Item drop entities? (voxel-debris)

[deathcap]

Currently harvested items are directly added to player inventory. An alternative maybe worth considering is to drop the items on the ground, as new objects, then only add to player inventory when collided with.

https://github.com/substack/voxel-debris can do this. See also previous notes in voxel/voxelmetaverse#15

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An interesting alternative to item drops: when a block is mined, add directly to player inventory. Requires an inventory system of course, but this is what Minetest does. Mentioned in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ss9kAQCAzVc and it was highly praised, well received. Also could offer better performance, directly adding the items to inventory instead of spawning item drops and continuously collision-checking (for pickups).

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Not sure if adding debris is worth it. Most harvested blocks are collected up immediately anyways. And there is this well-written post from /r/gamedev: https://pay.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/1toutc/what_makes_mmo_networking_code_so_difficult/cea1w63

Why can't we just throw items on the ground from our inventory?
[…]
The answer is worst-case scalability issues.