But then you'd need to sort the items by quantity (re-sorting every time you gain or lose an item), and that would probably destroy any gains you make with the smaller data transfer. Any ideas on improving the load times for the board editor? An offline editor where all the images are embedded would be great, since then we'd just have to download it once per build instead of asking the server for each individual image every time we want to tweak a board. (I've started saving multiple versions of each board so I can switch between them quickly in the scenario screen when testing.)
Your browser ought to cache most of those images - IIRC we've had the most success with this w/ Chrome. Meanwhile maintaining parallel web and offline builds is a nightmare that we haven't dared tackle yet, but we expect to get there some day.
I'm checking in a bunch of performance improvements to collection loading. You can try them out on the test server in the latest build. I tested with a 7500 item collection. Previously it took 12 seconds to load into the keep, now it takes 2.5.