Of course.

Maybe like in Runescape: items are temporarily destroyed if they're plot-related and you try to trade or droptrade them. YOu only get them back by going to some city in the middle of nowhere.

I think we'll have infinite inventory space, so dropping items won't work. We should have a trash can of sorts in your inventory that you can drop items into. Else, dropping just sounds ridiculous.

In my object class, I have a boolean defining whether or not the object is tradeable. If that is set to false, we can just make sure the player can't do anything with it except destroy it.

Infinite inventory space? You think that'd work? I was thinking limited, like in Fallout 3.
And the bartering idea also sounds like how you can use items in addition to caps as currency Fallout 3.

Wow, I'm relating this game a lot to Fallout 3.

This is another realism vs. gameplay thing. I think infinite inventory is a much better way to go, since in more "realistic" games where you have limited inventory, you've got a gazillion inventory slots anyway, and there's no realistic way you could carry that much stuff. Whereas if you can hang onto anything you like, no matter how cheap/useless it is, it's a whole lot more fun, and you aren't worrying the players needlessly that they're throwing away a seemingly useless item that can be used to upgrade the strongest weapon in the game.

If you had a realistic number of inventory slots, you'd end up with a game like Duke Nukem Forever, where one of the critiques was that you could only carry three guns at a time. Realistic? Yes. Pathetic? Yes. Limiting? Quite.

Alternatively, you could have limited inventory with a place to hold/switch out your inventory like Bastion does with Arsenals, but I don't like that a whole lot, either. You shouldn't have to choose blindly what kind of weapon you're going to use in a given situation before you even know what the situation is.

One thing I really dislike in games (Especially RPG's) is how they penalize players who make "bad" decisions. If you do something wrong, it should be immediately obvious, and "bad" decisions should be obviously bad, not a simple question with dire consequences (How often does that happen in real life? "Do you want this candy bar? Y/N" y "WELL TOO BAD! I'M GONNA KILL YOU!"). I like how one LP'er of Fallout 3 shot some ally and immediately got slaughtered by all the person's friends. If you make a bad decision, it should obviously be bad, and the dire consequences that result should be humorous at worst, since you were just messing around with the game, anyway.

AND/OR...

The "dire" consequences shouldn't be so dire. For example, in the game Chrono Trigger, you can choose to do absolutely everything wrong in the first part. There are some important, seemingly harmless events with "dire" consequences in the first part of the game. But are the consequences dire? It actually works out that if you get everything right, you get a reward of a few ethers, which is helpful in the second boss fight but really isn't hugely important. Searching around the dungeon after escaping (which happens whether or not you do everything right) turns out to be far more important. Get the idea?

I see your point. This game isn't meant to be realistic anyway, I mean, look at our other ideas

And how realistic is that?

Yeah, I think that games that aim for realism sacrifice gameplay and end up totally unrealistic in the process. If people really wanted realism in games, they'd play a game as someone sitting at a computer doing absolutely nothing important.

For a compromise:

You could have an inventory, and a pseudohotbar. You can sore anything in your inventory, but you choose the number of pseudohotbar slots. That way if you had a character who only used two weapons, you could shrink the bar down to two slots and not have to worry about finding the right item.

Good-ish idea, but is it necessary? I mean, it really depends on how the game is played. Are the controls Zelda-style (by this I mean GB Zelda, with A and B each being an item)? Do you move with WASD and aim your weapon with the mouse? Is it simply point and click?

We know it's gonna be side-scrolling, but the controls are a whole different story. And it depends on them if we need a hotbar or not.

We were planning something sort of like a "hotring" where you scroll through your inventory with two buttons, plus a Use button. Out of combat you just open up your normal inventory with a button. You could do that in combat, but the menu doesn't pause the game, so it might not be a great idea.

Menu doesn't pause the game? Even Fallout 3's Pipboy does that. The only thing I've seen that doesn't is Far Cry 2's map (the actual menu does pause), and that's useful (for when you're driving).
What's the point of not having the menu, or at least the inventory, pause the game?

I mean, the menu does, the inventory doesn't. You have the hotbar for combat.

Ah, OK then. Still, the hotbar depends on the controls, I think.

Please no Minecraft-esque hotbar. That thing is just obnoxious to use.

YOu know the Wii game Endless Ocean? Something more like that. Didn't we discuss this earlier?

Yes we did. I agree. Minecraft's hotbar is very obnoxious. I don't want to be looking at my keyboard whenever I want to switch items.

Howitz's idea with the scrolling hotbar sounded good. Maybe we could even focus the attention of a hand to the hotbar alone.

The scrolling hotbar is what I've been trying to describe here.

Again, that depends if we use the mouse in the controls or not.

Let's use the mouse only for trivial things like dragging inventory items and clicking buttons. The gameplay should not be centered around the mouse.

Speaking of the mouse, I've seen some games that actually make the mouse the part of the world you're playing in, which is kinda cool. For example, in Anachronox, the mouse is actually your personal floating computer thingy, and in Bastion, the mouse has a shadow on the ground beneath. It's kinda cool.

That's pretty cool. If we aren't gonna use the mouse in the actual gameplay (which I agree with, by the way), we can maybe do that.

But we should do that after we've finished the game, maybe in a later update or something.

Yep, it isn't a priority. For now, the priority is my deciding on final engine components and map file formats.

Ehem.

Perhaps I can solve this quarry.

...

guess I can't.

I may be a bit late with this idea but you could make some items stack able.
Who is the leader of this project btw?

Nobody, really. We're just all working together. Although I guess you could call Red and MOM the "leaders", since they're doing most of the programming and organization.

k, i accidently posted this some were else, but here it is again:

currency:
1 chip's worth: wood
3: rock
5: stone
10: steel
25: iron
50: bronze
100: silver
250: gold
500: diamond

you start defeating low-level enemies by poking them with a sword handle. every time you kill one, you get a wood chip. 10 of these can be used to make a sword upgrade, and make a wooden sword. OR, you can use these to buy potions at shops.
once you are a certain level, and have better attack, defense, etc., then you start fighting slightly harder enemies who give rock chips instead. you take off your wooden upgrade, and put on your rock upgrade.

or, we can make it 50 chips, to make a weapon upgrade. so basicaly, you start with part of a weapon, jab monsters with it, get chips, make upgrades, and get stronger.

Woah, slow down, weapon upgrades are WAAAY off. I don't even know if we're gonna implement that, maybe we'll just have different weapons. It shouldn't be related to currency anyway.

Should we have crafting? Or at least NPC-crafting? (easier to implement, you give items to npc in exchange for a better one, like in Maplestory)

Should we have crafting then? Or at least NPC-crafting? (easier to implement, you give items to npc in exchange for a better one, like in Maplestory)

so no weapon upgrade things. got it.
x2 posting happens to me, too.