Game Foundation Tutorials

Adding static data with Static Properties

Creating catalog items is the first step towards describing the static data of your in-game items. With that, we have:

• a display name for our new resource type
• a key that we can use to reference that definition
• and optionally tag to help us manage resources with taxonomy

Next we need to describe the additional static data to make the item definition useful. For that, the static properties will allow you to define custom data schema for a given catalog item type.

Declare a property

Creating a property is easy, you simply need to:

• Create a valid key (alphanumeric characters with '-' and '_').
• Select the type of your property. Supported type are interger number (e.g. int & long), real number (e.g. float & double), bool and string.

For this tutorial, let's try add a description to the currency we created earlier.

Now you simply have to add the description of your choice.

Getting the property at runtime

Let's switch to the coding part now.
As a prerequisite step, please follow the initialization steps you can find in the inventory tutorial.

With your script created, go to the OnInitSucceeded method, and append the following code

void OnInitSucceeded()
{
    Debug.Log("Game Foundation is successfully initialized");

    // Use the key you've used in the currency tutorial.
    const string definitionKey = "myFirstCurrency";

    // The currencies are available in the currencyCatalog of the database.
    var catalog = GameFoundation.catalogs.currencyCatalog;

    // Finding a currency takes a non-null string parameter,
    // but it can fail to find the definition.
    var definition = catalog.FindItem(definitionKey);

    if (definition == null)
    {
        Debug.Log($"Definition {definitionKey} not found");
        return;
    }

    // Use the key you've just created in the editor.
    const string propertyKey = "description";

    // Since we know the property's type, we can directly get the property as a string.
    string description = definition.GetStaticProperty(propertyKey);

    // A safer way to get the property is by using TryGetStaticProperty to make sure the key is right.
    if (definition.TryGetStaticProperty(propertyKey, out Property descriptionProperty))
    {
        // To get the string value out of the retrieved property simply use the AsString method.
        description = descriptionProperty.AsString();
    }
    else
    {
        // The key couldn't be found, maybe we made a type in the editor or in this script.
        Debug.LogError($"Static property {propertyKey} not found");
        return;
    }

    Debug.Log($"Static property '{propertyKey}' found; value: '{description}'");
}

Compile and start your scene. You should see a new log entry:

! Static property 'description' found; value: 'This is the main currency of the game. You will earn it by performing different actions.'

Conclusion

That's it for the Static Properties. As you could see they are useful to store additional data in your catalog items.

There is another way to store static data for catalog items for pre-defined structural data, which we will cover in the next tutorial.

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