Recent Inventory

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Cowboy
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Recent Inventory

Unread post by Cowboy » Wed Mar 26, 2014 11:57 am

I'll be blunt: Inventory management is a nightmare. I hate having to look for items, especially when I can't remember the exact name (looking for Festive Drinks, for example), or just can't remember what letter they start with or something.

Recent Inventory would be very simple, and simple to implement too. All it is, is a subset of your inventory that only shows items that have been used in some way in the past 24 hours. By "used", I mean, obtained in an adventure, moved from backpack/stash/store/showcase to backpack/stash/store/showcase, been the subject of a trade, purchased, equipped, consumed, etc. Pretty much *anything*. Now, you may say, how does this help if it applies to such a broad set of items?

Well, I don't even look at most of my items on any particular day. The inefficient foods? I never eat them. The bad equipment? Only used in reset (where it would be useful to have on recent inventory).

It wouldn't be that hard to implement because you could just have a true/false flag that is set to true when the item is touched in any of the ways described above, reset to false every 24 hours. Then just have another inventory tab that only displays things that are both currently in your inventory and flagged as recent.
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commandermack
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Re: Recent Inventory

Unread post by commandermack » Wed Mar 26, 2014 12:48 pm

Just Stash your useless stuff, buy a stash page and name it Bad Stuff.

"and simple to implement too" and "obtained in an adventure, moved from backpack/stash/store/showcase to backpack/stash/store/showcase, been the subject of a trade, purchased, equipped, consumed, etc."
very contradictory to one another.

This would be nice to have, no arguments there, but it isn't "simple" by any means, and the action listed above is much more simple for the time being, as this would get in the way of current progress.
Put this on a backburner though. On-Off profile option, for those who don't want a clunky menu and already store the "useless" stuff.

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Gobberwart
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Re: Recent Inventory

Unread post by Gobberwart » Thu Mar 27, 2014 6:07 pm

Simple to implement? You're kidding, right?

1. What counts as "used in some way"? Equipped? Autosold? Added to your store? Stashed? Showcased? Paradox does not track every time a player "uses" an item in every possible way for reasons of database size and usability. I'd need to start tracking that, and there is a risk of blowing the database to hell, possibly for no good reason.

2. It will very much depend what you're going to do with the item next as to which items you want to see. If you're going to equip something, you will probably want to see your recently-equipped items, but if you're going to autosell them.. well, you'll want to see completely different items. What would be the point in filtering by, say, your most-recently stashed items? Or some sort of weird aggregate.

3. There is very possibly an argument here for some sort of "favourites" (favorites for our US brethren) system where any item could be marked as a "favourite". Again, that would depend on the intended purpose. Favourite equipment is very different from favourite store items, favourite autosell items etc. Not sure it's worth it.

4. Why not just clean your stuff up? If you can get a maximum of about 500 turns a day with the best gear and turns on intermission, how much stuff can you REALLY accumulate? Take a few minutes to get rid of the crap, stash and/or otherwise squirrel away the rest, and all you'll have left is what you want. It's only a mess if you let it get that way.
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Gobberwart
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Re: Recent Inventory

Unread post by Gobberwart » Thu Mar 27, 2014 6:25 pm

Just a bit more on that...

One of the challenges with a game like this is "trying to keep everyone happy." Well, not really, because obviously that's utterly impossible. What we try to do is to provide an interface that meets the basic needs of all players, without necessarily spending too much time on addressing the advanced requirements of the few.

If enough people really want something VERY specific, or at least the vague request can be addressed by something we can actually achieve, then we'll do it. Otherwise, we'll try to offer a workaround or compromise, or just explain why we're not going to do it.

Remember, too, that Paradox is mostly a Javascript/AJAX front-end over a PHP/HTML back-end, with a bit of XML thrown in for good measure. You can probably write a user script to do most of what you want, very "simply" (LOL). If you can, then feel free to do so*, test it, share it, and give me the feedback so I can integrate it.

*Be VERY careful of user scripts that bombard the game server(s) with requests that cause lag. If you do this, I will ban you. Simple.
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Cowboy
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Re: Recent Inventory

Unread post by Cowboy » Fri Mar 28, 2014 3:38 pm

Cool, I'll write an extension that does this :)
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