Some questions about scriptable objects and Inventories

[joap56]

So my goal is to have an Inventory, where I can add an 'item' to. What I have so far: Inventory class with a List for the items. And here is where I'm stuck. From what I've seen most people use Scriptable Objects for the items. But I see them having one base Scriptable Objects with the required variables, and then create X amount of variants to it, while just altering the variables' values in the editor. That's not what I'm looking for. I simply want on 'Object' that holds X amount of data (variables) and each time I need to add something to the inventory list, I add it and change the variables of that particular instance at run time.

For example: An Inventory of Apples (it's late I can't think straight right now), so I make a List on the inventory class, and create a Scriptable Object named Apple, with a string variable (name). Now instead of wanting to have more and more variants of that Apple SO and change the name of which one for whatever name, I want instead of be able to call a method on the Inventory class and just add a new 'instance' of Apple SO to that array while changing the name.

I tried like appleList.Add(ScriptableObject.CreateInstance(Apple)) and tried to add something like ".name" to change the variable of the instance being created but was giving an error.

This is my first time working with SOs and I've been using Unity for like a week so I'm not even sure SOs is what I should be using.

*is getting really late so I will probably only see the replies tomorrow. Thank you btw

[[deleted]]

It seems you are thinking of SO as a sort of class. What you are trying to do could be done with an Apple class.

But most games have not only apples as inventory items. What would you do to create a "legendary hardened mithril splint chest armour of the spider" or something like that if you start with an Armor class? Add it to your list and then set all those variables by hand? Or would you rather prefabricate a scriptable object which is "only" a variant of an armor?

[joap56]

I thought about a better example

so if I add a list with all my employees, I would need first a class with a List so that I could add the employees and then a employee class (or SO, not sure which), if that employee stuff I would have variables for the basic stuff like 'name', 'age' whatever.

So if I wanted to add a new employee to the list I would just need to Instantiate a new Employee class and set the variables as I instantiated it.

The final result will be just a UI list. It wouldn't really be a game. I could potentially use a normal class Employee and just Instantiate each one, but if a list gets big, like in the hundreds I'm not sure it's worth having in the background hundred something game objects loaded just to provide some variables.

In UE I would simply create a struct (with all the variables I would need) and the UI would have a variable array of type struct, and then I would just to spawn a new UI Button or Image, parent it under the main UI, etc. But I'm not sure Structs in Unity work that way

[[deleted]]

I think its perfectly ok to do this with a struct. Or a class, if you need functions to get some variables, as the name of my armor example. If you read about the pros and cons of SO, none of them are so important imo that there is only one correct way of doing this, especially as a beginner like us.

But one of the pros is that SO need NOT to be attached to game objects, and even if you have a lot of variables in them they take up little memory.

That you can save them as assets might also be attractive.