What do I need to know to do an Inventory system?
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This is quite a vague question, perhaps you have a specific area you’d want to know about because an inventory system will touch several complex stuff like data stores, scripting, interface design and the sub alike.
Anyway, to start off, one thing you should consider doing is using number IDs as references because string references tend to take up a lot of a data store’s capacity.
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Whenever you arrive at a question like “What do I need to do X” you need to abstract your problem.
By that, I mean you you need to look at your problem from a simpler perspective which can be achieved by grabbing a piece of paper or a text editor and typing out all the various components required to achieve X.
Let’s walk through this with an inventory system:
- In order for a player to interact with their inventory they will need some sort of interface
- You need to decide if you’d like their inventory to persist over many servers/places within one game or if you want it to reset when the player leaves the game/dies
- Depending on what you want this may include data stores and understanding key, value data pairs.
- In order for the user interface to interact with things in the world (or “server”) you will need to know the importance of local and server scripts as well as the interaction between server and client
You can make it much more simpler than this but this will give you a general idea. Once you’ve spent some time forming a list go through the list and be honest with yourself what you know and what you don’t. Pick the things you don’t know and get learning.
TL;DR: Data Stores, Server/Client Interaction, User Interface Design, as well as foundation programming knowledge
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You may want to check out these video tutorials on player inventory and persistent inventory:
