I was thinking about some of the types of interactions that often occur and how the game might become more friendly and approachable with a more robust inventory pane.
I put together this proof of concept to spur conversation and ideas on this topic:
In this demo, you can shift-select multiple items. You can also drag to create a selection rectangle to select multiple items. Then you can transfer groups of items at once.
Theoretically, these batches of items can be dropped into places other than inventories. For example they could pre-fill a sales or shipping contract with their Materials and Quantities. This could make the game less dependent on manual entry.
Bulk dragging is interesting, I’d like people’s opinions on that. We have an unload all button, but not a way to load ships up with big piles of prefabs when we tear down buildings. Often when loading a ship from a CX, you need specific quantities of each item, and this won’t really help for that. But other time you need to load 100x C, 100x O, 100x FLX, and this could help with that.
Just a nitpick: on Linux (and Windows if I recall correctly), shift-click selects all elements between the last selected and the one that was just clicked. Adding only a single element is with ctrl-click instead.
Found the time to implement a little prototype myself.
Right now it only allows to transfer materials, not shipments and ofc not blocked materials.
I am moving on to another topic, but here is some food for thought: How should the drop targets behave if there are multiple items selected? Should they all be available? Looking for input!
HLF: adds half of each item stack (if total fits in inventory)
ALL: adds all selected items (if total fits in inventory)
<number>: adds exactly <number> of selected items or less (if total fits in inventory)
I personally would like to have MAX drop as much as it can. It would help me with an annoyance I run into frequently: I ship a bunch of consumable and other materials to a base to resupply it. The base doesn’t have enough free inventory to let me unload everything. So I have to manually unload as much stuff as I can (which requires a lot of tedious clicking-and-dragging), and then I can load stuff from my base to the ship, so then I can finally unload the last bit from my ship to base.
With this new feature, I see two possibilities:
I select everything, I drag it from ship to base, select MAX and have it unload as much as it can.
I select everything except some big heavy thing (so that the total will fit in the target inventory), drag from ship to base and select ALL
I think probably option 1 is my preference, but option 2 would be a huge improvement.
Regarding <number> – I think this is still useful, but I’m also wondering if maybe options like 25% or 50% might be more useful? I’m not really sure
Maybe MAX could operate based on the weight/volume order, so the stack of thing that takes up the most “room” gets dealt with first, if that takes up all the room in the target location then nothing else gets moved, and then just work down the “what takes the most room” order. Maybe the behaviour could change if you have sorted on weight or volume and then either of those takes precedence
Maybe im not explaining this so well, but hopefully you get the gist
I love the proof of concept, looks amazing. Will be really nice when cleaning out bases and you have 27 items to move to a ship without any other automation ability, or, you have bases with a ton of outputs that regularly get produced. You can just grab them all and yeet them into a ship instead of one-by-one.
On the topic of MAX - personally I would want it to be moved by the smallest stack first.
2000 HAL weighing 5,400t
250 DW weighing 25t
500 RAT weighing 105t
This would mean that all 250 and all 500 RAT would be moved, and the remaining space would be filled with HAL. This way you remove as much of the miscellaneous small stuff, leaving only the big heavy items. The purpose of the tool, for me, is to help moving lots of small items. So a big stack of ore is always lowest on the priority list that I’d want to move.
Some clever logic to automatically “pack” a ship to the full xx00.00 tonnage\volume limit would also be a nice-to-have though not needed. I.E, transfer one less large item and “pack” the remaining space with the smaller items to achieve a 100% full ship.
I think I don’t have a strong opinion on the exact behavior of the MAX button- as long as it’s consistent, people will get used to it.
I think my preference hasn’t been mentioned. It could split items evenly by count, which is helpful for filling recipes including smelting (1 FLX, 1 Oxygen, 1 Carbon), PG (1 H, 1 C, 1 MG), etc. This feels most useful for new players who are playing without tools.
Starting with small mass (or small volume? which one). Sounds pretty useful in a pragmatic way, mostly because consumables are always smaller than ore.
At first I thought the drop zones in PRUN was pretty weird. But I think it’s grown on me, and it’s better than the stack splitting that most games use. I think if you choose “half” it should fill your inventory with up to half or all those stacks, stopping when it’s full.
i’m also here to say i would prefer loading of the largest quantity of objects as well (so lowest weight/volume first), because that leaves less to be interacted with later.
on the other hand this could leave a small amount of dead weight, which loading heaviest first could pack a little denser…
i could get behind attempting to load equal amounts as well.
