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Hey Folks, Alrighty, done some updates. They ended up being more world modifications than actual action bar updates. The next steps though are pretty clear once I recover a bit more. We will hook up a simple inventory that reads our current items. When you pick up an item this will inform the game to add the item to your inventory. Upon doing this it'll check your action bars for an empty slot. If there is a slot it will place a reference to that item in that slot. Otherwise nothing happens. Then following that, we'll want to have it so when you are in your inventory. If you left (right?) click on an item, or perhaps some other key we'll see, when you use that key it will assign the item to that spot on your action bar. If that ends up not being annoying we'll stick with that for the time being.

Hey Folks, So I slightly recovered from the work week. Only a bit. But here we are! It isn't pretty but I've got the start of our action bar setup. The fields update when you press one of the keys, through the magic of events. Next I need to setup it actually showing the items you have in each spot. Probably have item pickups fill in the first open space. That's all I have for tonight though. Take care of yourselves!   actiontime.webm    

Today I think is an important time to just take a step back. Only for the day, work has been extremely rough these past few days and I'm officially out of steam. But when we come back, tomorrow I'll whip together a simple GUI to test our our action bars and throw up an image or two maybe, if the day is kind.   Take care of yourselves and thanks for the random visit, internet strangers.

It will eventually be mappable but the action bar support is added to the new unity input system. For now it defaults to 1 through = on your keyboard, but we'll eventually add in support for things like shoulder buttons on a controller. There is now an event setup that will inform all listening systems that the player has pressed one of these keys.   Tomorrow I'll be hooking up a simple UI of some kind to alternate between these. What I haven't determined yet is how we will represent our items on the action bar. I'm not sure if they will have unique 2D art made for them or not. Heck, there is nothing stopping us from making our items in the scene 2D as well, perhaps doing the ole cross cut style of "3D" 2D art.   I'll give you an example of this tomorrow.

I've added a new data collection to the player data. We've now got 12 slots available for an action bar. These are IDs that would match up with items in our item catalog. So now, lets think about how the interaction will work for the next code pass tomorrow.   First I'll just set the keys by hand to match a few of the items we support. Then we'll hook up the input tracking for 1-12. If you press one of these items then we'll print out the item in that slot. I also need to add an integer to the player data that tracks the "current" item. Have it default to 0, but otherwise it'll be whichever number you pressed last. Just added that before I forget.   So you press a key, we set the "current" item, then we need to pass this information to some kind of processor. Perhaps that's what we'll call this as opposed to a Handler. I suppose its really just two words for the same thing. But I kind of feel like Handler's are monobehaviors and I would like a ScriptableObject to take care of this.   That object will reside on the input controller because that's where we get all of our input information. Then pipe in the index to the "Select item" function.   The SO will hold an artifact reference to the player and the item catalog. In this way it can set and get the index that was chosen on the player for saving and loading. It can also cross reference the GUID stored in that spot with the catalog to get all the item data.   From there I need to raise an event for Holding a particular item. I'm not sure what kind of class will handle this yet, but it will be dedicated to the player holding items to use for interactions.   Now that I think about it...our game actions on items will be really useful for this. I can have items do various things like heal, water plants, or so on. Nice! I'm glad when past me is looking out for future me. I think this is sufficient guidance for tomorrow.