[RELEASED] [SUPPORT] Moore's RPG Template

[Moore_Game_Dev]

@IlliciteS

Hello,

Thank you for that amazing pack. It’s perfect. I cannot think of a better way to implement an inventory system in a real RPG. Or almost perfect; I just made some minor tweaks but that was not a big deal. For instance, I was surprised you need to press different keys in order to sell an item, to move an item to your inventory, or to move an item to a container. I made some verification with all the handy booleans you’ve made (are we in a container mode, in a trader mode, in inventory mode, is the 0 or 1 widget switcher activated, etc), and I replaced all the keys with a simple left mouse click and then I called the appropriate functions. It seems to work, even if I have just tested it for 2 min in your demo map.

I wanted to invert the right / left hand slot. Right now, if you left click (which is the primary click on a mouse) on an item, it will be set on the left hand, which will then be used by the right click in game (blocking for instance). My personal opinion is it’s perhaps not very intuitive(?).
I took a look at the “Get slot Type by item for right click” and in the “Contains” node, I found the “Right”. I was like: “ok, cool, I’ll just change it to left and do the opposite way in the “Get slot Type by item for left click” function. :D” But actually, it is not implemented the same way. So I was wondering if I could just copy past the “Get slot Type by item for right click” into the left one, and then modify the Rigt / Left in the Contains node without breaking the system.

I am wondering if the shield items shoud not be automatically set to the left hand (right now, we can put them on the right hand).

I am trying to do what you are actually developping; really equipping an item you have clicked on in the inventory. I’ve done it for the weapon / shield, giving them a static mesh. it works well, except for that part: if a shield / weapon is already equipped in one hand and I want to swap hand, it’s perfectly well noticed in the inventory but I don’t know where exactly. So, right now, the static mesh keeps on staying on the other / free hand.

And now, the fun part: if I want all my NPC to have their own inventory, to be able to equip (on them) an item, a weapon, or if I want to loot their body and the helmet I take on them disappear from their head, I would need to recreate a large part of that system but directly in their BP?

Anyway, again, thanks. I’ve tried to do it myself before saying your product on the market. And now I realize that I would never really be able to make it, or it would have taken months and months.

Hi IlliciteS,

I think you’re on the ball with the changes to whether an item goes into the left or right hand. With a bit of debugging you will no doubt get it to do what you want. To debug it in the most easy way I like to enable the debug booleans in the blueprints or functions I’m interested in and do a play test, then examine the Output window. Then I pick a node within a function that I suspect needs modifying and toggle the breakpoint on that node. Once its stops on that breakpoint during a play test I then click the Step Over button and follow along with what’s its doing.

• There are probably several ways to change the hand in which an item goes. You could modify the GetSlotTypeByItemForLeftClick and GetSlotTypeByItemForRightClick functions or you could modify the contents of the AllowedSlotTypesLookupDataTable which is referenced by those functions. If you examine the AllowedSlotTypesLookupDataTable you can see that for ItemType of Shield its got a row for each hand so that means it allows shields to get equipped into either hand.
• If you remove the row from the datatable for Shield to go into the RightHand, then when in-game , if you press the right mouse button on a shield in the inventory it will do nothing, but if you click the left mouse button it will still make it become equipped into the left hand.
• The slot that an item is equipped into is stored within the variables EquippedSlot and IsEquipped the CharactersItems array (of data type ItemStruct).
• The ItemWidget contains an event called On Clicked (Button Item) on the Event Graph that handles left clicks. The function OnMouseButtonUp, which you’ll see in the functions area on the left hand side, handles right clicks.

To get dead NPCs to visually lose their equipped armour you could create a few new functions to handle this:

• NPCs already have an inventory that is populated at begin play by the 2 functions AddSpecialItemsToNPC and GenerateInventory. You’ll see these in the Event Graph of BP_NPC_Master. You could modify one of these functions or create another function that focuses on adding equipped items to the NPC. Again the item’s EquippedSlot variable will need to be set to something other than Unset for these equipped items. The IsEquipped variable also needs to be set to true if the item is equipped.
• If you choose to modify AddSpecialItemsToNPC, some of the items added by this functions could be equipped items. The items added to NPCs read from the NPCItemsDataTable. Maybe add a new column to it (to the NPCItemStruct) called EquippedSlot of data type EquipmentSlotTypesEnum and another called IsEquipped (boolean) and read these (use a Branch node or a Switch node) within the AddSpecialItemsToNPC function. If an item is equipped then you could call a new interface function within BP_NPC_Master that visually equips the item/static mesh/skeletal mesh.
• Then when looting the NPC, the function called TakeHighlightedItem in ItemMainWidget makes a call to the interface function SetInventory (the target is a Container reference) where it passes in the modified Inventory of the NPC. You could call a new interface function that visually removes the armour or weapon from the NPC just before this call to SetInventory.

I hope this helps.