The Wallet Manager

Overview

The Wallet Manager is dedicated to the management of the currencies and their balance.
Contrary to the Inventory Manager, which manages item instances, the Wallet Manager doesn't create or destroy any object when adding or removing amounts. It just changes the balance of the related currency.

Wallet System vs Inventory System

What's the differnce

The Wallet Manager is designed for items that the player can collect plenty of.

You have two swords in your inventory, each having a different damage property value.

Swords are item instances in the Inventory Manager.

I have 1500 gold coins, and each coin doesn't have any individual property.

Gold coin is a currency of the Wallet Manager, with a balance of 1500.

Which one to choose?

While both the Wallet system and inventory manager can help you manage concepts of in-game resources and track the quantities for them, if you want to be able to track each instance of a given item at runtime (for example if all instances of an item can be re-arranged in the player bag), then define it as an inventory item so you can track the attributes of each instance separately at runtime.

On the other hand, if you only need to track the aggregated amount of a given resource, then defining them as currency will allow Game Foundation to handle these with more performance efficiency.

We will revise the user-facing name of these two systems in the near future to better distinguish the runtime behavior difference while removing the opinionate-ness of the use case of certain in-game resources (as money vs. generic items). In the meanwhile, use this to guide your implementatino decisions on which one to choose.

Initialization

The Wallet Manager is initialized with all the available currency types defined in the Catalog.

Only new players can benefit from the Initial Allocation of a currency. If a new currency is created between two sessions of an existing player, their balance will be 0 for this new currency.

API

The Wallet Manager comes with a basic set of expected methods to:

  • Get the balance of a currency.
  • Set the balance of a currency.
  • Adjust the balance by adding or removing an amount.