Perhaps start with telling us what is it exactly that you need the inventory system to do? Do you need to track the location and status of every item in a dungeon or would something like Hero.HealingPotionCount++ be sufficient?
Ack, had this in the original post, but I deleted it (was in a rush
).
Some things I will want included in said inventory system:
1. There will be weapons, armour, accessories that the player can equip.
2. Consumables that the player will use (non-stackable, for example healing/mana potions - they will help, but won't make or break a player's ability to progress in the game)
3. The item data must be stored in a way such that it's easy to display to the player (shouldn't be a problem regardless of how it's implemented, but it's still something I have to take into account)
4. It must be designed/coded such that its functionality is simple and user friendly.
5. Each item must have a designation (for example, a sword could be labelled as a 1h Weapon - meaning, if the user tries to use a "sword" in battle, which is an equippable item and not say, a healing potion, it's extremely easy to distinguish between the two and tell the player "hey, what the hell, you don't want to do that.")
6. Inventory size will be limited.
7. Item pickup will be automated (may eventually make it manual, but for simplicity sake at the moment, it's planned to be automated), but the player can choose to drop items.
8. Items will always take up 1 slot, so I don't have to worry about different items taking up different amounts of space.
I've been thinking of a few things. I could use an array of strings to represent the player's inventory, with some file input to get the item stats and item type if need be. I could read in the item name, then read in the item type, and depending on the item type I'll read in different values to an cItem class.
But now when the player uses an item or equips an item I have to be careful as well because various items do different things, and I'd think it'd be inefficient to add 0 to every stat except for damage when the player equips a sword, or add 0 to every stat except for defense when they equip armour (maybe I'd just have to suck it up and have a separate function for EACH item type, but this seems time+space inefficient - there are many ways to do something in C++, but I'd prefer to do it the correct way the first time, or at least, a more "correct" way the first time). This is my main wall in my project currently.
What kind of language are you using?
Doh, was in the title (or at least it should have been...still new to the forums). C++, with Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Express as the compiler/debugger.
