Open world items.

ZooGamingNZ

Hey team we are creating an open world system so to speak.

The player can move back and forth between levels collecting points to complete the game.

This would be as the player exits one area and then re enters that same area all previously collected items are gone.

I can set this up a number of ways telling the actor to shift off screen or be destroyed.

What I am after is the best approach to saving and loading states after a re set of the game eliminating already collected items from the game.

Sum up
Pick item up and eliminate it from game even after exiting and re starting.

Is this done with tables? I currently know very little about them. Lets say we are looking at using 100 collectible items what would be the best approach outside of setting up a large amount of save and loads?

Cheers

Moik

I'm not sure about the best approach, but tables are capable of doing what you need (storing information which changes between plays, across all plays even if the app was closed and restarts).

As for save and load, grabbing or inserting the data to and from the table is done basically with Change Attribute using the various tableCell, tableCol options under the Function tab in the variable-picker. It's as quick/simple as any grab of a scene or game variable using Change Attribute. The player won't notice a performance issue.

Like, for doing what you're saying, I would just make a Collectible table with one Boolean column, then have each collectible actor reference a specific row/column cell to find its own "Am I available state?" if True, be Visible. If False, be Not Visible. Then you can just add a Is Visible rule to whatever collection rules you have. They player will only be able to collect the item on the first encounter. If you don't have anything that sets the value for Visible back to True, it won't become collectible again.