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An idea for a new way to handle inventory


Bitsy Buccaneer
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The blog post about the Visual Outfit Browser reminded me of something I would really like for inventory management. Everyone I've told about it has agreed that it would be a big help, so I thought I would put it out here for feedback, improvement, and, if people are keen on it, help in presenting it to the Lindens.

My idea is for a modular inventory.

As it is, we're basically carrying our pocketbooks, rucksacks, wardrobes, holiday luggage, box rooms, garages, attics and kitchen sinks with us everywhere we go. Well maybe not the kitchen sink if it's no copy and rezzed back home. ;-)

So how about a modular inventory system where we have the option of assigning categories to items and then choose which inventory to log in with?

Three or four perhaps, preferably with customisable names, and a default category that includes everything. Even just an Archive to store infrequently used items in would be a great help.

So a person could have a Daily category, say, and then a separate one for House stuff. Or a creator with a large back catalog could use a module for retired goods and keep them out of the way but accessible (via a relog or perhaps other means) for future support. I might even manage to sort my inventory if I could do it in smaller, manageable bits. :) Someone who likes things as they are could ignore it altogether and carry on as is.

With the UI as it is, a set of tick boxes for the modules on the Properties tab might be the best way to assign items. A way to bulk assign items would be great too, though perhaps harder to implement.

A filter for unassigned items would be useful - one of the drawbacks I see about this is that people will acquire items when they're logged in with a different module and won't always remember (or have time just then) to assign them correctly.

That's my basic idea of how something like this could work. I'm sure others will have suggestions on how to improve and implement it, or reasons why it just won't work. The benefits would include quicker loading and ease of play. And we wouldn't have to spend ages boxing things up never to find them again. :)

Your thoughts?

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I am not sure how this helps to organize anything. The secret to good inventory management regardless is a system that is easy to use, males sense to you and makes use of lots of well organized folders to provide structure.

 

I don't think it would make much sense to reload some subset of inventory just to accomplish a task. I don't think it would make any noticeable difference in viewer performance.

 

There are already a number of great inventory management tools available that can make keeping large inventories organized.

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I didn't call it that.  I said that I stated that I didn't perceive a benefit of choosing what inventory I had at login, only to find mid session that I didn't have what I needed.

In choosing a category of inventory (and thus leaving other parts of your inventory inaccessible after login), what problem are you seeking to solve here because arranging things logically is already achievable (to me)?

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Folders don't reduce the total number of items in the inventory. (How did this get to be all about folders?)

Inventory systems and prims can't be bulk searched.

I've used landscaping items exactly once in the last two years, but my inventory still does whatever it does with them every time I log on. It takes longer for my 8 year old av to log in than my brand new building alt, so it is doing something that takes time and resources.

Now I could pack it all up into boxes and I could even use boxes in boxes to simulate the layered folder structure I carefully made. It would take some time, but it could be done. That's fine - until I want to use them again. If it was a major job, then it might be worth rezzing all of the boxes and copying it all back into inventory and going from there. (And then deleting it all again, being careful yet again to not purge any no copy items by accident.) But if I was just adding a few things to a small area of the sim? Not really. I could take photos of every item and make a database on my hard drive. I did some of that. It was tedious, annoying and became misleading when I got a new computer and a better graphics card.

I would love to be able to park that entire folder structure and all of those items somewhere else that could be more or less ignored until needed. Then when I want it, it's all right there ready to use. All I would have to do is relog, which isn't that difficult.

Furniture & decor also fall in that category for me. We don't have a proper house on the sim at the moment, but probably will in the future. A lot of the furniture "should" be replaced since it's old and primmy, but some of it has memories and good animations and might be fun to experiment with in Penny's holodeck approach. Being able to park the items and existing folder structure elsewhere would be the best solution at the present moment and the one which allows for the greatest flexibility in the future.

Pretty much all of my shop inventory could be parked as well. It's low maintenance stuff and I really only need it when I set up for an event. All in all, it would be easy for me to move at least 1/3rd of the items in my inventory elsewhere and not miss them at all on a daily basis. Then when I do need them, it would be easier for me to log in with that module (and preserved, intact, annotated folder structures) than dig out, rez and search through storage prims.

I've mentioned the idea to several friends and they thought it would be great. One would like to use it for hunting and sorting through what can easily be 100 new items per hunt. It could potentially help anyone who has fallen behind in sorting inventory. That includes myself. I got behind during my lost year before surgery and what with cognitive impairments and continuing chronic health problems I've never managed to catch up. My SL has also changed markedly over these 8 years and some of the folder organisations I so carefully made aren't really relevant anymore. Moving those over to a separate area would make it easier for me to go through them, save what's worth saving and reorganise it to better work with my current SL needs and practices.

More manageable bits + a sense of progress and accomplishment would go a long way towards helping some of us with out of control inventories. I think it would help me reduce my daily inventory by at least another 1/3rd. Probably half of that could be archived for unpredicted future needs and half could be purged altogether.

So if this were implemented, I could immediately take my daily "in-use" inventory from 100,000 to something like 65,000 and whittle the rest down to less than 30,000. All without losing the benefits of searchable folders.

100,000 to 30,000 is formidable. 65,000 to 30,000 in small bites is very doable, especially if I don't have to go through the whole box it up and figure out how to make it findable again schtick.

As I mentioned in my OP, those who are happy with things as they are would be free to ignore it altogether. There will naturally be people who want all of their furniture or landscaping handy but have other stuff they'd be happy to park in folders in a virtual attic. Like back up boxes of all the different sizes mesh clothing comes in these days so it's there when they get a new mesh body but out of the way until then. Or maybe an immersive RPer would prefer to know that whatever search brings up will suit the RP setting. If I did more inworld building, I would love to have a FP only module because I could use all of the visual space of the inventory window for building supplies. In folders, of course, but only a layer or two deep instead of folders within folders within folders within folders. A RL analogy would be a proper workshop or sewing room instead of setting up on the kitchen table amongst the rest of family life.

It seems like a way to add significant flexibility to inventory management and give us a potentially powerful and useful option. It won't be for everyone. I never thought or said it would be.

Comparing it to folders seems to the wrong step IMO and I apologise if there was anything in my OP which encouraged it. Better I think to compare it to prim stuffing or inventory search vs wading through inventory boxes. Ultimately, it would be a way to log in with a lower inventory count while archiving infrequently used items (or items used in specific circumstances) with the folder structures intact and searchable.

Does it still sound so pointless?

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Bitsy Buccaneer wrote:

Folders don't reduce the total number of items in the inventory. (How did this get to be all about folders?)

Inventory systems and prims can't be bulk searched.

I've used landscaping items exactly once in the last two years, but my inventory still does whatever it does with them every time I log on. It takes longer for my 8 year old av to log in than my brand new building alt, so it is doing something that takes time and resources.

If it's really inventory size that slows down login, I'd be all in favor of fixing that, but I'm not so convinced that this modular inventory idea is the way to go about solving such a problem. (Granted, I don't really understand the problem and I'm not aware of experiencing it, but that doesn't mean it's not real.)

Besides that possible efficiency boon, the goal seems to be to make inventory easier to search, and that indeed is a longstanding wish. I think that's how the discussion here got to be "all about folders". I'm no fan of folders, myself, and immediately quit using them for email when I got an early invitation to gmail. (Yeah, I'm that old.)

Give me tools for smart searching any day, rather than anything requiring me to manually sort something into something else. Instead of folders, I might find some use for user-supplied tags (although in fact I never use gmail labels either). The point of tagging an item with potentially multiple labels is that no tree-structured hierarchy is implied. (Maybe we can populate multiple folders with links to the same item, as the My Outfits folder works, but I've never even considered making an inventory link by hand, assuming it's possible, because I can't even be bothered to put anything in folders in the first place.)

TLDR: I basically want Inventory to work like gmail, with strong and flexible search, and entailing no effort in advance.

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Qie Niangao wrote:

TLDR: I basically want Inventory to work like gmail, with strong and flexible search, and entailing no effort in advance.


That works for me. I have no email folders either. And I'm starting to drift away from folders on my computer as desktop search improves. With only 10K items in inventory, I experience no slowdowns that make me want to split it up.

 

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Bitsy Buccaneer wrote:

Folders don't reduce the total number of items in the inventory. (How did this get to be all about folders?)

Inventory systems and prims can't be bulk searched.

Does it still sound so pointless?

Folders don't need to reduce the number of items in inventory.

Inventory systems CAN be bulk searched, depending on the system.  If I wrote one, it would log the prim content to SQL server along with a suitable picture and rich keywording, then you'd just search that system and it would auto-rez and unpack the right box.  Not a big task for a modern inventory system.

To me, yes it sounds like a solution looking for a problem.  I've just had a quick look, my 68,000 item inventory takes me 22 seconds from login button to inworld, I don't see that as a problem.  If I wanted to swap to a different category of inventory per the proposal, i'd need to stop what I was doing, logout, choose another inventory thing and login again.  Surely that overhead has already negated any extra time you may experience? *shrugs*

I understand that it's an idea that would work for you and not me, people work in different ways but i'm still not clear what the actual problem is that needs solving here?  Better searching, better categorising, better cataloguing I can accept but a need to leave lumps of my inventory behind when I login?  That's the part I don't see as a "benefit" with this solution and it feels to me like the actual thing you want to address wouldn't need to leave behind inventory either, if only it was presented in a different way?

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To veer OT: I put things in folders on my computer, but it has been many years since I looked for anything other than by Computer search. I don't understand why anyone would not find search faster.

Same with inventory, though I don't file each individual item, since there is no way to designate a location to save to, but wait and bulk file. 

It absolutely astounds me that many in SL are not even aware inventory is searchable. Guess what, they spend a lot of time rifling through folders looking for stuff, and not finding it. Typical: Yesterday someone could not find the ceiling fan in the set she bought, so instead of searching FAN she IMed me. When someone reports something missing, I ask them what search term they are using, 9/10 times, they don't know what I am talking about. Never noticed the search field. 

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Yeah, the entire concept of organizing files falls flat when they're arriving on your computer by the hundreds each day from numerous different sources. I look forward to the day I can search my Mac for photos in the same way I search Google for images.

"five women standing under a tree" will someday find the photograph of Mom and her four (at the time) remaining sisters, which is one of several files on my Mac named "IMG_0011.jpg".

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Sassy: Folders don't need to reduce the number of items in inventory.

My reply: Huh? The question was whether there was something wrong with folders. Nothing really wrong with them, but they're not suited for an important objective of this proposal, reducing the number of items in daily use inventory. That's MY main goal. It's the one the friends I've spoken with about this latched onto first. So I don't understand what you're on about with your statement above, except as it suggests misunderstanding.

Sassy: Inventory systems CAN be bulk searched, depending on the system.  If I wrote one, it would log the prim content to SQL server along with a suitable picture and rich keywording, then you'd just search that system and it would auto-rez and unpack the right box.  Not a big task for a modern inventory system.

My reply: Then amend my statement to "Inventory system which are not dependent on external servers" please.

Since I have no experience in coding, I would be dependent on others. And to be frank, using something from a random anonymous avatar on the marketplace with that much influence over my inventory seems a wee bit more of a risk than I'm happy to take.

Sassy: To me, yes it sounds like a solution looking for a problem.  I've just had a quick look, my 68,000 item inventory takes me 22 seconds from login button to inworld, I don't see that as a problem.  If I wanted to swap to a different category of inventory per the proposal, i'd need to stop what I was doing, logout, choose another inventory thing and login again.  Surely that overhead has already negated any extra time you may experience? *shrugs*

My reply: Oh for the days when I was at 68,000. My inventory didn't start acting up until about 90K. Logging in takes significantly longer. Opening a 2nd inventory window takes significantly longer. Items are more likely to disappear for a spell. Doesn't happen all the time, but more often than I'd like. Comparing performance on my main and alt (same computer, same internet, some 99,000 difference in inventory sizes) suggests that it does make a difference. And even if it didn't, I would still like to get some things out of the way.

There are items I rarely use but would like to keep organised in my existing folder structure. I would also like to be able to continue to search for them in inventory instead of slogging through boxes or relying on an anonymous stranger's external server. I want them out of the way, items, folders, the lot. Relogging for that one time in a year when I need them isn't that big a deal to me. If I found I wanted certain things often enough that they were better off in a more frequently used section, then they could just be moved again. I wouldn't expect my initial choices to necessarily be right the first time or to always be the best ones. My idea would add flexibility which would make it easier I think to change inventory organisation as our second lives change.

I would also like to have a clean slate module for specific projects. My personal examples would be building/texturing, sorting and reorganising. Since I generally decide to work on those before I log in, choosing a module to log in with wouldn't have to be any more complicated than picking Aditi over Agni. The two benefits would be less visual distractions in the inventory window and it could stay that way, exactly how I left it, no matter how long it was till I got back to it.

Working from the mass of folders of everything I own in SL is visually distracting for me and makes it harder for me to work efficiently. It's one of the reasons why my inworld projects get started but not finished. Maybe I'm alone in this. Maybe I'm not.

Sassy: I understand that it's an idea that would work for you and not me, people work in different ways but i'm still not clear what the actual problem is that needs solving here?  Better searching, better categorising, better cataloguing I can accept but a need to leave lumps of my inventory behind when I login?  That's the part I don't see as a "benefit" with this solution and it feels to me like the actual thing you want to address wouldn't need to leave behind inventory either, if only it was presented in a different way?

My reply: Let's try this again. I have many items I would like to keep but do not need or want frequent access to. I would like to have them out of the way 364 days a year. I would like to preserve the folder structures and inworld search for them.
So how do I do that using currently available means?

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Bitsy Buccaneer wrote:

 

There are items I rarely use
but would like to keep organised in my existing folder structure
.

I'm teetering on the far edge of the topic here, but: hierarchical object inventory folders would be so handy for so many different things. The scripting interface would want to be more elaborate than LSL has now, but it could be very powerful.

(Yes, scripts can impose a tree structure, even multiple trees, even tangled trees, but that simple inventory folder interface is pretty natural for users to manipulate and would be great to preserve when copying between individual and object inventories.)

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Take it away, Qie. I'm not sure the thread has ever been on topic really. If you can make better use of the space, go for it.

Or perhaps we can speculate on the differences between the reception here and inworld, where everyone I've mentioned it to thinks it sounds grand. I'm really curious why it's been like night and day.

Maybe we should just post funny cat videos instead. :matte-motes-smile:

Anyway, sorry to waste everyone's time.

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Bitsy Buccaneer wrote:

Or perhaps we can speculate on the differences between the reception here and inworld, where everyone I've mentioned it to thinks it sounds grand. I'm really curious why it's been like night and day.


Quite probably because you asked friends inworld who are like minded, after all, people do tend to associate themselves with similar people, that's only to be expected.

The forums are a broader spread of people who have no emotional connection as a friend might and may be less concerned about a different viewpoint being taken as a threat to a relationship.

When subject to a merely analytic view, it's inevitable that the experience will be different.

 

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I don't know what your friends are like, but mine are all people I can trust to be honest with me. Disagreements and differences of opinion or taste really aren't a problem or a threat to the relationship. They're a pretty diverse lot too, in temperaments, opinions, degree of tact, pretty much everything. So I'm not sure I'm happy to along with your suggestion that they're like minded.

Some of the people I've talked about this with were more contact-friends than friend-friends, so perhaps they might lie to me or dissemble for that sake of social purposes but the responses were quicker than that and more enthusiastic. Plus some random conversations here and there too. Not everyone thought that they would use a modular inventory, but those who didn't could see the benefit for someone else they knew.

It was the diversity of those who thought it sounded useful that finally got me to post here. If it had just been me and a few mates, I never would have worked up the courage to put myself on the line like this. Right now, I honestly wish I hadn't.

You are quite right about the lack of an emotional connection amongst forum regulars and new posters. There are lovely people in the creation forums (mesh & scripting especially), but in other sections it can be frustrating and lonely for those of us who aren't in with the cliques.

More than that, there are enough never going to work suggestions put forward by newish residents that it probably does become a reflex to automatically say no. This past summer when I was participating more often, I stopped myself on many occasions because I didn't want to go down that route. And then there's the way people can all pile in on top of someone who has an unpopular opinion. At least that didn't happen to me here.

I've thought a lot about what you said and to be honest, I'm still scratching my head over it. It just doesn't fit with what I've seen of my friends, the pool of inworld opinion I drew on, or the forums.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I've read through the thread here, twice actually, to make certain I understand perspectives as best as I possibly can...so, keep that in mind please :)....

I can understand why it would be a solution for you, probably others as well, based on the problem(I suppose that might not be the best word, I'm not sure, but I'll call it that) you have stated you have. I can understand why it might be frustrating for you, and visually confusing/annoying/distracting, as well. I can also understand why you would believe it is the loading of the inventory that is actually the cause for a bog down of your system. But there is one thing I do not understand about your posts, and please do not take this the wrong way I am actually seeking to understand this bit......why are you taking the responses personally simply because they don't share your view? Maybe you're not taking it personally, but from context clues, it seems a bit as if you might be. I'm actually surprised no one has come along and actually been rude, lol(kudos forumites). It seems that folks here are trying to both understand your problem, and join in a conversation about "ways to better solve inventory issues", or at least something along those lines. They may not share the same perspective, and they may not even understand your perspective, but I hardly think they were less than receptive...rather, they were attempting to understand/explain/converse/share.

That said...I have not had the same experience as you. I have had an inventory of varying sizes including only the library items, over 500k items, and everywhere in between. I have only had issues with inventory taking a bit to load when I got over 300k items...or I have more than one av on at once. Otherwise, never any issues. Even with my old dinosaur pc, sparky, who was definitely beyond his prime and I'm not even certain how it ran sl at all lol, things still loaded pretty darn well and quickly. So, personally, I am not convinced that inventory size is actually a big contributing factor to loading issues/lag, especially in this instance. The second window taking a bit to load, is a non-issue, though, for sure. The system doens't have to reload the entire inventory in order to open a second window as all assets associated are already loaded. The fact that you feel a slow down while doing it tells me it may be something else(I could be 100% wrong, but honestly, I don't think I am).

For me, sorting inventory is an odd thing, I use both folders and boxes. Things I only intend to take out periodically, for very specific purposes, go in boxes. My boxes are named as such(and only contain a few items when necessary) that they are super easy to find with search in my inventory. I box things(though I avoid double boxing these days, I used to, when necessary, use that method too). I label everything easy to find names(ok, easy to remember). My boxes get put into appropriate folders. When I need something, I can either open a folder and find the right box, or search for a box if I know the name and want to get to it super quick. Then I rez the box, take out what I need, and put the box back in inventory. I don't take everything out, unless I need to, though.  Items I might use more frequently, get put into folders, but not boxed. So, they're super easy to find.

While my opinions and my experience may not be the same as yours, and your idea may not work for me, I *can* understand why it would work for you. But, at the same time, I can see why it would require a "more helpful than not" approach for the majority, before ll would ever implement something like it. That's just how ll is though. If it only helps a few, more times than not...it goes in the bin, regardless of how good of an idea it might be for those who find it helpful/useful/necessary. 

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I'd like your idea more if instead of having to relog we could just have modules delivered efficiently and quickly and be able to put modules 'away' just as quickly and easily when we find we don't need them.

I don't think that the majority of people experience a slowing down due to inventory, unless they have low end computers or old ones.  I use a box and folder system but still have close to a 200k inventory and I don't notice any slowdown.  I would bet most residents don't have more than 50k unless they are a creator, an extreme shopper or have been around a long time and don't weed their old stuff out or eliminate duplicates.  

I'd personally be happy with better search tools and also have a way to to specify with a click or maybe two what folder to put something in so it doesn't get dumped in big category folders such as Objects and make it easier to move items.  A simple click or two could save hours of sorting inventory and save a lot of drudgery.  Those that don't want to be bothered can just not answer and the item will go to the default folder for the kind of item it is.  But I'm sure these suggestions would not be universally applauded either.

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