FOSS gamedev and creative worlds

I don't know if I should post this as a bug report or a feature request ..... While I consider it to be a bug, I don't think it technically is one, so I'll post this in the form of a feature request for now.

I am always painfully aware of the amount of space left in my inventory when mining, but not everyone is. In fact, I probably am only aware of it because of my OCD. The other day, one of my friends dug up a load of mese, only to surface and find their inventory was full, and they had lost it all. And today, another friend lost a poptart cat this way.

It would be nice if mining was made impossible while your inventory was full. It's not even like it would FORCE people to surface before they wanted to. As much as I dislike the command (as it is wasteful, and unwanted materials can be left in an unlocked chest for people who want them), people could use /pulverize to clear unwanted objects from their inventories before continuing.

I'd love to hear what other people think of this idea.

Well, its definitely not a bug.... And I guess I agree partially with your post, because people SHOULD always make sure there inventory has space for mining. But it does suck when you do find LOADS of mese and then you mine it and then you check your inventory and its all full of cobble or iron or whatever.....

As a workaround, when I hit a load of mese, I try to use up what I don't need, then put only one block of mese in each slot, as well as some slots having other materials I want. Then, as all of my slots are forced to be the materials I want in the proportions I want them, I only lose the excess, and whatever didn;t get a slot(most likely cobble). Of course, since we don't carry poptarts and rainbows around, it's best to manually check before attacking a cat and rainbow.

If you use the item_drop mod everything you mine is dropped to the ground and if your inventory is full it won't be picked up, so you won't lose it, you can clear your inventory and go back to pick the items up.

Brandon and Rarkenin, Are both absolutely right! :-)

davidpace wrote:Brandon and Rarkenin, Are both absolutely right! :-)

Toss Items you don't need down the shaft. Keep mining. Come back for them later.

rarkenin wrote:As a workaround, when I hit a load of mese, I try to use up what I don't need, then put only one block of mese in each slot, as well as some slots having other materials I want. Then, as all of my slots are forced to be the materials I want in the proportions I want them, I only lose the excess, and whatever didn;t get a slot(most likely cobble). Of course, since we don't carry poptarts and rainbows around, it's best to manually check before attacking a cat and rainbow.

We need a poptart food mod.

So, despite of the fact that it is annoying you can see it as a challenge. You can learn how to keep things clean. I never have this problem because my inventory is always tidy. This is a skill very helpful in real life.
And if someone trained it in the game he might not write code that is all messed up (like some mods are). ;)

rarkenin wrote:As a workaround, when I hit a load of mese, I try to use up what I don't need, then put only one block of mese in each slot, as well as some slots having other materials I want. Then, as all of my slots are forced to be the materials I want in the proportions I want them, I only lose the excess, and whatever didn;t get a slot(most likely cobble). Of course, since we don't carry poptarts and rainbows around, it's best to manually check before attacking a cat and rainbow.

That's a great idea, especially if you plan to /pulverize your cobble anyway. I do try to save mine though. In any case, loosing cobblestone is better than loosing mese.

BrandonReese wrote:If you use the item_drop mod everything you mine is dropped to the ground and if your inventory is full it won't be picked up, so you won't lose it, you can clear your inventory and go back to pick the items up.

There are very few Minetest plugins that get on my nerves, but item_drop is one of them. I recently left all the servers I used to use, because they all installed this. In addition to having to go around and pick up the things you've already mined, lag often prevents me from being able to pick up these items at all. Then, all the extra items floating about the server cause even more lag.

item_drop is great for people who want a more Minecraft-like experience, but I tried Minecraft, and I don't like it. A more subtle solution would be better in my opinion.

Leroy wrote:

davidpace wrote:Brandon and Rarkenin, Are both absolutely right! :-)

Toss Items you don't need down the shaft. Keep mining. Come back for them later.

Great idea, assuming that people remember to do it. I guess the main solution is just for people to pay attention to what they're doing, and if they forget, it's their own fault. Still, it would be nice to have a failsafe.

Casimir wrote:So, despite of the fact that it is annoying you can see it as a challenge. You can learn how to keep things clean. I never have this problem because my inventory is always tidy. This is a skill very helpful in real life.
And if someone trained it in the game he might not write code that is all messed up (like some mods are). ;)

Like I said, I also don't have a problem keeping my inventory clean while mining. This feature is more to help others than myself. Although, it would mean I wouldn't have to watch so closely as well, and therefore wouldn't have to surface as often. Not all challenges are a good thing, in my opinion. I agree that some plugins are poorly written though, and need to be cleaned up. I just don't think keeping a clean inventory helps train you to keep clean code.

Well, there seems to be a negative response to my proposal, so I guess implementing it upstream is a bad idea. Oh, well. But I know some people would enjoy this, as I have had several people tell me that lost items is why they use item_drop, and have had one person specifically request that I add item_drop to my server for this reason. I've built a working prototype, and after more testing, I'll post it in the forum as a plugin.

Leroy wrote:

rarkenin wrote:As a workaround, when I hit a load of mese, I try to use up what I don't need, then put only one block of mese in each slot, as well as some slots having other materials I want. Then, as all of my slots are forced to be the materials I want in the proportions I want them, I only lose the excess, and whatever didn;t get a slot(most likely cobble). Of course, since we don't carry poptarts and rainbows around, it's best to manually check before attacking a cat and rainbow.

We need a poptart food mod.

Someone was joking with me the other day about making poptart cats into a food item. It would be a waste of such a rare and finite item, but it would be amusing.

0gb.us wrote:I just don't think keeping a clean inventory helps train you to keep clean code.

1. It does. Training concentrating and organisation in one small aspect of you life helps you in every other one.
2. Don't take me to serious.

0gb.us wrote:Well, there seems to be a negative response to my proposal, so I guess implementing it upstream is a bad idea.

No, it's a good idea.

me wrote:
We need a poptart food mod.

Casmir:Someone was joking with me the other day about making poptart cats into a food item. It would be a waste of such a rare and finite item, but it would be amusing.

Me:It could give you lava resistance for a day

Cats *could* be useful for lava protection, but this may require some interesting implementation. Perhaps getting a cat makes you have a cat costume for your appearance?

Talking about /pulverize, it should be allowed for cobble and dirt, annoying for iron/coal/clay, and disallowed for cats and mese.

One could also make valuable stuff like cats and mese take precedence over cobble, so the cobble is destroyed.

rarkenin wrote:Cats *could* be useful for lava protection, but this may require some interesting implementation. Perhaps getting a cat makes you have a cat costume for your appearance?

Talking about /pulverize, it should be allowed for cobble and dirt, annoying for iron/coal/clay, and disallowed for cats and mese.

One could also make valuable stuff like cats and mese take precedence over cobble, so the cobble is destroyed.

Oho! Sounds good! What about when having mese, no fall damage!

rarkenin wrote:Cats *could* be useful for lava protection, but this may require some interesting implementation. Perhaps getting a cat makes you have a cat costume for your appearance?

Sounds doable. Someone already figured out how to apply custom skins to players. Altering whatever function handles damage would be easy to alter as well. I'm not going to be the one to figure out how, but the hardest part would be getting the client to not react to lava if they had said cat suit. Then again, maybe the client doesn't need to avoid reacting. When damage is turned off, the client still thinks the player is taking damage, and the server corrects it. The red flashes make it hard to see what you're doing in lava though.

rarkenin wrote:Talking about /pulverize, it should be allowed for cobble and dirt, annoying for iron/coal/clay, and disallowed for cats and mese.

Dirt is more useful than people give it credit for. Many people like to build floating islands out of it, but it requires removing the thin layer of dirt from somewhere else. On several occasions, my hoarding of the dirt I find in caves has been able to keep people from having to take the dirt from the surface, which would have left large patches of exposed stone.

Cobblestone is arguably expendable, but people ask me for my cobble fairly often. People who have built large mines, and probably pulverized their own cobble, only later realizing they needed it.

Ranking pulverizable items would also be difficult. For example, you listed mese as more valuable than iron, presumably because it creates the fastest pick, or because it is more scarce. However, I would rank iron higher, because mese has only one use, a pick, which can be fulfilled by other items. Iron on the other hand, is necessary for securing your items against theft (locked chests), making a passage private (locked doors) and transporting liquids (buckets), all things that are otherwise impossible. Some people (not me, I love rare game items) might even argue that the cats are worthless, because they can't be used for anything, and make horrible furnace fuel.

I'm not trying to be argumentative, I'm just saying that ranking things is difficult, and is pretty much done on a per-person basis.

rarkenin wrote:One could also make valuable stuff like cats and mese take precedence over cobble, so the cobble is destroyed.

Doable, but again requires a ranking system. It would also be more difficult to build, but probably not too difficult. If an item cannot fit in the inventory, the game would need to find the lowest priority item, and remove the stack that has the least of it. If it can't find a stack, it would look for the next lowest priority item, and so on. Are all the iterations worth it? Probably. I don't know.

Could we have some sort of visible effect implemented in C++ when inventory is full, like a yellow flash like when taking damage, as on option in addition to blocking a dig and giving a chat message, or even as an alternative to blocking, just warn with the flash?

A simple workaround would be to raise the item limit per slot from 99 to 999, tweakable by minetest.conf file (now it's hardcoded)

rarkenin wrote:Could we have some sort of visible effect implemented in C++ when inventory is full, like a yellow flash like when taking damage, as on option in addition to blocking a dig and giving a chat message, or even as an alternative to blocking, just warn with the flash?

That would be great! I don't know C++ though, and I don't feel like forking just for this anyway. This Lua implementation will have to do, unless we can convince a higher-up that this feature should be added.

trukoil wrote:A simple workaround would be to raise the item limit per slot from 99 to 999, tweakable by minetest.conf file (now it's hardcoded)

Actually .... It's not as hard-coded as you think. It can be edited in "/usr/share/minetest/builtin/item.lua" (on Linux). Or, it can be altered easily in a plugin, but it would require a way of making sure that plugin was the first to load. One such way would include adding your plugin to the list of dependencies of all other plugins you have installed. It wouldn't be elegant, but it would work.

TECHNICALLY, the mese isnt lost. It's just in a nondisplayed part of the inventory IIRC

GloopMaster wrote:TECHNICALLY, the mese isnt lost. It's just in a nondisplayed part of the inventory IIRC

No, it's lost.

If you use a plugin to expand or contract the inventory size, you can see. I had this issue with the bags plugin ....

Also, even if it wasn't lost right away, it WOULD be lost on server shutdown. The player files save every inventory slot, including empty ones, and there is no space for overflow.