For the inventory of my character I thought of not having a UI and instead have sockets on the skeleton.
When you pick up an object this object would attach to the first socket that is not occupied in the array (we’re talking about hip sockets here). The player could press a number key (1 up to 5) in order to place in his hand the item that occupies that position in the socket array, and then use or throw that item.
I understand the capacity limitations of this system since having many sockets would be silly. I am mainly interested in the performance side of this. Would it be too bad to have items attached to your sockets at runtime if we have many NPCs (maybe 100) that use the same system?
What you could attach to the sockets are static and skeletal meshes (mainly static), which would not have physics activated, they would rather just follow the animation of the character.
What do you think?