Getting Started with AGS - Part 5
Managing Inventory
Each character in the game can carry their own set of inventory items.
Inventory items are totally separate from room objects, and you must
explicitly set up every item which the player can carry at some point in
the game.
Go to the "Inventory items" node in the project tree. We visited this briefly in
part 4, but it's time to go into a bit more detail.

The inventory editor, another look
Every inventory item that the player can carry at some point during
the game is listed in the project tree. All the items there also have a
number beside them - this is the inventory item ID, which is largely for
backwards compatibility with older versions of AGS.
To edit an inventory item, double-click it in the project
tree, and a new window will open up with the item's properties in the
property grid. If you want the player character to start off carrying the selected
item, set the "PlayerStartsWithItem" option to True. Remember, if you
want to change which image is used for the item, select the "Image"
property and click the "..." button.
Now, you may have noticed that once the player had picked up the key in
our game, they could see it in their inventory window but not actually do
anything to it - clicking Look or Use on the item did nothing.
In order to give the inventory
item some interactivity, we once again need to call on the Events List.
Click the "Events" (lightning) button to bring it up:

The events list... this time for inventory
Now, the important point to note here is that if you are using the
built-in inventory window (which we are), the only events which can occur
are "Look at inventory item" and "Use inventory on this
item". This is because the default inventory window only has Look and
Select options. The other modes are all available if you design your own
inventory GUI (but that's quite complex so we'll leave it for later).
So, select the "Look at inventory item" event, and click the
"..." button. You'll be taken to the script editor once more, but this
time you'll notice that there's already some existing script as well as
our new method:

Script for looking at the key
We are now editing the global script.
This has all the script for handling events on game-wide things like
inventory items and characters. Previously we were working with hotspots
and objects, so they were confined to their own room script.
Anyway, for now I've just added a simple Display command to
show the player a message when they look at the key. Feel free to do
something similar.
Inventory item hotspots
By default, when the player selects an inventory item as their mouse
cursor and clicks on the screen with it, the centre of the item will be
used to decide what to activate. However, with some items you may well not
want this behaviour - for example, we might want the end of our key to be
the activation spot. To set the cursor hotspot, simply click on the spot within the
image. You should see a crosshair appear where you clicked. The
"Draw crosshair" option, if activated,
will draw a spot on this part of the item in-game so that the player can
easily tell which bit of the cursor is active. You can set the inner
and outer colours for the crosshair. Recap
Go to part 6:
Using your own graphics
Tutorial last updated 17 August 2007. Copyright (c) 2001-2007
Chris Jones.
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