It’s been almost a month since I’ve written about how the current stockpile system works, and how an improved system might look like. This was the post that I wrote back then:
Usually, when I make such statements, I gave them some thought and think that they are possible. Being a pessimist, that means that, unless there’s some very unforeseen stuff going on, it’s very possible to do and unless I say it’s painfully difficult, it’s somewhat easy to medium. Therefore, I’ll rank this task a 12.5 on the coding scale.
By messing around with some voodoo dolls, 250cc of chocolate ice cream, some candles, a crystal ball and other stuff, I’ve come to the belief that, with all the features that have been announced for Alpha 10, 10.5, and Tom’s streams, we might not see any drastic inventory change in Alpha 10, probably 11, likely even further down the road.
That means that, if we were to mess around with inventory stuff today, it could survive for the next two months! That… actually sounds somewhat depressing. But it’s take it or leave it, so we’ll take it.
During my next few posts, I’ll walk you through in the process of reverse engineering, and building, some quite odd things that are abstract and not really necessary to understand from a player point of view. If you’re interested in modding, however, you probably going to like this part or that other part because it could be useful. I guess. Sharing is caring.
So, during the next few RepeatFeeds, where you can ask questions and I’ll answer them for once, I’ll be
Building a better inventory system: Part 0, Requirements
The current inventory system in Stonehearth is not scalable, and not very modding friendly. Stockpiles act autonomous, which is kind of nice from an objective programming point of view, but very unhandy if you want to mod it. It can also be somewhat demanding on the performance because it performs constant checks for items that it could gobble up - in each citizen. So we strive for better performance, scalability and modding support. Somewhere on the way we might be able to get some gameplay improvements, too, who knows.
The next post will be the first in the series, where I’ll take a look at the files currently involved, some basic processes and where we will stand to move the world. Or, at the very least, the inventory system.
The current progress can also be seen on the GitHub repository.