UIS as difficult as it seems?

[Flibble]

Hi all,
First off, I'd like say that UIS does look awesome, it's obviously well coded and has lots of love and LOTS of functionality so don't get me wrong here

Is this thing as difficult as it seems to get the hang of? I've previously used a couple of other inventory assets, now sadly deprecated and within a day or two I've had what I need up and running for the most part, even Inventory Pro which was fairly comprehensive and not exactly new-user friendly.
I'm struggling to get things working here as I find it really hard to follow the inner workings (I'd say I'm an intermediate coder just about).
I do struggle with taking in tutorials which doesn't help but always seem to get stumped on something that's obviously a simple fix if you know what you're doing but spend days hunting through endless hierarchy/string ID's/slotSets/itemSlotSets/itemViews/viewSlots/etc etc.
My need was a shared Inventory shared by an (RPG) party of four characters but who each have their own Hotbar and Equipment.
Would this seem fairly simple to set up and I'm just not "getting it" yet, or will it be a pain to set up and I should abandon ship now (with no hard feelings)?
Thanks!

 

[Sangemdoko]

Hi Fibble,

I'm sorry to hear you are struggling with UIS. It is massive and does have a steep learning curve. Sometimes systems just click with some people and not with others, it's a question of having a similar way of thinking. There0s never a single way of making something work, there are always infinite ways to approach these sort of big systems. So it's a good thing you contact us here when you get stuck rather than spending hours trying to figure something on your own.

In your case, you say you want to have a single Inventory and multiple characters. (fun annecdote that's how UIS started in the early prototypes).

One of the first thing to figure out is if you plan to show multiple character Hotbar/equipment windows at the same time. or if it will be a single UI and you switch which character info is being displayed.

For the Inventory, you'll want an ItemCollection for each Equipment and for each Hotbar, So that's 8 ItemCollections, and I assume you'll also want a shared bag so that means at the very least 9 itemCollection.
Actually for the Hotbar it depends if the hotbar items are shared or not. Meaning if you have 5 potions in your bag and Characer A and B set a potion in there hotbar does it point to the shared 5 potions, or do they split the potions in chunks such that one character can run out while the other still has some?
In the case of shared, then you won't want 4 hotbar itemCollections, instead you'll want the ItemHotbar to point to an Item in the bag (or a seperate itemCollection for all hotbar items).

I hope so far it makes sense.
I think it's always best to start small and build up to what you need. So start with 2 characters and then once that works go to 4.

Best of luck