Since the game’s inception, the only way for a player to move their belonging has been either to store them in their clothes or backpack or to put those in a storage itself located on a vehicle. There is little way to carry more equipment across distances.
One of the game which I play often, Project Zomboid, has both wearable storage options (hiking bag, golf bag, school bag, etc…) and hand-held options (first aid kit, briefcase, doctor bag, etc…) and it is fairly useful to optimize space and have items in a dedicated storage item that can be moved around without dropping all items around like it is the case with any storage barricade.
Would it be possible to implement in Unturned a category of items that can carry items inside (for example with a 3x5 inventory slot) and themselves be carried around (perhaps they’d need to be in secondary of primary slot in some cases, or would just fit in the inventory, taking 2x3 slots or something) ?
I heard that Nelson was considering a clothing overhaul (well needed, undoubtedly) and that he wanted to reduce the constraint of the hardcoded 7 slots, something shown on his Trello. And while I find it to be a good idea, as I hope to see shoes slots, the ability to carry 2 bags (for example messenger bag & hiking bag) and so on… I wanted to know if independent items that wouldn’t use clothing slots were possible or envisioned in the future.
Judging on how Zomboid handles carried storage items, Nelson would have to consider creating an entirely new system handling restrictions on what other items can and cannot be used. This is a pretty big ask in my opinion since that would require a good amount of new code to be implemented.
Carrying a briefcase with something in it in one hand? Either the player must decide to place it down (maybe as a barricade) or be refrained from using items that require two hands.
Sure, you can consider restricting players to only using items with a tag like "One_Handed True", but taking into consideration how much of the Vanilla, Curated, and Workshop assets already use animations that require both hand’s armature, that would severely restrict the amount of things this tag can be used on. All handguns in Vanilla use both hands. A possible solution to this could be calling for a secondary animation for all items that can be operated with just one hand, but that’s significantly more time and effort developers must take to… well, develop their projects. I doubt this isn’t feasible, although it seems rather unorthodox and in most cases counterproductive.
Silver Lining!
In my opinion, I believe more clothing slots would be excellent.
For the carried storage on the other hand (no pun intended), I believe it would be nice to instead of carrying the storage item (outside the player’s inventory), a barricade when placed can save the data (items stored in it), so when the player picks up said item, instead of spitting all the items out like a vanilla crate would, the items would be saved for next time the player places the item down.
Think of the logic used for Minecraft’s Shulker Box. I definitely think this would be a pretty fun idea.
Besides my strange workaround solution, I kind of second this opinion (albeit to a degree).
Indeed, I expect such a system to be hard to implement, but overall, I think it’s something that will have to be done eventually, since the Unturned inventory system is fairly basic and could gain from a revamp to allow for more functionalities. But yeah, ideally, the best stop gap option would be to carry barricades with items inside, until a proper addition can be made.
