Inventory System Plugin

Overview

The main challenge in creating the Inventory System plugin was figuring out how to generalize its usability such that it can be used in various types of inventory mechanics (grid-based, weight-based, limitless, etc.).

At the time of creating this plugin, I was only interested in making the plugin fit for my main project (see Project Bongo), which required the ability to:

limit the capacity of an inventory category
stack and lock items
track multiple instances of the same, non-stackable item

Testing the bare-bones functionality of the system, which includes three common attributes of a generic inventory item

Features and API

Common features of the plugin include, but not limited to:

Add/remove items to/from inventory, respectively
Extendable UI data for items
Save/load inventories and items synchronously and asynchronously
Interface for any UObject-derived classes that can be added to an inventory
Initialize inventories with preset items

Available nodes for the Inventory System plugin

Example Usage: Creature Archive

An example (albeit uncommon) usage was for Project Bongo, which needed a simple system that stores a collection of unlockable creatures.

Setup

(1) Define an item using the InventoryItemDefinition class

(2) Create a UObject-derived class that implements the InventoryItemInterface class, which has a method that returns the associated definition

(3) This is optional, but for the Creature Archive, I created an InventoryItemPreset object that stores the inventory items to add on inventory initialization

(4) Create an Inventory object

(5) Add an InventorySystemComponent to an Actor class, and then add the previously-created Inventory class to the component

Tools Unreal-Engine-5 CPP Blueprints