not compete for anything, there is no reason to tediously consider dropping any of it. No, there is no need for these to be throwable; clowns will have to git gud and find other funny items to toss awkwardly. Alternatively, just one big menu for scrolls and potions. Last time I checked, the total number of potions+scrolls+permafood is 47 (i.e. less than 52) and that includes stuff like degeneration and acquirement but not the removed poison or curse weapon/armor/jewellery, so you could even fit all kinds of chunks in there. One convenient place for such a menu would be "I" which currently just shows what you see by pressing "z??". A final consideration is the "=" menu, as it would need to let you remap (c)onsumables.

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jeremygurr

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Post Monday, 22nd February 2016, 17:29

Re: Inventory expansion feature for the dcss-ca fork

HardboiledGargoyle wrote:You are missing the fact that polearms are evoked with the 'v' key, and honestly all weapons and UC should be evokable with the 'v' key so you could see your chance to hit in melee


I don't think that would affect this due to the fact that weapons cannot be evoked with 'V'? If the goal is to make it so that keys that only open a subset of the inventory (e.g. q, w, r, e, W, P, etc) still require only two keystrokes while things that open the entire inventory (i, d) require one more, only evokables that can be evoked with 'V' would actually need to be in the "evokables" group. This would also solve the issue with rods (although I'd be favor of letting rods be evoked from the inventory anyway, but that's a different discussion).

Personally, I think this proposal sounds nice. I very rarely access my inventory with 'i', so the only action that I do frequently that would get an extra keystroke would be 'd', but that would be outweighed by the fact that I would be using 'd' much, much less often due to the extra inventory space. So overall, I think this would be a massive improvement to convenience for me. If the inventory size limit is considered to be more of an interface issue than a balance one, I think this would be a good change. If it's meant to be a balance thing... well, then I think it's doing a poor job.

For the weird cases (wielding, quivering, or throwing non-traditional items), I think there are two approaches: either make it so you can press * to show the entire inventory from the 'Q', 'w', or 'F' menus, or remove those features altogether. While the first suggestion ups those actions to a whopping 4 keystrokes, I think they're done rarely enough for that to be okay. In fact, I'm pretty sure at least 95% of the time I wield, quiver, or throw an item that isn't a weapon or ammunition, it was an accident, so I would actually say that by eliminating the accidental cases this would be a net increase in convenience for me. Removing all the times where I accidentally wield a breadstick or quiver a scroll would vastly outweigh adding an extra two keystrokes to the times when I want to do something like that on purpose (and throwing books as a Trog worshiper is literally the only situation I can think of offhand where I do any of those things on purpose anyway).

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Halls Hopper

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Post Monday, 22nd February 2016, 18:01

Re: Inventory expansion feature for the dcss-ca fork

The evoking of polearms is definitely a strange edge case. That could still function though even if v evoked the last thing, just by using the V the first time. I find myself needing to evoke wands and other evokables far more often than polearms. Even when I do have a polearm, tab usually does the dirty work for me. I can't even remember the last time I manually evoked a polearm. But I can see why this would be a headache to those used to using v for evoking what is wielded.

The idea of breaking out consumables from the main inventory group is interesting. That would certainly seem to accomplish what I'm going for. That does give me an idea.

So now I'm thinking of just using v to evoke what is currently wielded, as it currently works, 'w (letter)' will wield that normally wieldable item, but you can still wield anything by doing 'w * ?' and looking through the possibly large list of items, going to the next page if necessary.

I will have 'i' function almost normally, showing items in categories like it currently works, with the change that if the inventory list goes beyond 52 items, the extra items won't have assigned letters, but will still allow you to see all of them. If you want to select one that doesn't have a letter, you can scroll down with page down and arrows to the one you want and hit enter. But it is probably easier to go to the specific inventory section you are interested in, by just type w? or e? outside of the inventory menu to see just those sections, very much like it works now. I think this could be done in a way as to almost seem like nothing has changed. Differences would only be seen when you have more than 52 items. The 'i' command would become a little less useful, and the specific inventory commands (w? r? W? v? etc) become a better option to work with your inventory. Even as it is now, when you have the full 52 items, the 'i' interface is a bit awkward, since you have to step through pages to see what you want anyway. The '/' search command can still be used to quickly get to what you want. But for those who don't like the extended inventory game play style, they simply need to keep their inventory at 52 or less, just like they have to do now, and things will function just like they are used to. If I can actually pull that off, that might be satisfactory to people who like it like it is, as well as those who would rather avoid spending so much time managing their inventories.
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Tomb Titivator

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Post Monday, 22nd February 2016, 19:52

Re: Inventory expansion feature for the dcss-ca fork

I think you're on the wrong track now. r/q/e/V/F/P/W/w/T/R work well, and won't work any better, but the "i" menu may become worse with what you suggest in your last post.

The people who "like it as it is" like it because you just can't pick up more than 52 items. They like that the game forces a limit, exactly because it blocks the temptation to expand the number of inventory items into an awkward, hard-to-work-with space where "items don't have assigned values" or something. And that's legitimate. Because to make things "function like they are used to", they will have to hold back, bite their lip, and drop one of the 52 items in their inventory before picking up an artefact they want to check out. Not fun; it's even less fun than the current situation.

jeremygurr wrote:you can still wield anything by doing 'w * ?' and looking through the possibly large list of items, going to the next page if necessary.


Why do this? Runes used to be inventory items and you could throw them. When they got goldified, devs didn't make a special little feature to let people throw them. It's like you're replacing a gas stove and with an electric stove, but also hooking in a special appliance that makes a little gas fire, just because some jackasses used the gas stove to light their cigarettes and you're concerned that they won't be able to do it anymore.

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Halls Hopper

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Post Tuesday, 23rd February 2016, 11:34

Re: Inventory expansion feature for the dcss-ca fork

Ok I have a working version of an inventory expansion feature. You are welcome to pull the latest version of DCSS:CA and try it out.

Here's what I ended up doing:

The inventory has been divided into two groups: consumables (potions, scrolls, and food), and everything else. The 'i' command shows the weapons, armour, evokables, etc. The 'I' command shows the consumables. Each can have 52 items. The drop command now requires one more step to specify which of the two inventories you want to drop from. The adjust command '=' can now also be applied to the (c)onsumables.

This was a major code change, and there are likely many bugs. I have tested the basic features and they seem to work correctly, but it will take some time to discover and root out all of the issues. Feel free to add a bug report to the github page for CA, and I'll look into it when I can.

Halls Hopper

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Post Thursday, 25th February 2016, 02:18

Re: Inventory expansion feature for the dcss-ca fork

I tweaked the inventory expansion a little further, removing the only extra keystroke. I split the drop command into 'd' for drop inventory, and 'D' for drop consumable, corresponding with the 'i' command for view inventory, and 'I' for view consumable. Now I can carry a maximum of 104 items, with no extra keystrokes required at all! I've been playing games using it for several hours now and it is beautiful. Gone are the days when I had to constantly figure out what I had to drop before picking up another item. Now I can carry all of my permafood, instead of just limiting it to one stack, and having to go back later to pick more up when I ran out. Now I can play a Nemelex character and not have to constantly be dropping unused decks to make room for more gifts. I'm so excited! Thanks to all of you who provided feedback on this, it turned out better than I even hoped it could.

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Tartarus Sorceror

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Post Thursday, 25th February 2016, 06:45

Re: Inventory expansion feature for the dcss-ca fork

jeremygurr wrote:Now I can carry all of my permafood, instead of just limiting it to one stack, and having to go back later to pick more up when I ran out.


You had me up until this part.

Halls Hopper

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Post Thursday, 25th February 2016, 18:10

Re: Inventory expansion feature for the dcss-ca fork

What's wrong with carrying around permafood vs. leaving it on the floor and coming back later to get it? Does it make some branches too easy?
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Barkeep

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Post Thursday, 25th February 2016, 21:18

Re: Inventory expansion feature for the dcss-ca fork

Well, for one thing, we have too many kinds of permafood. For another, food is a bad mechanic. I assume that's what Rast is referring to, though they're welcome to correct me.
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Tartarus Sorceror

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Post Saturday, 27th February 2016, 04:07

Re: Inventory expansion feature for the dcss-ca fork

Well, as long as food exists I think it's better to make it less annoying.

Tartarus Sorceror

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Post Saturday, 27th February 2016, 04:56

Re: Inventory expansion feature for the dcss-ca fork

Because one stack of permafood is enough for the whole game.
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Abyss Ambulator

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Post Sunday, 28th February 2016, 09:54

Re: Inventory expansion feature for the dcss-ca fork

Now that death cobs don't do AF_Hunger, you don't even need to carry the small food for any particular reason.

Tomb Titivator

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Post Tuesday, 1st March 2016, 01:29

Re: Inventory expansion feature for the dcss-ca fork

prozacelf wrote:Now that death cobs don't do AF_Hunger, you don't even need to carry the small food for any particular reason.

Suboptimally spamming firestorm without |energy reasons.

Slime Squisher

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Post Friday, 4th March 2016, 11:43

Re: Inventory expansion feature for the dcss-ca fork

the problem is that the most limiting effects of food have been removed leaving the core system somewhat vestigial...

maybe we should bring back nausea and metabolism (and diet) mutations/items instead! That would probably make permafood relevant again. *runs away really fast*

Tomb Titivator

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Post Friday, 4th March 2016, 14:40

Re: Inventory expansion feature for the dcss-ca fork

the problem is you still have to hit c over corpses to continue playing
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Tartarus Sorceror

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Post Saturday, 5th March 2016, 06:46

Re: Inventory expansion feature for the dcss-ca fork

remove hunger 2k16

Temple Termagant

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Post Wednesday, 16th March 2016, 21:45

Re: Inventory expansion feature for the dcss-ca fork

jeremygurr, the system you've set up in this fork is awesome. I've always hated the inventory management mini-game and this solves it nicely. So much so, I'll probably play this version exclusively.

Thanks & please keep it up!
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Tomb Titivator

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Post Saturday, 19th March 2016, 00:08

Re: Inventory expansion feature for the dcss-ca fork

GOLDEN :roll:
21:15:14 <PleasingFungus> the inventory consumable split is fascinating
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21:16:57 <zxc> the inventory changes are a step backwards
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21:17:10 <PleasingFungus> oh?
21:17:14 <zxc> I think so atl east
21:17:35 <PleasingFungus> howso?
21:18:04 <zxc> well w, W, P, V, etc already filter your inventory
21:18:26 <zxc> in a UI sense
21:18:48 <zxc> not so good for new players I know
21:19:01 <PleasingFungus> the whole point here is that you don't have "strategic" items conflicting with 'tactical" items for inventory space. it's a gameplay change, not just a UI change.
21:19:04 <PleasingFungus> well, a point, anyway
21:19:06 <PleasingFungus> idk their reasoning
21:19:14 <PleasingFungus> but it's strongly reminiscent of some stuff we've been talking about for a while
21:19:17 <zxc> well the strategic item split has long been discussed outside of this
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21:19:28 <zxc> and I'm a fan of taking out strategic items
21:19:36 <zxc> and replacing with some other method of using them
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21:20:23 <PleasingFungus> this is basically what that does, though
21:20:38 <ProzacElf> taking out strategic items?
21:20:45 <zxc> it splits consumables and the rest
21:20:50 <zxc> but many consmuables are tactical in nature
21:21:06 <zxc> so it's not the same, though yes in practice it achieves a similar result
21:21:13 <PleasingFungus> see, i was thinking of consumables as the tactical category
21:21:18 <PleasingFungus> but yeah you're right, this isn't that
21:21:43 <PleasingFungus> yeah i have no idea why they did this, then
21:21:44 <zxc> I think the strategic / everything else split makes more sense
21:21:47 <PleasingFungus> just wanted a larger inventory?
21:21:51 <zxc> yeah I think so
21:21:54 <PleasingFungus> lame
21:22:12 <PleasingFungus> playerthink
21:22:36 <zxc> I think the issue is that it's not clear to newer players what they should be picking up
21:22:37 <ProzacElf> i kind of like some strategic items taking up inventory space
21:22:42 <zxc> and importantly, what not to bother picking up
21:22:53 <zxc> often I see people picking up like 10 weapons by lair
21:22:59 <ProzacElf> then it's like "should i carry the !cmuts, or leave them behind?"
21:23:05 <ProzacElf> well, sure, zxc
21:23:13 <ProzacElf> but you eventually need to break that habit anyway
21:23:18 <ProzacElf> noob or no
21:23:31 <zxc> ProzacElf: but in the majority of instances you can leave behind strategic items
21:23:41 <ProzacElf> sure
21:23:44 <zxc> so it's just a bit of tedium to drop them or locate them
21:23:49 <zxc> and go back when you want them
21:23:57 <ProzacElf> but i also carry around way more weapons than i'll feasibly use at least until lair
21:24:07 <ProzacElf> or whenever i finally decide on what i'm going to train melee wise
21:24:31 <zxc> I sometimes take al ot of weapons too because you have so much space at the time, so I can bother with ranged weapons etc
21:24:42 <zxc> but newer players don't make the adjustment when they finally do get a good weapon
21:25:03 <zxc> they continue to lug around weak alternatives that they shouldn't consider switching to
21:25:07 <ProzacElf> true
21:25:26 <ProzacElf> but i don't know how much the game really needs to cater to newer players
21:25:29 <zxc> I sometimes have trouble with inventory space because I carry lots of items that have niche uses
21:26:05 <ProzacElf> me too, but then it's like "oh, stone of tremors is useless 99% of the time, should i keep it over this wand of confusion?"
21:26:18 <ProzacElf> instead of 6 different flails that do mostly the same thing
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21:26:32 <travis-ci> The build has errored. (master - 58c38cf #5084 : Chris Campbell): https://travis-ci.org/crawl/crawl/builds/116790436
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21:26:36 <ProzacElf> i mean, at some point, you just have to trust that the player needs to make a decision
21:27:24 <ProzacElf> (spoiler: wand of confusion is better than stone of tremors =p)
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21:27:44 <PleasingFungus> there's a big downside to larger inventory, too: increased decision paralysis
21:27:46 <PleasingFungus> too many options
21:28:02 <PleasingFungus> which of these 104 inventory items do i use to get myself out of this fix...?
21:28:06 <zxc> yes, also ui annoyance with letter assignments
21:28:39 <zxc> also, more keypresses to pick up more items and more time spent looking through them
21:28:49 <zxc> for very little real benefit
21:28:51 <ProzacElf> i rarely have difficulty deciding what i should carry in terms of what is actually going to be useful
21:29:34 <ProzacElf> i'm usually trying to carry around extra jewelry "just in case" or have room for some sweet randarts that i want on my morgue when i ascend
21:29:49 <zxc> all those resist rings
21:29:59 <ProzacElf> and i leave behind the lig/ambrosia/vulnerability that i never ever use anyway
21:30:13 <ProzacElf> right, the resist rings that i also never use
21:30:22 <zxc> carry vuln 'just in case' you need to paralyse something that has high mr and doesn't have hexes
21:30:40 <ProzacElf> or the lig "just in case" i somehow can't handle a tormentor
21:30:48 <ProzacElf> but would rather get pummeled by an iron giant
21:30:50 <ProzacElf> or some shit
21:30:51 <zxc> ambrosia in case you think of using it
21:31:24 <zxc> noise in case of mesm in lair shoals vault
21:31:32 <ProzacElf> hahahahahahahaha

Dungeon Master

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Post Saturday, 19th March 2016, 07:30

Re: Inventory expansion feature for the dcss-ca fork

By now I think that the cleanest solution is to make items disappear after a while. (For dropped and seen items, of course not for unseen items.)

It might be too hard to slap this onto Crawl, and it'd require a whole bunch of follow-up changes (on the magnitude of item reduction), but it'd solve the basic problem nicely. (I am aware that players could leave areas to not "spoil" the items, but I'd chalk that as a strategic decision.)

Shoals Surfer

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Post Saturday, 19th March 2016, 12:30

Re: Inventory expansion feature for the dcss-ca fork

Or juggle items by picking them up, dropping others, then after a bit picking up the others and dropping the originals. It'd introduce a lot of tedious workarounds.

Dungeon Master

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Post Saturday, 19th March 2016, 12:31

Re: Inventory expansion feature for the dcss-ca fork

allbefore: Try harder!

Ziggurat Zagger

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Post Saturday, 19th March 2016, 13:22

Re: Inventory expansion feature for the dcss-ca fork

Well the real solution is to reduce the number of items players might want to carry. The biggest offenders in general are branded ammo, misc evokables, and food types, though trimming down the number of potions/scrolls/wands (yes even further) would be good too.

You could make items go away after some time after you reduce the number of items, if you want, though I suspect players will dislike that change pretty severely (since it is very much item destruction) and I'm not sure that the benefits are really worthwhile.
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Barkeep

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Post Saturday, 19th March 2016, 14:00

Re: Inventory expansion feature for the dcss-ca fork

Yeah, dpeg, could you link to some bigger description of how "item disappearance" works? It, uh, sounds incredibly annoying and I have a hard time imagining how it wouldn't be gameable in some fashion.

Put me in crate's camp here; almost all of Crawl's inventory problems are really item bloat problems. All that I'd add is that 90% of the time I spend juggling items is because I ran out of space for chunks...

Dungeon Master

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Post Saturday, 19th March 2016, 14:55

Re: Inventory expansion feature for the dcss-ca fork

archeo: Sure thing: each character will carry a weapon, (worn) armour items, (worn) jewellery and tactical consumables (wands, potions, scrolls). All of these probably put you below 52 items. On top of this, there are a lot of situationally useful items, ranging from swap-in rings to strategic items (potion of cure mutation, spellbooks etc.) Carrying all of these will always lead to more than 52 items, so you have to make choices about what to drop.

These decisions are tedious, not so much because they're hard but because they're so frequent. It's easy to drop spellbooks unless there's a good reason you will be able to learn and use some particular spell real soon. It is not so hard to choose which wands is the least useful of your current bunch etc. So I agree that ways to cut on these frequent, little inventory decisions is good.

However, I completely disagree with opening up the inventory. In my opinion, this is one of the areas where less is more. In a world with unlimited inventories, everyone would carry every spellbook, every half-way decent looking randart and so on. It would lead to very long inventory lists. And I don't feel like scrolling through pages of items just to find that one particular thing I need right now.

This thread contains some ideas how to deal with the problem in better ways: addressing food in some way would be a good step, for example. My point is that there is a simple, basic approach that solves the problem outright: you can pick up what you want, but stuff you drop disappears. (Homework for allbefore: come up with a reasonable interface that avoids scummy behaviour). This is *not* like item destruction -- (a) the player chooses which items to discard, (b) discarding is forever, not temporary. This would make item decisions permanent, in other terms, relevant. If you decide to drop those potions of lignification or the spellbook of Alchemy, then that's it. It could be that this leads to extremely streamlined inventories, but, as always, the hope is that matters actually depend on circumstances.
There are some obvious caveats to carrying this out as-is, one of them is spellbooks. But in principle, this is a way to deal with (1) limited inventories in games having (2) almost unlimited items. There would be no stashes, and no backtracking for items; you only have what you carry.

To sum it up: instead of having many, meaningless decisions, this approach tries to make each of these decisions meaningful. I am sure to many, this is a mixed blessing at best, but I think it could be interesting. I think it could decrease the margin for errors, and so increase game depth.

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Post Saturday, 19th March 2016, 15:27

Re: Inventory expansion feature for the dcss-ca fork

I believe item dissapearence was been proposed before(even i have thought about it but never proposed myself) and my main question is: "what will keep players from just not picking things up?" I can only think of how item dissapearing when droped will lead to some tiresome and boring minigame where the player has to constantly check his inventory spaces, intentionally leave unidentified gear on the ground to come back to it later, stop picking up repeated wands and so on. So, how is that gonna be adressed?
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Ziggurat Zagger

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Post Saturday, 19th March 2016, 20:38

Re: Inventory expansion feature for the dcss-ca fork

dpeg wrote:archeo: Sure thing: each character will carry a weapon, (worn) armour items, (worn) jewellery and tactical consumables (wands, potions, scrolls). All of these probably put you below 52 items. On top of this, there are a lot of situationally useful items, ranging from swap-in rings to strategic items (potion of cure mutation, spellbooks etc.) Carrying all of these will always lead to more than 52 items, so you have to make choices about what to drop.

These decisions are tedious, not so much because they're hard but because they're so frequent. It's easy to drop spellbooks unless there's a good reason you will be able to learn and use some particular spell real soon. It is not so hard to choose which wands is the least useful of your current bunch etc. So I agree that ways to cut on these frequent, little inventory decisions is good.

However, I completely disagree with opening up the inventory. In my opinion, this is one of the areas where less is more. In a world with unlimited inventories, everyone would carry every spellbook, every half-way decent looking randart and so on. It would lead to very long inventory lists. And I don't feel like scrolling through pages of items just to find that one particular thing I need right now.

This thread contains some ideas how to deal with the problem in better ways: addressing food in some way would be a good step, for example. My point is that there is a simple, basic approach that solves the problem outright: you can pick up what you want, but stuff you drop disappears. (Homework for allbefore: come up with a reasonable interface that avoids scummy behaviour). This is *not* like item destruction -- (a) the player chooses which items to discard, (b) discarding is forever, not temporary. This would make item decisions permanent, in other terms, relevant. If you decide to drop those potions of lignification or the spellbook of Alchemy, then that's it. It could be that this leads to extremely streamlined inventories, but, as always, the hope is that matters actually depend on circumstances.
There are some obvious caveats to carrying this out as-is, one of them is spellbooks. But in principle, this is a way to deal with (1) limited inventories in games having (2) almost unlimited items. There would be no stashes, and no backtracking for items; you only have what you carry.

To sum it up: instead of having many, meaningless decisions, this approach tries to make each of these decisions meaningful. I am sure to many, this is a mixed blessing at best, but I think it could be interesting. I think it could decrease the margin for errors, and so increase game depth.

The problem is that your proposal doesn't decrease the number of decisions that need to be made, it increases it instead. I still have to decide which items are most important to carry, but now I have strategic items that are competing over the same limited space, since I can't drop that spellbook I will want in 10 levels, I have to carry the stupid thing with me until I am ready to use it, this results in yes, more meaningful decisions, but more frequent and more hair tearing ones, not to mention having to keep extra slots open to be able to do mundane things like pick up unidentified items to see what they are.
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Post Saturday, 19th March 2016, 20:40

Re: Inventory expansion feature for the dcss-ca fork

Oh I didn't even realise that you would be forcing players to carry around spellbooks. That sounds, um, very bad. Well, at least Trog exists so you can ignore that problem.

If you exclude strategic things (spellbooks, enchant x) then crawl is already quite close to 52 items being more than you ever need (and if you go back a few versions, 52 items was more than you ever needed; you guys created this problem!). Just trim down the number of items.

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Post Saturday, 19th March 2016, 21:33

Re: Inventory expansion feature for the dcss-ca fork

1. When you pick up a wand, if you have an existing wand of that type, the charges from the two wands should combine and leave you with one wand. Set the maximum recharging capacity for all wands to 2,147,483,647 or whatever so that there isn't a benefit to maintaining two of the same wand. You have to get rid of the wand trove prices but since they're pointless anyway (nobody is going to give their only wand of heal/haste to a trove) that isn't a downside. Do the same for rods, remove max rod charge cap (which is pointless in the first place, using recharging on rods is already a bad investment) and either remove rod enchantment, or set the enchantment to the greater of the two merged rods and multiply the recharging rate by the maximum charges. Yes this is a very small buff to rods, but evocations has much bigger problems.
2. Sacks of spiders and boxes of beasts should stack (or combine the charges as above). Also they shouldn't exist but if they do exist they should at least stack/combine
3. If you aren't removing food, at least remove pizzas and royal jellies, and combine the two rations.
4. Combine tomahawks with javelins, and combine stones with sling bullets. There is no point in differentiating between these.
5. Remove ammo brands except needles, ranged doesn't need to have two brands at once
6. REMOVE LANTERN OF SHADOWS HOW IS THIS ITEM ALLOWED TO EXIST
7. Also remove decks

Now you can goldify strategic items and the 52 item slot limit will never be a problem again, that is until you make it a problem again by adding 20 more new item types again
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Barkeep

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Post Saturday, 19th March 2016, 22:29

Re: Inventory expansion feature for the dcss-ca fork

I've always liked the idea of turning strategic items into dungeon features, like bookshelves or forges or shrines or whatever. If you go the goldification route, it'd be a neat way to handle it instead of having different inventories for different scrolls and books.

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Post Sunday, 20th March 2016, 00:05

Re: Inventory expansion feature for the dcss-ca fork

dynast: Try harder, seriously.
Siegurt: What is your point? I mention "spellbooks" and "follow-up changes" right in my posting.
crate: People always had trouble with 52 items. You say they don't had to, probably rightly so. Yet, they had :)
duvessa: Interesting! For reasons entirely alien to you, I'd still defend royal jellies. Yes to 2,4,5,7 as is.
archaeo: Yes, that'd be an expansion of shops (which are random, strategic containers in any system).

Dungeon Master

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Post Sunday, 20th March 2016, 02:55

Re: Inventory expansion feature for the dcss-ca fork

duvessa wrote:4. Combine tomahawks with javelins

Small race buff...!!! (or nerf if you go the other way)

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Post Sunday, 20th March 2016, 03:43

Re: Inventory expansion feature for the dcss-ca fork

CanOfWorms wrote:
duvessa wrote:4. Combine tomahawks with javelins

Small race buff...!!! (or nerf if you go the other way)

We keep hearing that throwing is going to be nerfed anyway.

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Post Sunday, 20th March 2016, 04:29

Re: Inventory expansion feature for the dcss-ca fork

dpeg wrote:Siegurt: What is your point? I mention "spellbooks" and "follow-up changes" right in my posting..

dpeg wrote:These decisions are tedious, not so much because they're hard but because they're so frequent. It's easy to drop spellbooks unless there's a good reason you will be able to learn and use some particular spell real soon. It is not so hard to choose which wands is the least useful of your current bunch etc. So I agree that ways to cut on these frequent, little inventory decisions is good.


My point is that your suggestion doesn't reduce the frequency of decisions, it does increase the *hardness* of the decision, and while I agree that in general harder decisions are better for the game than easier ones, I think that increasing the hardness *and* frequency of a decision that's already tedious because you have to make it too often doesn't sound like very much fun to me.

To me it looks like you're saying that the decision to drop a spellbook is easy because currently there's no cost for doing so, however your proposal (to add a cost to dropping things, a rather extreme one at that) doesn't reduce the frequency of making decisions regarding what fits in your inventory, it only makes those decisions harder. I don't believe that frequent hard decisions regarding your inventory are any less tedious than frequent easy decisions.
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Post Sunday, 20th March 2016, 13:37

Re: Inventory expansion feature for the dcss-ca fork

dpeg wrote:dynast: Try harder, seriously.

My bad.
dpeg wrote:There are some obvious caveats to carrying this out as-is, one of them is spellbooks. But in principle, this is a way to deal with (1) limited inventories in games having (2) almost unlimited items. There would be no stashes, and no backtracking for items; you only have what you carry.

You basically wants to get rid of "ctrl+f" and the only thing i can think of is making things on the floor expire.
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Halls Hopper

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Post Sunday, 20th March 2016, 22:03

Re: Inventory expansion feature for the dcss-ca fork

I've spent hundreds of hours playing crawl, and dozens of hours playing this fork with the inventory change. It is **so** much more fun and less tedious with the new inventory system that I don't want to ever use the old again. Yes, I lose some of the choice of which items to carry around, but gain choices when it comes to dealing with particularly difficult enemies (which is where most of the intensity, excitement, and interest in the game lies). And I lose almost all of the tediousness of having to make that decision every time I come across an interesting item. The second choice for me adds far more fun to the game than the first takes away. If the choice of what to carry was a more significant part of the game than the choice of what to use in a given encounter, than why not limit the inventory to 10 items?

Taking things away from crawl that are redundant is a good thing. Taking things away from crawl that genuinely add distinct strategic choices that players can experiment with, learn from, and improve their game with, takes the game backwards. With the current inventory system, I would never carry wands of confusion or decks of cards or wands of polymorph, or most of the miscellanous evokables, even though each of those might provide good strategic choices in some scenarios.

More distinct and meaningful choices = more depth in the game = longer time it takes before all interesting strategies are explored and the game becomes boring.

I would recommend to anyone that really cares about this particular issue, that you should actually try out the various proposals. 10 minutes of actual gameplay will often tell you more than many hours of theoretical discussion will about it. Obviously to test this particular proposal you would need to get a character far enough along for it to be meaningful first, and *then* start the 10 minutes :) . So, maybe it would take 30 minutes... And if you really want to see the difference at it's best, trying playing a Nemelex character...
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Barkeep

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Post Monday, 21st March 2016, 15:51

Re: Inventory expansion feature for the dcss-ca fork

I removed a couple of replies here, and I apologize to jeremygurr, as I'm partially responsible for pushing this conversation off topic.

Others can feel free to start a new thread on DCSS' inventory. Please use this thread to discuss DCSS-CA's inventory change.

Ziggurat Zagger

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Post Monday, 21st March 2016, 16:05

Re: Inventory expansion feature for the dcss-ca fork

I have been playing this fork for quite some time (close to a hundred of hours already) and I can assure you that some theoretically-predicted problems with inventory don't actually happen.
1) Too many books and too many slots? No. I drop books which I will never need so my spell list for memorization is pretty short (less than a single page). Of course it means I don't need to use stash ever
2) Too many items in evoke menu? No. I drop unneeded wands and change their autopickup, I have exactly the same number of items
3) Too many weapons/artifacts (I use LUA script to pick up all artefacts)? Probably. When I have time and desire, I identify or drop them. Compare with standard crawl where you have to do it every time because you cannot pick it up due to inventory limit
4) Too many potions/scrolls? No. In normal crawl I would have all those scrolls of blinking and potions of berserk too, but here I don't need to drop scrolls of enchant weapon/armour because I am a OgTm in robe who can need them for trove, I even consider enchanting my blowgun because I already have 13 scrolls of enchant weapon in my inventory and not in Ctlr+F menu.
5) Too many jewelry? Not really, I drop every duplicate as before, though having 2 rings of protection from cold or negative energy is nice.
6) Food? Pick all
7) Missiles for your launcher or throwing? Pick all
8) Not sure if you are going to find sling, crossbow or bow first? Pick all missiles right from D1

TLDR. It's really enjoyable, you choose time when to check your inventory, not your inventory interrupts your normal play.

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Tomb Titivator

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Post Tuesday, 22nd March 2016, 07:55

Re: Inventory expansion feature for the dcss-ca fork

couple nitpicks

You remapped "D" to the "drop consumables" menu. "D" is a very useful button because it allows you to instantly drop an item you picked up by accident or to auto-pickup. You can even use it to drop an item you just picked up and identified. "D" gets pressed dozens of time in a game. Instead of removing the "D" command you can have players press "d*" or "d\" to go to the consumables menu. They'll go there only a tiny handful of times per game, at most, and an alternative way is to select a consumable from the "I" menu and press d - it's just single-drop, not multi-drop. I end up pressing D maybe a hundred times in a game.

If both menus have unidentified items mapped to the same letter, then the menu you see after reading a scroll of identify should momentarily remap both of these items, and withhold this letter from other items, to make sure that pressing this letter does not identify any item, so that people don't take erroneous action which is currently valid, such as using the message log (e.g. "k - puce potion") to guide their keystroke after reading ?ID.

Halls Hopper

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Post Wednesday, 23rd March 2016, 21:34

Re: Inventory expansion feature for the dcss-ca fork

Fixed. D now works as before. If you want to drop a consumable, you can use control-D or use the 'I' inventory.

Temple Termagant

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Post Saturday, 2nd April 2016, 18:30

Re: Inventory expansion feature for the dcss-ca fork

I'll echo Sandman25 on this - forget (at least for a minute or two) the discussion and _give it a try_. There is no better way to get a true feel for it.

http://crawl.homedns.org/crawl#lobby

Make a char, test it out, then come back and discuss.

I think it's amazingly better than vanilla. I find the whole process of deciding what to keep and what to drop agonizing and it continually interrupts my play. There is certainly room to argue that it's my own fault and I just need to get better at prioritizing but even if I did, it wouldn't be _fun_ (for me and I imagine many others).

I want to hang onto everything I find, including that Stone of Tremors and that lignify potion. Even though I'll use it rarely, I like having the option...

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