The Inventory Manager

Overview

The Inventory Manager is a central piece of the Game Foundation architecture. It creates and destroys item instances.

Main inventory example
Example: the main inventory contains characters, hats, bonuses, and themes.

Creating/Removing items

In order to create an item, the Inventory Manager requires an Inventory Item Definition. This definition can be found in the Catalog and passed to the CreateItem() method, or specified with its Key.

When created, an item is assigned a unique identifier (ID), and its properties are initialized with their default values.

Getting items

The Inventory Manager provides some methods to retrieve items, or find specific items by their ID, their definition or their tags

Some of the methods allocate an array to return the collection of items found. You'll also find a non-allocating version of those methods, accepting a target collection.

Removing items

To remove items, the Inventory Manager exposes various methods:

  • Removing one item by passing its reference.
  • Removing one item by passing its ID.
  • Removing items by their definition.
  • Removing all the items.

Removing items from the Inventory Manager doesn't destroy the item object in memory. It wouldn't be an expected behaviour for a managed language like C#. Instead, the items are discarded: they are removed from the data layer and they cannot be part of any process, but their ID, display name and definition remain accessible.