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Here's what makes me uninstall the game everytime I try to re-install after a year (Inventory System)


CVT

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I've been playing this game on and off over the past couple of years, especially since 41. Each time I come back I only want to check one thing before trying to get into it again. Only one thing, really, and it's the Inventory System. All these years, I'm too lazy to scroll to forum and don't much time to try to bring it to the attention to the mods and what not, since I don't have much time in general on my hands. 

But after all these years, and it seemed that players are content with the state of the inventory systems, which is quite unfortunate since it's quite a big chunk of time spent on the game. Now, I'm not going to propose any new UI design or whatever, there's already so much successful game out there to get inspiration on.

 

But here are my frustation on these things, first, I can't help but notice that looting activities seemed to distract me, or detached me from the "experience" in general, it's a chore to do. Scrolling, scrolling, short term memory kicks in, scrolling. Maybe there's too much entities to process, maybe a disconnect between the visual cues and the "loot" boxes, etc.

 

- Lower cognitive load for looting

Maybe let's brainstorm a bit to see what kind of annoyances we can get rid of, I stand near 4 boxes, box 1(apple, wrench), box 2 (knife, wrench), box 3 (apple, pie), box 4 (nails, trash). Now, maybe just aggregate them together get rid of the mindless switching UI back and forth ritual? I'd rather see 2 apple, 2 wrench, knife, pie, nails, trash. Now, the backend implementation to due this with low latency might be an issue if the data structure is just not written for this fast aggregate access, but I can see aggregate sum variant of https://baihuqian.github.io/2018-08-09-moving-average-from-data-stream/ should work. (Yes, there cases where same items may have sub-meta category, e.g. quality, freshness, etc

 

- Minimize dependency on mouse precision for looting (I hate having to being precise with my vertical mouse movement back and forth, I'm not playing fps game here)

One that that I love about playing console games in general is, the games really made effort to deemphasize inventory management activities to as minimum as possible to non-existent. There are ways they can do this, some may not apply in zomboid if we want to preserve the "hoarding" aspect of the games. For example, maybe, get rid of the magazine/book system as item, just make it a collectible thing. Maybe use a "capped" item system instead like Last of Us.

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The inventory system has improved a lot over the years, and I think that most of us are satisfied with it (at leasth I am). At first it may seem a bit rough, but after a few hours you start to become agile with it, and there comes a time when you can handle it with closed eyes.

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6 hours ago, Thar said:

The inventory system has improved a lot over the years, and I think that most of us are satisfied with it (at leasth I am). At first it may seem a bit rough, but after a few hours you start to become agile with it, and there comes a time when you can handle it with closed eyes.

 

Eh.. I always cheat myself enough points to get dexterous so transferring items is faster. I don't care how realistic that part of the game is, it's still a game and I don't enjoy waiting for bags to empty all the time, which is a common experience.

 

I suppose in PVP multiplayer you don't want someone to be able to clean you out super quickly, but in coop or solo play, let's just move on to more interesting things shall we?

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I just don’t see how this is a problem in the default game? Not enough spawns to make it more than a quick glance / scroll for the most part.

 

 Throw in mods, set loot to high, or maybe store all your proffered loot in a single container, then sure, it’d become tedious.

 

Some of that tedium is just down to simulating struggling to find and loot stuff in a tense environment, so the way other games simplify this may not fit well with PZ.

 

 Note that there is a controller ui. It uses a larger ui and let’s you shuffle things back and forth with buttons. It might be more comfortable?

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I would personally like more precise categories (there is a mod for that, but it should be in vanilla) and the ability to "collapse" an entire category of items so that they won't be shown in my inventory until I expand the category again. Another big quality of life change I really wish to see in the future is a tooltip information that tells you how many of the same item you have in your inventory/backpack. I often forget if I have an item already or how many of them I have, so that will help massively selectively pick up what you actually want or need without wasting space.

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4 hours ago, EnigmaGrey said:

I just don’t see how this is a problem in the default game? Not enough spawns to make it more than a quick glance / scroll for the most part.

 

 Throw in mods, set loot to high, or maybe store all your proffered loot in a single container, then sure, it’d become tedious.

 

Some of that tedium is just down to simulating struggling to find and loot stuff in a tense environment, so the way other games simplify this may not fit well with PZ.

 

 Note that there is a controller ui. It uses a larger ui and let’s you shuffle things back and forth with buttons. It might be more comfortable?

I come back from a loot run. Grab my full bags from my car's trunk.

 

Now I have to take them inside my base and empty each bag's contents out into crate or some other container depending on type so it's easier to find what you're looking for later. This can be quite a time investment. And it gets repeated, many, many times. It's even worse for newer players who are less sure about what they'll need.

 

The base game needs to have a sorting function where if you are near containers with x type of item in it that you can press a UI button to autounload stuff from your selected bag into nearby appropriate containers. If you're near a container that has all canned food it in, any canned food items in your bag gets dumped into the container, but weapons or tools won't. It also kinda sucks waiting for slow items like planks to load and unload, since you have to do it so very many times for constructions.

 

Being able to hide an item from view would be nice as well, like I don't really care about that zombie's shoes or their glasses or whatever else junk they have. Or these forks and butter knives. Let me hide them so I can skim through containers and mountains of corpses more quickly. It would just collapse all undesired items under a single entry "hidden items" that you could click to expand it if you wished.

 

It all adds up.

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2 hours ago, BoogieMan said:

I come back from a loot run. Grab my full bags from my car's trunk.

 

Now I have to take them inside my base and empty each bag's contents out into crate or some other container depending on type so it's easier to find what you're looking for later. This can be quite a time investment. And it gets repeated, many, many times. It's even worse for newer players who are less sure about what they'll need.

 

The base game needs to have a sorting function where if you are near containers with x type of item in it that you can press a UI button to autounload stuff from your selected bag into nearby appropriate containers. If you're near a container that has all canned food it in, any canned food items in your bag gets dumped into the container, but weapons or tools won't. It also kinda sucks waiting for slow items like planks to load and unload, since you have to do it so very many times for constructions.

 

Being able to hide an item from view would be nice as well, like I don't really care about that zombie's shoes or their glasses or whatever else junk they have. Or these forks and butter knives. Let me hide them so I can skim through containers and mountains of corpses more quickly. It would just collapse all undesired items under a single entry "hidden items" that you could click to expand it if you wished.

 

It all adds up.

That makes a lot of sense and if we're mainly talking about organizing your warehouse after a day of looting, I can see why it'd get annoying. 

 

Good ideas there. 

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  • 2 weeks later...

I think the zomboid inventory system is screaming out for an affinities system - for example, what path of exile instituted. 
 

it’s optional: but basically you can set a tag to a container to the category of item if your choice (eg magazines) and then when you access that container you can hit a key combo or button that will automatically transfer all items of that category either into or out of your backpack/bag etc into (our out of) the container. 

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  • 2 weeks later...
On 11/28/2021 at 11:17 AM, Tchernobill said:

You make me sad.

All you ask is done by AutoLoot mod.

I implemented automatic looting both instant if you wanna cheat, or "as fast as possible" with Vanilla rules by default.

I also added the "as fast as possible" storing button with Vanilla rules.

 

To be fair, "there is a mod for that" is not a valid argument. There is also a mod that improve the item categories, but I do believe that should be a vanilla thing. If a mod is either indispensable or just that useful/popular, than vanilla should adopt it, even just in part, to improve the game.

 

Case in point, the new map system. The minimap mod and the external map site was so used and popular that devs acknowledged it and implemented their own take on it.

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@leviathan_13

And you are also right for "item categories": they implemented it in vanilla with B41.60.

 

Nonethelss, I am sorry to contradict you but "A mod is doing the trick" is a valid argument for "not uninstalling".

You can prefer it in vanilla as much as someone who is close to die from thirst can prefer sparkling water to still water.

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  • 2 weeks later...
On 11/8/2021 at 10:22 PM, CVT said:

I stand near 4 boxes, box 1(apple, wrench), box 2 (knife, wrench), box 3 (apple, pie), box 4 (nails, trash). Now, maybe just aggregate them together get rid of the mindless switching UI back and forth ritual? I'd rather see 2 apple, 2 wrench, knife, pie, nails, trash.


 

I love this. Imagine you’re going through someone’s closet IRL. You have to open every box, sift through random stuff and find what’s useful. I think it’s part of what makes the game so immersive. The super in-depth systems of everything. The tidiness of everything makes you chose if it’s worth checking every box or if you want to risk missing something good. 

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