The inventory rework is in the same tech preview [as crafting], right?
TL;DRInventory rework wasn't in the crafting preview; it's going well and fully functional, with slow icon rendering still being tuned, and he hopes for tech preview very soon and thinks 4.7 in March is possible.
I don't think it was.
So you can't have crafting without the inventory rework, but the tech preview for crafting doesn't have it?
Technically you can. It would just be really bad. It's more from a game design point of view. But the inventory work is going really well. I mean, some people have been reposting screens recently of the original concept that was shown; it's starting to look like that, so that's really good.
When does that go into tech preview?
We're hoping very soon, because at this point, every version that I've seen is fully functional, and so we just really want to solve one thing. You say quality of life; if I have a third one to add to my list: the speed of rendering of icons in the inventory. Right now, you open your inventory and there's always a moment where it's rendering RTT, the render-to-texture icons, for each of those. In case you don't know, this is a full 3D scene that gets rendered flat right there. We have versions of this in previous concepts where it's full 3D. It's super nice. It takes forever. The user experience is not great, right? And no matter the amount of work we're going to put into the UI and the functionality of inventory, the speed of the UI is really a thing that we need to improve. And so that's the part that we're still iterating on now. We've done massive improvements, but we need to dial that in perfectly, because that's the part we really want to solve. I feel good about it.
You feel good enough to say 4.7 in March?
I think so.