suggestion Product Placement

[illanthropist]

Now I'm not talking about in game sponsorship from large corporate carbonated drink manufacturers but inventory control in game.

Curious to know, how many dump their stuff in a pile and how many like me are neat freaks and take time to use shelf space etc?

Being the latter, I have to say it's rather a cumbersome task putting all your ducks in a row!

Currently I have to:

1. Drop an inventory item
2. Target said item
3. Use the "place" hotkey
4. Move to required location
5. Drop item again

With some items the cursor cannot even target dropped inventory, forcing me to back step to bring it into view.

My recommendation would be to replace "drop"  with the "place" functionality, so in all cases using drop would bring up the placement UI rather than having to go through every single item menu to include a place button and remove the place button from both the bedrolls and lantern (assuming these are the only 3 items with said button).

Even if you weren't particularly bothered about where said items would end up, a simple double tap/click would work just the same...

Not sure if it's at all possible but I'd also like to see the addition of a mod key/button e.g. hold down right thumbstick so the highlighted item would rotate rather than the camera view so I don't have to do a barn dance when drying out fresh guts!

Love to hear anyone thoughts on this...

 

[LucidFugue]

I'd rather have a "place" button somewhere near the "Drop" button to make this a reality. Honestly, I don't place items around.

Almost everything goes into cupboards/storage, unless it's firewood or curing items. I don't make any particular place "home" in that way, as I roam between multiple locations.

[Raphael van Lierop]

16 hours ago, illanthropist said:

My recommendation would be to replace "drop"  with the "place" functionality, so in all cases using drop would bring up the placement UI rather than having to go through every single item menu to include a place button and remove the place button from both the bedrolls and lantern (assuming these are the only 3 items with said button).

The main reason to have a separate Drop button is that for the most part, Dropping is more of an "emergency" action -- you've just been injured or have hit a Fatigue threshold where you're now Encumbered by all your gear and you want to drop stuff quickly to get on with it, maybe a Wolf is nearby or a Storm is brewing or you're nearly Freezing, etc. Whatever the reason, it would be frustrating to have to individually place each item you were trying to "dump".

I'm not saying Drop is perfect either; just explaining why I think there could be a different use case between Drop and Place. I agree this whole interface could be cleaned up.

[Raphael van Lierop]

(Oh, and in case it helps, we call this feature "Item Placement".) Product placement brings to mind wholly different things.

[illanthropist]

30 minutes ago, Raphael van Lierop said:

(Oh, and in case it helps, we call this feature "Item Placement".) Product placement brings to mind wholly different things.

Lol yeah just used that for my own amusement, I was in half a mind to make a joke item description for the improvised hatchet saying "not nearly as good as the one available at hinterlandstore.com but does the job!"

[illanthropist]

43 minutes ago, Raphael van Lierop said:

The main reason to have a separate Drop button is that for the most part, Dropping is more of an "emergency" action -- you've just been injured or have hit a Fatigue threshold where you're now Encumbered by all your gear and you want to drop stuff quickly to get on with it, maybe a Wolf is nearby or a Storm is brewing or you're nearly Freezing, etc. Whatever the reason, it would be frustrating to have to individually place each item you were trying to "dump".

I'm not saying Drop is perfect either; just explaining why I think there could be a different use case between Drop and Place. I agree this whole interface could be cleaned up.

I did play devils advocate in my own own head and think of this which is why I tried with the poll option to maybe come up with a ratio.  The only emergency situation that springs to mind is fleeing from a predator attack in which case you haven't really got time to use either except the decoy hotkey, if after placing brought you back to the inventory UI where you could escape once done.  Sorry, I'm a bit of a geek in terms of HCI.

[Raphael van Lierop]

3 hours ago, illanthropist said:

I did play devils advocate in my own own head and think of this which is why I tried with the poll option to maybe come up with a ratio.  The only emergency situation that springs to mind is fleeing from a predator attack in which case you haven't really got time to use either except the decoy hotkey, if after placing brought you back to the inventory UI where you could escape once done.  Sorry, I'm a bit of a geek in terms of HCI.

Well, the question you're asking (in your poll) is if people prefer a tidy to a messy place. Given the option, people seemed to want to organize their gear -- we saw this even with dropping, where people would go to great lengths to try to "drop" their things in an organized fashion. Item placement really came out of an experiment to see what players would do if given a little more authorship over their own environment -- would they take the time to organize their things, to customize their safehouses or stashes a bit more, and therefore feel a stronger sense of ownership?

Without Item Placement, the Ikea vs. Messy question wouldn't really be on the table. BUT, this is a bit different than the question you seem to actually be wanting an answer to, which is more like "if you had to choose, would you prefer a quick and messy "drop" to a careful and time-consuming placement action?" (question assumes you can't have both at the same time).

[SteveP]

It's handy to be able to drop a bunch of firewood in a pile so it can be easily accessed without the use of a container. I do this by leaving wood and water near the door where I can quickly grab it on the way out. I do it at the forge because I can't carry the piles of wood and metal and coal all at once. It's kinda frustrating that I need to light a torch just to find the stuff because it's so dark near the forge. I'd prefer a bit more ambient light from the furnace or perhaps a low cost candle that provides minimal illumination with a very low resource cost.

The place item was useful because it permits us to move a burning torch around and see if it can be useful in dealing with a wolf or bear. Jury's still out on that since I haven't gone back to testing in a long while. I'm apprehensive about it because if it doesn't work the way I hope, the bear might attack. I'm hoping it would let me get just a little bit closer to the bear in order to have a higher chance of a quick kill for the bear (for humane reasons of course!)

I watch in a kind of stunned amazement while some players on Youtube spent game-hours nearly arranging stuff in their cave. I understand the underlying compulsion of neatness and lack of opportunity to be aesthetically creative.

I tend to organize things according to functional needs for quick retrieval and also for the boost to condition presevation

I think the opportunity to make "mistakes" in prioritizing activities is a net benefit since it might ultimately penalize players who do things based on cultural assumptions. Neatness does count in one respect; it helps to have a neat environment since clutter is something we deal with in our everyday lives. I like it if the game encourages us to question our cultural assumptions but the opportunities to do that in the game are rare. Attempting to garden is an example of a doomed strategy. Just because a particular task is available, does not mean that it's a good choice.

[Bobfrid]

For me, the only addition I'd like to see to the UI would be a "place multiple items" feature. Example would be when I've got a ton of water I'd like to have on the shelf in the stone cabin in TM. Currently, I drop the water then meticulously place the water on the shelf to maximize the use of the area. If I can place multiple items and have the game align the items as it sees fit along the surface of the shelf (or whatever), that'd be excellent. The Xbox interface isn't bad, it'd just be more convenient with this addition.

The funny thing is, I only do this type of thing in TLD. My office at work looks like several dozen laptops and cellphones detonated.

 

 

 

[illanthropist]

Perhaps the poll, an afterthought to my original  post, is misleading or a too restrictive closed question.  I was just interested to see if other people were as anal as me when it came to organising their stash, be it inventory requiring curing, wood piles around the stove or even spare clothing laid out on the bed.

Am I playing dolls house?  Sure, a little I guess but it's not without utility having cedar separate to fir or spare torches on a shelf near the entrance.  The rifle for example, in order to place it on the gun rack (shame can't pop a bow on there) I first have to drop on the floor.

I guess what I was trying to say was if each drop action required a further click to ascertain where dropped and then returned you to the backpack UI once completed it would be more convenient than coding a place button on every item and not require much more time than it does now to dump your load should it be required.

[Monty Cristo]

I'm responding to the original poll question and I just drop my stuff on the floor, but not in a disorganized pile.

I only put hides, guts, saplings, wood and tinder on the floor.  The rest goes into storage areas, and not sure about this part, I thought I read somewhere that things degrade slower if you put them in drawers, lockers, etc.

But I'm a bit of an organizational fiend me damn self and seems to me that dropping something on the floor, then clicking out of inventory, moving one step to the side or back and then dropping another item satisfies the average neat freak's desire to keep things orderly.  You may be in a special group needs more.  And I'm not saying that staying in the inventory and placing things manually wouldn't be more convenient, because it would.  I just think that it's not something I'd be in a hurry to change.

I'd add a way to sharpen tools and make fire without whetstones and matches first.  I see those 2 items as the most limiting to The Long Gevity.  I like the candle idea too.

[McGuffin]

On 6/3/2016 at 1:34 AM, Raphael van Lierop said:

I'm not saying Drop is perfect either; just explaining why I think there could be a different use case between Drop and Place. I agree this whole interface could be cleaned up.

And what about Right clicking on the drop button to activate placement? (this may not work well on Controller, but, this would be convenient on keyboard at least)

[Raphael van Lierop]

4 hours ago, McGuffin said:

And what about Right clicking on the drop button to activate placement? (this may not work well on Controller, but, this would be convenient on keyboard at least)

Possibly. Our controls/UI has to work for both (not just because we're on Xbox One as well as on Steam, but because many of our PC players want to use a controller) and we don't want two separate sets of controls to tune and support, so we prefer solutions that work on all our controllers.

[SteveP]

On 2016-03-06 at 10:49 PM, illanthropist said:

Perhaps the poll, an afterthought to my original  post, is misleading or a too restrictive closed question.

Since you have created a poll when you started this thread, I think you are able to modify the poll questions and options. You can have multiple choice option or have only one vote per question as I did with the Forging & Quenching poll. Once you edit a poll, I think the previous votes will disappear so I would suggest trying to edit the poll to solicit more options as per the discussion we've had so far.

A deficiency or limitation of the new forum seems to be that one cannot add a poll to an existing discussion and linking together threads is not quite easy.

@Bethany Williams is there anything we can do with the forum to add polls to an existing discussion? It seems to help to get some feedback before constructing the poll. Altering a poll does seem to be possible but it would be nice to add a poll to an existing discussion.

[bethany]

29 minutes ago, SteveP said:

 

@Bethany Williams is there anything we can do with the forum to add polls to an existing discussion? It seems to help to get some feedback before constructing the poll. Altering a poll does seem to be possible but it would be nice to add a poll to an existing discussion.

No, polls are standalone features. It may seem somewhat limiting to not be able to add them to existing discussions, but it is quite nice to have them at all as they weren't made available on our old forums. 

Linking/merging posts is very easy for moderators. If you'd like to create a poll and PM me the link (just to make sure we don't make any mistakes), I'd be happy to merge it with this topic.

[illanthropist]

Happy to see the poll removed as it doesn't really reflect the discussion,  actually surprised polls can be edited.  Figured once voted on it would be locked to stop people trolling or reversing questions.

My reason for suggesting getting rid of drop for replace was because the UI looks pretty slick as it is and I think adding a 4th button would spoil that to some extent when on some inventory items 3 are already used i.e the rifle.

It's in no way a game breaker but in my case would be a big QoL enhancement and as mentioned, both here and in a separate post concerning the removal of certain hotkeys for controller support (R,H,M), there are a limited number of binding options available for use.

I might have suggested possibly moving sprint and crouch to unused analogue buttons, freeing up 2 shoulder hotkeys but I don't have enough experience of different controllers on the market to know if this would be practical, steam controller for example.