Items v2.0

[-Andreas]

Feature Showcase:

Items v2.0

 

Background

Early 2019 it was decided to finally begin the complete revamp of the old basic item system that made every item identical. Nervous had previously wanted to start up this new project, but due to the sheer scale of such a revamp of our system it was postponed for a long time. Nervous and I had a discussion about potential ways to do this, and we landed on the same approach that most larger MMORPG games are using. I took upon the task to do so, which meant a lot of ressearch was necessary to accomplish this. After the planning phase which included the new data structure in the form of an UML diagram previously shown on the version 1.5 announcement I started to redo large portions of the code and move every single bit of code that involved items onto our new system. Two months later and here we are with the system now live on the gameserver. 

 

Items 

With the early release of version 1.5 of the GTA:World gamemode we're now able to introduce you to our second version of our item system. This new way of thinking allows us to make every single piece of item in the world unique. All items are now stored separately from your inventory, and have their own row in the database. With this new approach to items we'll be able to manipulate them all individually based on attributes associated to that unique items template. Weapons, drugs, phones and so on can be renamed. Besides renaming certain items some items such as weapons can keep track of which weapon components it has attached. Even striationmarks and serialnumbers will be kept for firearms.  

 

How do we plan to fully utilize this?

The first step was to redo the code and prepare the entire system for further development. Now that the first phase is over we're able to look into the suggestions section where a lot of the features required such a system in place to even be considered. Some of the planned implementations includes;

• A new phone system
• Credit cards
• Revamp of the drug system
• Forensics for the LSPD with the use of striationmarks
• Weapon components that can be acquired and fitted onto your firearms

 

Other noticeable advantages 

Now that the items are kept separately in the database we wont experience items lost in the void. Sometimes weapons would go missing after equipping and logging off. One of the main reasons for that was the way the old inventory system kept track of your actual inventory and weapons equipped. The two were not directly connected, and once in a while weapons were lost. We noticed a lot of the refund requests involved weapons lost due to this, so a solution had to be implemented to counter this. Besides preventing items from randomly disappearing the administration team will find it easier to trace specific items by their ID.

 The same applies for all items in general from now on.