Chad McKinney · Lead Gameplay Engineer, US PU Gameplay team

Yeah, so what it will allow is text-based filtering of local results at first, but not global text search. And the reason for this is because it's actually much more difficult to implement than you might just naively think. You have to consider how you're extracting that data out of the back end. The way that we're implementing the new entity graph system is to optimize it for the kinds of queries that gameplay does most often. And that usually means hierarchical queries. And for this reason, the way that the data is laid out in the database is not conducive to text-based search. Instead, we would have to have a different kind of caching layer in order to facilitate this, which is doable. It's not that it's not possible. It's just that that's not the work that's currently being done. We're very focused on Server Meshing, entity graph, persistent streaming, all that stuff. So the people that we would need to work with in order to support that are tied up with some very important things right now. The global search won't be out in the first outing, but it is something that we've definitely talked about, and we have some ideas about how to do it.

Rob Reininger · Assistant Director, Systemic Gameplay Services

And on that note, we actually found that... we put in an item type and subtype, so the categories and subcategories that you would see in the shop kiosk. So you've got your categories across the top, like, oh, clothing, and then pants, shirts, whatever. We're giving that level of filtering, where you can set up your criteria, say, yeah, filter, and then only the stuff in that location that matches that criteria will show up. So it's a little more efficient way to go, where's my guns, where's my clothes, where's my whatever. But the text search... we're also limited on how many things we can bring into the query results each time, just because it'll take longer and longer for things to load. So we felt it was better to give you faster results than to create this huge list, wait for it to load for 15 minutes, right, and then allow you to interact with it. So I think we've actually turned the text-based filtering off right now, because the type/subtype or category stuff was so much more efficient, where it's like, let's just nix that and give them a little more space to show items.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

So it's not out of the question?

Rob Reininger · Assistant Director, Systemic Gameplay Services

No, no. It was one of the first things I wanted. I'm like, I want to type, much like we have in the friends list in the front end, where you can start typing somebody's name and see them pop up in the list. That's exactly what I want as a player. And I want to be able to type keywords. I want to be able to type like sniper or bullet or whatever. As a game that manages so much stuff, we have to have those quick and easy ways to not just figure out what it is, but where it is, what I need to do to go and get it, how much of it I've got, what quality, what shape it's in. There's a bunch of stuff that will be coming into play much more as we move forward.