Inventory Management

I would use a bank or warehouse system if implemented, especially if there were Group banks.

SL is not like other mmorpgs. We do not have a static set of inventory goodies to collect. Even for the social players, the ability to hold large quanties of inventory is intrinsic to the enjoying SL. For content creators, it is our life blood.

I think charging an access fee based on land ownership is a bad idea. Speaking just for content creating business owners, there is no relationship between how much you contribute to the SL economy and other player's enjoyment and how much land you own. Also, as with RL, fees get passed on. If the economy won't support passing on the fees, then the business goes belly up.

From a personal perspective, in theory Ferran and I have enough land to support any proposed inventory/land/fee. In reality, Linden Labs only allows one "owner" of a private sim. Therefore, only one of us would be covered by the land blanket, and the other would be out of luck.

I currently have 6,000 items in inventory. More than half of those are Phobos Design related items. I keep a clean and highly organized inventory. I could cut it down by appoximately 2,000 items by exporting all my textures to my hard drive, but then I'm faced with hours of work.. and more importantly a re-import fee of $L a pop for any textures I need again. Not much incentive there.

I'm also not confident about database stability. Ever since I logged in naked and without inventory (for several days), I have been nervous on this subject. I have often said that if a bug wiped out our business inventory, it was time to sell off our land and go play somewhere else.

Our answer to that uncertaintity was to pass a full-mod copy of our entire business stock to an "alt" we both have access to. We log her on at best once a month to add new items to her library, so she serves us as both a "mule" and as insurance against data corruption related to our principals.

I aslo enthusiasticlly vote for multiple drag-drop and bulk exports.

I need some clarification... My understanding is that "boxing" up inventory does not reduce your actual database entries. If it does, loading my textures into prims and taking them back inventory would be viable

The idea of a bank, would be, rather, should I say, 'tedious', if the bank wasn't a place to 'go to' per say, if we could access it through a drop or menu item, I'd be ok with it. Say, someone with thousands and thousands of textures, having to go back and forth between the bank and applying it to the object, that uhm, doesn't sound too pleasant.


I'd go for a 'banking system' if it was able to be accessed via a drop down menu or popup menu.

But not if I have to truck around trying to find one.

I would oppose the idea if inventory size was land based. While I don't own any land under my account, Indigo is owned by Flipper and myself. The land is in his name as well as all of our other land. However, I need extra inventory space for designing - from clothing templates, snapshots for vendors and prim boxes, the actual clothing items themselves, vendors, prim boxes for each item etc. That in and of itself probably accounts for half of my inventory and I am fairly meticulous in cleaning out my inventory regularly.

As for the warehouse rental idea.... I think that it could work, but most likely people will piss and moan about having to be charged storage fees for something that used to be free.

I understand that inventory management is a huge problem and does need some solution.

+ Library
+ My Inventory
+ My Archive

Items in My Inventory can be quickly searched and rezzed. Items in My Archive are stored on a separate database cluster. Their keys/names are cached for quick lookup, but they must be moved into My Inventory before they can be worked with. So if you wanted to view or edit permissions on an asset, play a sound, view a texture, or edit a notecard in My Archive, you'd have to restore it to My Inventory. And, of course, you would have to restore an object before rezzing it. Giving inventory would be the same: no archive-to-other-person transfers. Archival and restoration would be a low-priority process and might take a few seconds.

Items in My Inventory have "Move to Archive" in their context menus. Items in My Archive have "Restore to Inventory" in their context menus. You can also just drag items between My Inventory and My Archive. There is a Keep Directory Structure option. If you have something stored in My Inventory/Objects/Stuff/Furniture, and you drag and drop it onto My Archive (and not a subfolder of My Archive), it will land in My Archive/Objects/Stuff/Furniture. If you drag it to a subfolder of My Archive, it will go there instead. If you have Keep Directory Structure turned off, it will just land wherever you put it.

Another solution might be to right click on a folder and have a context menu item: "Archive This Folder" - this would essentially be the same thing; the folder's contents would be visible and searchable but not accessible until the folder was restored. However, doing this with a really big folder to get just one item out might be more wasteful than having a separate archive tree.

My understanding is It does not actually reduce the database entries but it will reduce load. Everytime you access your inventory a query to the asset server is sent. If you have textures stored in a prim it will not return those textures inside until you rez the prim to access it's inventory.

NO NO NO NO NO NO NO!!!!

I don't want SL to become another MMORPG!!! If I wanted that, I'd go back to WoW!!!

Add more database servers, split the load, I dont' care. Don't turn SL into an MMORPG!!!

Huns beat me to it. I was thinking about a "deep inventory" system too, where items could be moved from active inventory (indexed on the asset server that Toneless mentions as "instant on" items) to a heavily compressed/layered archive. With the understanding that there will be a delay when moving items from/to archival storage, or perhaps even some sort of resource cost.

im sorry, but this is an horrible idea. i used to play World of Warcraft, and we had a place like that, the bank, well.. the entire time we had around 100 people fooling around. and thats because WoW was a game that you already had the world, not like SL where you have to "download" it.

what would happen is, dozens of people staying in the bank, advertising items, or testing them, every time you needed to go there you would need to download all clothes and atachments of everyone, AND the place.

it would be way too hard since most of people got 8.000 + items on inventory, just imagine having to organize them....

massive lag from bank > avatar and avatar > bank tranfers. people wont transfer one by one, they would transfer folders, massive folders wich would cause a massive lag.

well that IMO, i think even if the items are stored in a single place they will still be there and still lag.

First, I think that tools that would allow people to maintain their inventory would do a lot to reduce the burden on the server. I get a little frustrated trying to organize things and generally give up. Tools that allow people to organize should be a priority before anything else is considered I think.

Teaching people how to maintain their inventories would help a lot too. Reduce frustration and server burden.

I don't mind having an "off site" storage facitlity so to speak. In fact, I think it is a great idea provided one can actually find things in it.

However, linking the amount of items allowed in storage to land owned may serve to discourage commerce in SL.

Personally, I think that items that you create yourself, should be stored on your own client and items created by others, could be stored in SL inventory. Has LL considered anything like this?

.

Items you create would still have to be stored in SL anyway, because others can see items in-world. Plus, what would happen to your stuff if your hard drive went south?

Sorry, I'm a latecomer to this debate. This may have already been suggested, but how about creating a folder of type "archive" (as in tgz or zip)? Items stored within that parent folder, or any subsequent user-created child folders, would automatically be a) compressed and b) only loaded into memory on folder click.

Sorry if this idea has been suggested -- I really don't want to read all five pages.

thanks for this

ps: read page 4

We need a way to bulk download our snapshots folders!!!

-Ghoti

I fully support Huns' idea. I was about to propose the same thing myself!

I'd be fine with having a limit to fast inventory storage if:
1) The size of each item was easily visible
2) I could buy more space
3) I didn't have to travel to a vault at some place on the grid to access archival storage

I oppose tying inventory space to land tier. Prim quotas (and soon script cycles) are tied to land ownership because prims are a sim thing. Inventory is an asset server thing. Keep them separate, and allow users to buy extra inventory space separately from land tier.

Incidentally, there are a few changes that could be made that would make it easier for people to keep leaner inventories:

* Group inventory would allow group members to share items, instead of everyone needing their own copy. See my feature proposal.

* Having links/aliases/shortcuts in the inventory would allow placing an item in multiple folders without making a copy of it. Do I really need a copy of my shades in 5 different outfit folders?

On the snapshot issue, Shawn Marten sells Memory TV's that cycle through and hold all your snapshots for you. They're pretty, they're affordable, and they're COOL. You can find them in the SL Boutique Stores and En Nomine inworld.

To re-echo something that others have said before me:

If I had better inventory tools, my inventory wouldn't be in the mess it is - and there would be no inventory problem.

Give me inventory tools - I will control my inventory.

Tying the size of inventory to land = totally thumbs down!!!
What would you do with those that now currently have inventory over a future limit? Delete their excess? uuuggghh...

Tying the size of inventory to L$/RL$ = totally thumbs down!!!
This would create the great virtual digital divide, truly making SL a world only for those with the RL assets to enjoy it.

One thing that should be implemented is a auto trash delete. Don't wait for users to delete trash, have it auto deleted weekly.

As far as banks go, what would be the limit on our inventory? Would SL have thousands of users having to dump stuff in to banks one morning? If there was a charge and the user didnt have the funds, would their stuff be deleted? Would the area around banks become giant lagfest malls? ugh again. Would there be one bank per sim? Would I have access to my stuff in every bank or I would have to travel cross world to get access to an item in my bank? The "bank" idea will be a huge change in SL, it would be nice to set it up in a preview for us to see first.

Huns has the best suggestion yet by far, similar to a bank, but with the convenience of working within the current inventory scenario.

fen-

Great idea, if it meant speeding up things. I'm for the UO Bank idea..... Equally, I'm totally against the amount being tied to land holdings. I own a fair amount of land, so it wouldn't affect me adversely, but equally, I know people who don't own ANY, they like it that way. However they buy a LOT of other people's creations. This way they contribute just as much to the economy. Don't penalise them.

pfft.

Non-Loading Inventory 'Vault'

I already came up with something similar to what many are suggesting, to ease the load. But no one ever listens to me. Bastages.

First thing we need is Multiple Drag/Drop/etc

To give further possibilities to Huns' ideas...

1. Library
   
2. Group Libraries
   1. Group1
      
   2. Group2
      1. My Files
         
      2. <Member>'s Files
         
      3. <Member>'s Files
         
      
      
   
   
3. New Files
   
4. My Archive
   
5. My Inventory
   

The top-level folders should be tabs to keep things tidier, especially if we're allowed more groups in the future.

Huns' idea of My Archive (and Group Libraries) being a cached list, or perhaps something similiar to XML feeds, is probably a good one. You can't do anything to the objects until you "restore" them to My Inventory or New Files.

Your items in Group Libraries would likely just be pointers to files in My Inventory or My Archive.

New Files is where any gifts, bought items, etc would go.

My Inventory and New Files would have a limit, of course. If you're over your limit you'll get an annoying nag screen telling you to archive your files. That way you avoid losing anything because you received a lot of gifts while you were away on vacation or your over the limit to begin with or something.

A player should not manage the inventory, the inventory should manage itself.

We're dealing with databases here, no human intervention is required. Any process should be totally transparent to users and intergrated into the inventory system itself. It should all be automated with the only noticable sign that there may be some delay for older items to get transferred.

Limits, banks and management are a solution looking for a problem.

Tied to land ownership = no
Usage cap = maybe
Fee for extra storage = maybe
Local BACKUP=yes
Mutliple drag and drop = I'm blue in the face
I would use a banking facility but really really really would like to see a local backup possibility. I won't even re-broach the drag and drop.
Thanks for asking Pathfinder.

I like Huns Valens idea of archiving.

I much prefer this to having to travel to some bank.

Tying size of inventory to land ownership - VERY BAD IDEA.

Any size limits should be generous.

It seems odd to me that inventories that didn't cause massive log-in problems one day do the next, and continue to. I don't think that all of a sudden some critical mass was reached, when one player bought one couch too many. There have to be more factors involved,having to do with the new version.

coco

That depends what you mean by management. I do always tell my managers that management is a solution looking for a problem

Yes, communication with the asset server should be a transparent and automated process.

On the other hand, your inventory is no different to the filing system on your pc. It's your responsibility to organise it - and therefore manage it. If your way of managing is to dump everything in root, so be it. But if you're anal like me, you have a place for everything and want everything in its place.

I'd like to manage my inventory myself. I'd love the most basic tools to do that. And have them work as they're meant to. And when I get them, I'll rise to the call to clean up my inventory, but not before, unless someone wants to compensate me financially for the hours I put in.

Inventories are in a bad need of a complete overhaul. Seperate storage may or may not be an answer, but it's by no means the only thing or most urgent thing we need.