this is an old bug, but I just got fed up with it again: if you try to look thru inventory when mining, the screen resets every time a mining cycle completes (you scroll and select a location and it resets to the top of the list every mining cycle) Plus, with 3 or more beams, the combination of mining and inventory usually bogs the client down so bad you think it crashed. it can tale 30-60 seconds after hitting escape before you leave pda for cockpit view, worse if you are auto-jetting, merely because you accidentally called up the inventory screen.

Mining SHOULD be the perfect time to browse your hoards of widgets stashed hither and yon, especially with the logistics of manufacturing to ponder, but it is the one thing you can't do.

Since I gather this happens as ore is repeatedly and quickly added (and subtracted if jetting) to/from inventory, would there be a way to NOT update your local inventory if mining beams are active? Perhaps separate the current ship's inventory from the main inventory screen when in space?

You would still want the inventory list to update, especially with new stuff being brought on board. Where the problem lies however is in the interface code. The section managing the inventory needs to remember (via a convenient local variable) the row you'd previously selected, then reselect that row when updating the list. Unfortunately, that's not what's happening at the moment, and the default behavior of IUP is to set the selected row to the first row of the list, which is what you're seeing.

Not a hard fix, but not something anybody but the devs can do.

The inventory uses a tree control. What you propose is actually harder to accomplish than you seem to be aware of Keller, when working with tree controls. It's not impossible to accomplish, but it's not exactly trivial either.

Why not only update the inventory with your active ship's cargo and armor status when jumping sectors? Can that be done separately from the Cargo page?

Or maybe just make it so the darn control only updates when it's shown/unhidden instead of every time the inventory event fires?

A while back I did some work looking into how to best use tree controls. It was targeted at trying to speed up the inventory refresh times for characters with large inventories. If I recall, I met with minimal success on the speedups, but I did manage to minimize the amount of data that was being updated each time the inventory was changed. I'll see if I still have this code and see what can possibly be done to polish it up. Perhaps ray can use it to some effect.

They could start with updating IUP. IUP 2.x was acknowledged to have serious problems with trees. VO currently is using the stock tree, and while you are correct that fixing the refresh issue is actually tougher done than said, replacing the tree class (even if not updating IUP itself) would be a lot better than sticking with the current buggy class.