Depends heavily on what the inventory screen is doing, and how detailed the items are. If the thing can be summed up as a sword icon with a +1 over it or a bottle with HP or MP, and that's the absolute most complicated they get, then minimal would work. Not as much information means not as much requisite screen coverage.
If you've got something more along the lines of balder's gate or ToME4 complexity, you need to give it (a lot) more room. Insofar as personal preference goes, I prefer fullscreen, so to speak, inventories... usually.
It also depends on now much the stuff in that inventory interacts with the playing field. Something like a belt slot (or the ability to designate inventory slots arbitrarily to go in a sort of "active inventory" window) can help if significant non-equipped utility items are being considered. Also hotkeys, of course. ToME 4 or Incursion is my go-to example of hotkeys done pretty damn right. Not perfect, but a lot better than a lot of games that could use them.
My inventory serves two purposes: The normal one of equipping your own character, and a secondary one of before combat you can use it to swap items between members of your party. It uses an inventory screen that displays a paperdoll on the left and one on the right, with character cycling buttons above each. You can then swap items between sides by holding SHIFT and clicking on an item. So you can quickly equip lackies or exchange items fast.
I currently solve the information problem in much the same way that ToME 4 does: I use hover-over mouse pop-ups. I plan on expanding the current display to include comparing the item you are equipped with to the item you are hovering over, such as Diablo 3 and Skyrim and such do.
I have not addressed hotkeys yet, but definitely will look at ToME 4's method and see how they do it.
Voted 1680x1050, but it's actually only 1600x900.
Noted, will test it as well.
Running on 1360x768, so I can't really pick any of the options above.
Thanks, will add that resolution to the list to test.
My monitor's native resolution is 2560x1600.... but I'm the only person I know who can run that resolution. I play things like DF windowed... but a window size that's probably as large as many of the full monitor resolutions listed so far in this thread.
Well now I have no way to test a resolution that big.. I may have to recruit you at some point. =P
You're missing 1366x768 from that poll. Its a laptop resolution.
Indeed, seems quite a number of people are using that resolution. I believe my laptop supports and uses that resolution, so I will definitely add it to the testing list.
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As it stands, I believe I'm going to be able to implement a custom resolution option. My options screen will include the "standard" resolutions listed in the poll and the ones commonly reposted here in the replies, and also a "Custom Resolution" option. You select that, and enter in the dimensions you want. It will bounds check them for minimum size and for aspect ratio conflicts. I don't see any reason why that won't work with the way the game currently works.
Tested and working: 1680x1050, 1440x900, 1280x1024, 1024x768, 800x600, 1366x768, 1600x900, 1360x768, 1366x1024, 1400x900
Not working: 640x480, anything lower than 800x600
I noticed with some of the resolutions, such as 1366x1024, there was a one to three pixel margin of error with the mouse detection routines. Meaning sometimes you could be on the border of an icon rather than on the icon and still get the hovertips or click on it. That may end up being something that just gets accepted since figuring it out could be like splitting strands of hair.