Adding the component and containers


  1. There are two components, one is the C++ parent and the other is the blueprint child of the C++ component. There is nothing stopping you from making your own BP component with the C++ component as its parent but I still recommend using the Blueprint component. You can also make a blueprint child of the blueprint component, which is the recommended path if you are going to override any functions. You want to add your component to your actor, if you're making an item, I suggest using BP_ItemActor as its parent and the component will automatically get added. Do note though that the item Data Asset only accepts children of BP_ItemActor. Go here if you want to change this behavior

  2. Inside the component you'll find an array called ContainerSettings. These are your settings and where you'll add any items to the container. It is most common to give them a unique name, which you'll later use in the next step to assign them to a container widget. You will also need to set what kind of type this container is inside InventoryType and give the component a widget inside WidgetClass which it'll use to display its containers. Typically for player characters, this is the inventory screen. The order of these containers are important. There are many functions that try and find the first available container, which scans the containers from index 0 to the last index.

  3. Now you'll need to bind your containers to a widget to represent the container. This is optional, there are cases where you might not want a container to have a widget representation. Though the player will not have a widget to interact with the container through. Go into your widget and add a child of WBP_Container to your layout. The plugin comes with a widget called WBP_DemoContainer which has all the visuals set up for you. Then go into your graph and implement the I_InventoryWidgets interface. Find the GetContainers interface function and make an array and add your containers. Somewhere throughout your logic you will need to call BindContainerWithWidget, you can see an example on how I call this function inside BP_Interactable or BP_ThirdPersonCharacter.

  4. The actor must implement the I_Inventory interface and override the GetInventoryComponent function and pass in a reference to the inventory component.

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