Unity Inventory Question

So I want to have a pickup that exists in the world, and when you pick it up, it goes into your inventory. My question is, what's the best way to represent this in Unity?

Ideally I'd like this inventory item to be a prefab that I can drop in the world. That's all well and good, but my issue comes up when the player picks it up.

When it's in the player's inventory, there's no object in the world anymore, its just stored in an array for inventory objects. Of course, if the player drops it, it will again be in the world.

This *feels* like it will use two different kinds of objects, a GO with a mesh (etc) and a non-mesh object (not sure what that's called?) when it's in your inventory. BUT I DONT LIKE THIS ROUTE. It doesn't feel right to me. Id prefer it to be one thing, although, if I can't have it that way, I understand.

Any suggestions on how to handle this?

Aug-6-11, 9:43 pm by Hanford | File under: tech, Video games, Unity

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David Koontz wrote: Aug-20-11, 9:00 pm

I think you can have 1 class on your prefab that has a reference to a 3d object (the mesh) and a 2d object (the GUITexture, or whatever). Like you were saying you toggle one off and the other on when the item switches states between being picked up and in the world. If just hiding the mesh of the 3d object causes problems (collision, triggers firing off, etc.) then you could set the actual object to be outside of your screen and just position the child object (the 3d mesh) in the scene and when it is collected you move the 3d object to the parent's location. You'll probably have to control the 3d and 2d objects independently as one is in world space and the other likely is in view space.

Hanford wrote: Aug-8-11, 1:45 pm

More than one class seems like a headache; every inventory prefab needs to keep track of an in-world mesh, and the in-world mesh vice versa. (Project prefabs, not Hierarchy prefabs). Ideally it's one prefab that can exist in the world, or in an inventory.

i think the best way to do this is when the item is in your inventory, we turn the mesh renderer and collider off and move it to some never-reachable part of the world.

This seems messy, but I'm going to let it stew for a while; I'm not really happy with either solution.

CC wrote: Aug-8-11, 9:03 am

I agree with Asher. You want more than one class.

Think of it like this: you have an abstract Inventory Object without any display information at all, and then you have displayers of that object for different contexts. When the object is in the game world, you're using a displayer that is an object with geometry and position. When the object is in your inventory, you're using a displayer that shows a bitmap in OnGUI or something.

The above really isn't all that different than, say, displaying a health bar over your character's head and also showing health numerically in a status screen or HUD; you're just storing and displaying "objects" instead of "integers".

Alternatively, if the above is more complex than you need, you can just think of it like this: the game-world object isn't the object itself; it's an "InventoryItemGiver"; when you trigger it, it gives you an item and disappears.

Asher Vollmer wrote: Aug-7-11, 8:25 am

I'm bad at explaining why I do things, but here's an example of how I would handle this:

I would create two classes.

class InventoryObjectType extends System.Object {
var name:String;
var icon:Texture2D;
var cost:int;
var prefab:InventoryObject;
}

class InventoryObject extends Component {
var lifeLeft:int; //Some instance-specific properties
}

I would create a prefab of the item I wanted to summon and add the InventoryObject component to it.

I would create a master object in the scene that just has an InventoryObjectType[] array variable exposed. And then due to Unity-Magic, all of the customizable properties of that class would pop up and be editable.

Hope that helps and isn't totally incomprehensible!

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