Shoule I Use Inventory for NPCs?

[jkaczmar]

I have a philsophical question regarding UCC/UIS combined as it relates to NPCs. Should a typical enemy NPC be enabled with a UIS inventory or is this just unnecessary overhead? Is is smarter to just use UCC weapons so they can fight and use UIS Item prefab drops when they die? In my case, I'm planning on having dead NPCs drop things like Cash, Bullets, or Weapons as separate pickups so that they Player doesn't need to search their dead body for loot. It feels like adding UIS integration to a typical enemy NPC isn't useful in this context.

I realize there are specific situations where you might want to have an NPC with an inventory, such as a shopkeeper.

Thoughts?

 

[Sangemdoko]

That is completely up to you

if your enemy has only one weapon, with no necessary to switch weapons, pickup new weapons, etc... Then you don't really need the CharacterInventoryBridge.
Especially if the weapons you can pickup after killing the enemy is different from the one the enemies have. (in many games the weapon an enemy has has different stats from the one the player can equip for more control over balancing. so even though they may look the same visually they are not)

I hope that guides you in the right direction

 

[jkaczmar]

That is completely up to you

if your enemy has only one weapon, with no necessary to switch weapons, pickup new weapons, etc... Then you don't really need the CharacterInventoryBridge.
Especially if the weapons you can pickup after killing the enemy is different from the one the enemies have. (in many games the weapon an enemy has has different stats from the one the player can equip for more control over balancing. so even though they may look the same visually they are not)

I hope that guides you in the right direction

Yes, that's helpful. I was leaning towards not using inventory for that reason specifically. I kind of want my damage to be level and power calculated (two attributes on my NPC) rather than tying it to Inventory values for weapons. However, before I backed out my inventory mods to the NPCs I wanted to make sure I wasn't missing some other reason that I should leave it all enabled. I'm also using a spawner from SoulLink so not having the inventory on the NPC is helpful because I don't have to manage individual Inventory ID numbers for each NPC when they spawn. It was throwing an error for each NPC as they didn't have unique numbers. I figured out a way to work around it, but it's much easier to just not have to worry about it.

Thanks for the help!