Something that I always disliked about SS13 in general is it's inventory. it's simplistic, and sure - it works. but there isn't much to it. it by no means does it's job badly. It even offers some simplistic inventory management due to being able to store items that can hold items IN large enough storage items; leading to levels of optimization. You can, for example. store more in your backpack if you carefully organize everything in boxes IN your backpack. but it's more of a pain to get things out of your backpack due to having to shuffle through the nested boxes.
However, I feel that more than anything. A change is long since due for 13th Cru; considering that the core mechanic of storage hasn't changed at all since the olden days of the ancient goon leak. And you know. it's good to be different.
However, in order to change it, I had to have a clue what I was changing it to. and as usual. I look towards
From my collection I've got a fair few to look at:
* Fallout (The original and Bethesda ones. both work pretty well the same however)
* Dark Souls 1/2/3
* Final Fantasy VI
* Diablo 2
All of these games have distinctly different Inventory systems, each with pros, cons. and a limiting factor(s), which I'll go over here.
Starting off with Fallout.
Fallout; and other RPGs like it (eg, the Elder Scrolls, the Witcher games, etc) are Weight Limited - The amount of items you can carry on you at any given time is limited via your character's carry capacity. ex: you can carry 300 pieces of paper (or in the case of the Elder Scrolls; cheese wheels), but perhaps only one anvil. Going over this "carry capacity" typically debuffs your player. generally via limiting speed.
There's aspects of this in SS13's current system - you can only carry so many items of a specific "size" (defined via w_class). but the amount of items you can carry is theoretically unlimited. this system is probably ideal for single player games due to ease of use. but wouldn't be ideal in an ss13 environment due to the lack of depth. Inventories are better off not just being lists in my opinion. so this one's out.
Next up is a classic - Final Fantasy. which is Capacity Limited. The amount of items is only limited via some arbitrary number. That's it. This one offers the least depth possible out of all the games here. and effectively negates inventory management completely due to it being in a neatly ordered list. so understandably this isn't one I can use.
funnily enough - however. things that store items in SS13 are limited via capacity as well. you'd only be able to hold 7 items total, regardless of size. though larger items may take up more than one slot.
after Final Fantasy - Dark souls. a classic.
Dark souls has aspects from the above two - the amount you can carry on you at any one time is essentially unlimited, but the items you can equip are limited via weight. which the maximum of can be increased via leveling up vitality. However. there is no carry limit, or other such restriction for a reason. and that reason is that items in dark souls are Rare as hell. there's very few situations where you'd max out an item - so they simply removed item maxes. this alone makes dark souls Scarcity Limited.
Dark souls' inventory works well for it. however, it suffers from the same drawbacks as the other two discussed - it lacks the same depth that ss13's has in terms of inventory management. it does exist. but it's minor. this is due to it's use-case favoring a singleplayer game over anything else. there's no backpacks or anything of the sort. so nobody really cares that you can store enough arms to equip an army up nature's pocket.
The last option to look at here. is Diablo 2. (I actually looked at a swedish game for this initially - Haven and hearth. but more people know Diablo.)
It's of course, not exclusive to Diablo; but it's likely the most well known implementation of it. the term I'm going to use for it here is Grid limited - but I refer to it as Tetris.
This is likely the best option. it's use-case can match SS13's easily by simply assigning a grid to each storage item; and with a bit of tweaking, can be supported by the vast majority of inventory items. so it's the one I went with. Of course the system I built has got plenty of issues and drawbacks. but I'll cover that along with the nerd shit in another post.
