Officially supported methods of batch modification of the inventory

[DanielWillett]

I'm basically looking for a way to improve the performance of 'kit plugins'.

A while back I had issues with the performance of equipping a lot of players at once with a kit. When the next game started every player would go to get a kit at once and the server would become very laggy for a little while. I was able to sort of fix this by using the SendInventory RPC to send all the items at once but its still not possible to clear the inventory all at once because the player's inventory UI won't update without explicitly sending the item removal.

Also the Items.clear method doesn't update the bool[,] slots field in Items so it leaves behind ghost items.

What I'm looking for is something like this:

public void EquipKit(KitItem[] items)
{
  // this will stop any updates from being sent and keep onItemWhatever events from being invoked
  player.inventory.StartBatchUpdate();
  
  // a clear inventory method wouldn't hurt either
  for (int page = 0; page < PlayerInventory.STORAGE; ++page)
     player.inventory.items[page].clear(); // clear should also update the 'slots' array which it currently doesn't
  
  foreach (KitItem item in items)
  {
     page.tryAddItem(...)
  }
  
  // will invoke events for the inventory state being updated and send it to the player
  player.inventory.ApplyBatchUpdate();
}

[SDGNelson]

It is a nice idea!

It looks like vanilla uses Items.clear in three places. Two are seemingly pointless (?) before destroying storage, and one is used before loadSize to reset the storage. Perhaps clear + loadSize is a good workaround for that in the meantime.