First questions

If there is one topic for online gaming that is extremely important to many gamers, and at the same time almost never mentioned with any detail by the developers... It's Inventory. I'm not just talking about the display of inventory and how many 'Slots' you have access to, I'm also talking about how it works on the server side, how it gets transmitted to the clients, what determines the limits, etc...



Obviously, I'm wondering about all of this for selfish motivations. I'm working on the Inventory system for SOP.

One question is 'How many things is it reasonable for a player to have ownership of?'

Another question is 'How should the inventory be stored on the server?'

And just to stop at an arbitrary 3 questions...

'What would be the best display method for items that allows for easy management of inventory and equipped items?'



I'll be discussing this over the next few days as I hack out a workable system, throw it away and then try to make a better one. I'll be comparing examples from other games and trying to quantify both the good and bad points for each. Where I can I'll guess about a particular system's back-end process and mechanisms, but that's all I can do.



Just for giggles, here is a snapshot of what I have so far...