Originally Posted by
snupy
Another thing I have often seen people complain about is the duplication of records when several modules are loaded. For example in PF1 if you load both the Core rulebook and the Ultimate equipment you'll have two copies of e.g. the longsword (and most other things). Similar problems with classes, spells, etc. With a few modules loaded it can become quite annoying. In practice it is not something which irks me too much, but I agree with the complaint and don't like the fact that each module has to have a separate copy of each record it wants to access.
The better solution would probably be to have a single master list, possibly encrypted if it has to be, for each type of record, e.g. an items list with all the items. Whenever a module needs a specific record it calls from the master list, so both core rulebook and ultimate equipments call/load/import/whatever the same longsword entity from the master list.
This is the very basic principle of avoiding code (or text) duplication, making consistency, corrections, updates, much easier. Suppose spell or class features effects are added (I believe they should be included in the paid modules but that's for a different thread, very grateful for the great work done for free by members of the community), it would than be enough to update a single list rather than a multitude of modules.
Now I am sure every developer is very familiar with what I wrote. If the unified list solution is not possible or feasible for reasons, allowing to specify which records get visualised in the menus could be a solution. For example if I usually load core rulebook and ultimate equipment I could specify that I don't want core rulebook items to appear in the general items menu. It should be possible to save these settings though, otherwise it's essentially the same as filtering by group which is already possible.