Inventory management (Destiny)

by kapowaz, Thursday, August 21, 2014, 12:14 (3845 days ago) @ Kermit

I was struck with the oddness of having a cursor at first, but there are great reasons why, most of which are discussed here:

It seems like the main reason he talks about is to negate the need to press up/down/left/right repeatedly to get to each inventory slot, but this is something that Diablo III also had to handle for the console versions, and their approach (I think) works even better:

A radial menu! So you push in the direction of the slot you want to interact with to highlight it, then press a button to select. Once you're ‘inside’ a given inventory slot it's more traditional d-pad navigation, but that's okay: it's modal.

One of the biggest issues I encountered with the cursor navigation is that it's too easy to accidentally ‘leave’ the modal context of a given inventory slot whilst moving between them, at which point in order to go back to browsing between items you have to return to the inventory slot itself. It's particularly easy to do this if you have two or more rows of items for a given slot; you open the slot and start diagonally moving off towards the second or third row, but in so doing you leave the hotspot of the slot before reaching the destination, and so it closes.

To avoid this you have to actually move the cursor horizontally first, then vertically, which feels a bit unintuitive. They could probably have solved this problem relatively easily with a timer once you leave the area of each slot, giving you time to hit the second row before the expanded items collapse again.

On the flip side, the map is something that I imagine would be a whole lot more difficult to implement with a traditional d-pad UI, and I think here more than anywhere else the cursor shines — I doubt it'd be possible to do this better any other way.