Inventory Management

In other MMORPGs, you typically cannot "carry" all of your inventory items. You have a finite number of storage places (bags or backpacks).

If you want to keep more items than you can carry, you have to "deposit" them in a special central location, like a "bank" with safety-deposit boxes or some kind of warehouse "U-Store-It" place.

You can keep items in these storage places, but they are not immediately available to you. You have to make a bit of an effort to go to the "U-Store-It" and withdraw your items.

If it turned out that such a system could help with the current inventory-overload issues, and if LL were able to figure out a way to implement something like this, would you use it? What if we capped your "immediately accessible" inventory and required you to store seldomly-used items in a place like this? What if the size of your warehouse were proportional to the amount of land you owned? The more land you have, the bigger your warehouse? What if you could "rent" more space (in $L or $US) if you needed more? What if Residents could set up their own warehouses based on their owned land and rent out space to other Residents, creating a new business opportunity?

How would you envision such a system? Is being able to "carry" your entire inventory critical to you, or are you looking for better ways to store and organize things you don't use all the time?

I'm just tossing ideas out there. Thanks for any feedback.

-Pathfinder

This would be great. Also, perhaps incentives for people who maintain smaller inventories! Kind of like dwell, but without the money-balls and naked parties!

Very quickly, I'm going to say this: snapshots make up a large portion of many Residents's Inventories in sheer numbers, and Residents may be hesitant to delete them because a lot are treasured memories -- I know I'm in this situation -- but going through each one is currently a pain. That's a lot of texture-loading. So, if there was a way to easily all tag and consolidate them into a single ALBUM, I think that might take care of some of the load.

Limit the amount of inventory storage space we have.

Give us a usage indicator.

Grant us the ability to export inventory to a local drive.

Those are my suggestions.

*edited to add that we need a few weeks notice please

I would be all for such an idea. A large fraction of my inventory is previous work that I don't want to delete lest I suddenly have a use for it again. After having spent 3 hours making something and discovering that it doesn't match the style of the rest of my build, I often find that the item finds an entirely new used a month or two down the road.

I support tying the inventory to land tier, as it would mean that each account is consuming a proportionate amount of the storage. The idea of physically travelling to a warehouse complex and depositing my items is appealing, also. However, I think the key would be to provide a reasonable level of storage. I cannot begin to provide feedback on capacity without knowing how large the average item actually is. Can you provide us with that info?

I think a bank (seperate server) much like the banks in EQ would be great. I have tons of stuff in my inventory that I only use once in a blue moon, and some I never use but may "need" someday.

Could be like atms scattered throughout the world that opens a second "bank" inventory when you access it, or a button on the UI that directly links you to that server.

That way those items would never have to load unless you access your bank, which I'm assuming folks wouldn't do nearly as much as their regular inventory.

perfect, especially if inventory affects performance in any major way....

If it's secure and easy to use, then yes. If it's only as good as dropping objects into a cube, then no. It's way too easy for prims to get deleted by other players or through accident, and copies of items sometimes change permissions due to bugs. Right now things seem safer in inventory.

I'd gladly make use of a storage locker if it was risk-free.

Pathfinder, I admit I do not know all the workings with this peticular db and game. I do know that some other games I have been with and had similar overload of db items it did not really matter if the items were stored in a "bank" or in the persons "pack" as the items still existed in the db itself.

I noticed that the items in my "pack" seem to only get pulled from db if I open the folder, so going with this experience would it make much difference in overall performance to have a "bank"? As those items would still be physically taking up db space?

If having a ceiling on the amount of items a person can carry will help the db problem I know I would agree to such a system. If this "bank" system would help I would defiantely agree to it... make it more realistic in fact and to me more interesting virtual experience.

It sounds like a great idea but you don't really need to spend time implementing anything special. Isn't the same thing achieved by boxing up stuff?
It would be a lot easier to sort our inv if you let us multi-select and multi-drag, you know
Also, why should the tasks of authentication and inventory transfer be performed by the same machine?
Wouldn't it be preferrable to have a lightweight authentication system that would just let me in to SL? You can do a lot without ever using your inventory you know...

Yes tks like ShureGuard?DD But in Sl of course for free))

To take care of my inv takes some time every week.

I have 2 places to stay at - an own (small) island.. a BF place.. lots of clothes (and shoes).. furniture,,, trees, flowers.. yes all kind of things that prob all of us have plus some more...

Another thing that would be nice to get - are to be able to colour mark folders as i do in my Mac.

I dont know how much an huge inv slow down or what so ever your life in SL.. maybe you can tell us?

***

PS I am happy that i dont need to clean windows.. in the SL houses.. or wash clothes but my inv kill me anyway..

I'm curious why our inventories aren't stored locally so that inventory searches happen on our own computers and not on the asset server. Seems to me the inventory should just be a list of names and key numbers and the only time we should be hitting the asset server at all is when rezzing something, or making changes to our inventory like adding a new item, renaming or deleting.

I've often thought about moving some of my inventory into storage prims, but I've always been nervous to do that because it seems there'd be a much greater chance of losing things.

Some of that sounds good to me. Right now, all I need readily available to me in inventory are my clothes/accessories, weapons, and textures. All these I put in folders that are named to remain at the top of my list. The other items, I tried storing in prim cabinets left on my land.

But I don't like the idea of making the size of the warehouse proportionate to the size of land I own. I personally have enough land, but I don't see that being fair for other users. If we only have one thing in common, we're all packrats.

Yes! We need BULK DOWNLOAD!
I have over 3000 textures, all of them with full permissions - WHY can't I download them all to my HD?

Didn't mean to fork the discussion with this thread. I just noticed that a similar idea was brought up here!

/120/29/46553/1.html#post495047

Keeping important things in prims is a very bad idea. Items can be accidentally (or maliciously) deleted, or get moved somewhere.

That's why you... TAKE... the prims... into your inventory?
So that the download will only be one name and key, instead of 500?

Perhaps LL can move away from teir = land and more into teir = resources available. I am not trying to start an arguement here, just tossing an idea out.

If LL started to bill players on how much resources they required instead of how much land they required it would allow for an overall increase of performance. Free accounts would get very little resource allotment, but it is free! Premium accounts would get more resource allotment for their $10/month and if you needed more you could up your teir.

I do not have all the answers for how this works but it seems to me that land in-itself is not using much resources, open land would be great for LL so the focus should drift away from land and more onto resources being used by the players. If someone wants to have 400 bling items on him/herself or 300 rotating signs, or 150 constantly running scripts on their land.. then should they not pay more for that then someone that is content to have a lag free play experience with a premium account?

Please do not flame, just putting out an idea.

Pathfinder, check this thread out.

Is there a way that the Lindens can tell us the amount of data we deleted at the end of the event? I think there are plenty of users that are willing to sacrifice time and energy to help LL at this specific point.

I actually quite like this idea.

I recently spent several hours sorting out my inventory and it amazed me how mych stuff I had aquired.

Much of it I rarely, if ever, use but would be loathe to dispose of it so a long term, 'offline' storage solution would work for me. I know I'm only repeating what a few have said but it would stop having to have so amny item streamed to our inventories.

this sounds like it's the right way to go (as much as i hate it.)

Love the idea, Pathfinder!

What would help aswell, is something that compares textures with each other.
I'm betting that a lot of people got a lot of copies of the same texture only with a different name.

My initial reaction: "Oh shite, look we've got a real major issue here that we cannot solve without limiting or removing the current functionality, so let's package it up as a better way of operating to help us paper over the cracks. Better still let's make it look like a Linden has thought this up off their own bat, without giving the impression that this is actually what's going to happen."

Personally? No, bollocks. Make your system scale without the need to bork existing functionality. We're here to create, don't make it more difficult by making it less intuitive or less easy to access our inventories. If you can't do that, then be honest and say it's got to happen because we can't find a way to make SL scale, rather than pretending it does.

Just my 2 cents.

I *love* the idea of a bank. The other online "games" I've played have them, and it does make for easier inventory management. I was actually shocked when I joined SL and learned that there was not a bank system in place already. So I'm of course ALL FOR IT!!

My opinion though is NOT to tie it to the amount of land a person owns. Many people rent land from others, many build wonderful elaborate items for others, but don't own land. I just would hate to see people not be able to have as much inventory as others simply because of the amount of land they owned. If you have to go with a cap, make it across the board same for everyone.

PS: The ability to put folders inside prims would make it much easier for people to make closests to store stuff in also. hehe.. As Chip states, it is risky storing stuff in prims and leaving it out in world, but there are plenty of items I would be willing to take that risk on.