InventorySystem

An advanced Drag ‘n Drop inventory system

Documentation
We’re working on making InventorySystem even easier!
A HowToCompute Publication
Table of Contents

Table of Contents 1

Getting Up And Running 2

Testing! 9

Controls 11

Common Errors: 11

Adding your own items! 11

Customizing the UI 12

Using the crafting functionality 13

Using the Chest functionality 15

Troubleshooting Tips 17
I added an item/recipe, but it isn’t showing up! 17
How do I remove my save file / reload InventorySystem? 17
Still having issues? 17

Conclusion 17

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Getting Up And Running

A quick note before we get started - we’re currently working on improving the
documentation and making it even easier for you to get started with InventorySystem.
Our apologies for the inconvenience, and we hope you will enjoy using InventorySystem.

Start by adding InventorySystem to your project. After you have purchased

InventorySystem from the unreal engine marketplace, it will end up in your vault. So
open up the epic games launcher, go to the unreal engine tab, Library and if you scroll to
the bottom, there is a tab named vault. Find Inventory System and click on Add To
Project.

Follow the prompts to create your InventorySystem project. Once you’ve created it, open
it up, and play around with it a bit. Feel free to build your project using this sample, and
if you want to move it over to your own project, please follow the steps below:

1. Set up Input on your own project

For InventorySystem to function properly, please open up the input settings of your own
project (go to Edit > Project Settings > Input (under the Engine section). Now press
Import, and browse to <WhereverInventorySystemIs>/Config/InventorySystemInput, and
open whatever version you want (one only has the inventory, and the other one has the
full project).

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2. Migrate InventorySystem over to your own project

To move over all of the files to your own project, open the InventorySystem project, and
go into the content browser, and press “Content”. You should now see the
InventorySystem folder. Now right-click this folder, and press the migrate button, as
shown below:

Press OK on the Asset Report dialog, and then browse to your new project’s Content

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Folder. Now press the Select Folder dialog, and the content should move over. Please
note that this may take a while, and may fail if you still have your other project open.

Now open up your new project, and follow along with the below instructions for using it
with your own project.

Now in your content browser, you should have the InventorySystem file, if not be sure
you are not in a subfolder!

So the first thing that you will want to do is add an InventoryManager component to
your PlayerState. For this open up your playerstate and add an “Inventory Manager
Component”. (AddComponent, and go through the list)

Once you have added that hit Compile and Save.

Now head over to InventorySystem > Blueprints > InventoryFunctionLib (blueprint file).
And find the cast node.

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Delete the highlighted, and drag out of the playerstate. Type in cast to <your playerstate>.
Then drag out of that and type in “get Inventory Manager Component” and press the one
under variables > default. Now connect the output of that to the return node, and take
the execution pin from “Get Inventory Manager” to the cast node. Now connect the
execution pin without text to the return node, and the one with text to the Print String.

In the end you should end up with something like the following (MyCoolPlayerstate being
the name of your playerstate):

Now head over to InventorySystem > Example Project > InventorySystemCharacter. Head
over to the “Inventory System code” part. Now head back to your content browser (don’t
close this tab! Just minimize it) and open up your character (in my case the 3rd person
character). If your character doesn’t yet have a begin play event, add an “Event
BeginPlay” node. Now find the Variables tab on your left and press the +.

Name it “InventoryManager”. Be sure to spell this name correctly, or stuff will go wrong!

Give it the type “Inventory Manager Component” by Pressing the existing Variable Type
(probably Boolean), typing in “Inventory Manager Component”, clicking it and pressing

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reference. Be sure to quickly compile and save.

Head back to the InventorySystemCharacter and copy the below selected code.

Now go back into your character, and paste this right after begin play (to avoid the case
in which it would not be called!). Be sure to connect the input from begin play to the Get
Inventory Manager node. Don’t forget to connect the output from the SET node to the
rest of your own BeginPlay code.

Now create a new variable of type Boolean and the name “IsBeingControlled?”. Copy the
following piece of code over to all of your input functions (unless you already have a
system for losing control in place, in which case you will need to modify later code). In
the case that the checkbox is not check, please check it or you won’t have any control
over your character!

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You should end up with code like this:

[explanation] Before your character can move or do anything it will check if it is being
controlled, this allows the system to not let the user look around etc when they have
their inventory open.

And now for the easiest part! Find the piece of code that toggles the inventory in the
InventorySystemCharacter.

Copy that and paste it in a free spot of your own character.

If you’d like to enable crafting, also make sure you copy the following snippet of code
that toggles the crafting display.

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For chests, there’s some ray-tracing involved. This means the code will be a little more
complicated, thus we have included two screenshots to help you out. Please ensure you
copy the “InputAction OpenChest” event, as can be seen below

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You may need to replace the “InputAction OpenChest” node with A. a custom input
action, or B. a hard-coded key, like “C”.

For the HotBar to function, we’ll need head over to the “HotbarControls” graph.
Depending on your editor, the “Graphs” selection will likely be on the left, right under
the “Add New” button. Double-click the “HotbarControls” item here.

Now make sure you new character has a secondary event graph
for the hotbar controls too (press the “+” sign on your graph), and
then copy all of the nodes in the example character’s graph over.
This will enable your character to switch between the slots in your
hotbar using they scrollwheel and/or number keys.

Compile and Save your character and we are ready to test!

Testing!

Now fire up one of your maps with your just edited character in it. When you press play
you should see something like the following:

Now press E and you should get something like:

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This means the basics work! Now let’s try and add/remove some items!

Let’s place a few pickups by going to InventorySystem > Mysc and dragging a few
“Pickup”s into the scene.

Now you can adjust the pickup’s settings, change the item and the amount. I’d personally
recommend making 2 of them apples, and 2 of them burgers. I’d also make at least one
less than 0 to test if removing items works. Now pick up items and drag them around in
your inventory and move them to your hotbar. Try dropping a few and picking them up.
(see the below article on controls).

If everything worked as expected, congratulations, you have successfully ported

InventorySystem to your project!

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Controls

Use E to open/close your inventory.

Use I to open/close the crafting display.

Use O to open/close a chest.

Use keys 1-9 or your scrollwheel to select hotbar slots.

Use Q to drop an item, use CTRL+Q to drop all the items that are remaining in the
selected slot.

Common Errors:

I get the error: “Cast to playerstate failed, please check InventoryFunctionLib”!

This means that it could not cast the current PlayerState to whichever cast node you specified. This is most
commonly caused by setting the incorrect playerstate. Head over to your gamemode, and set the correct one.
Did that not work? Check if you are overriding the playerstate in your world settings!

Adding your own items!

Adding items is easy!

First open up the EItems enum (in InventorySystem > Enums). Now Press the new button
on the top right. Add as many as you want, giving them sensible names.

Now open up the Items datatable (in InventorySystem > Datatables). For each item press
the + in the row editor. The current version of the system counts on the fact that you
have ordered your enums and your datatable the same. So first of all give your row the
name: previous row+1 (so if the last item had the rowname 2, this one will be 3). Now
populate it with the wanted data. Category, SubCategory and DroppedItemMaterial are
optional, tho setting a material is strongly recommended! You MUST also set the “Item”
to your newly created Enum for this to work. Your row should look something like the
following:

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Now place a pickup in the your scene of choice, and set
it’s item to your newly created object. Now pick it up
and see if it works as intended! Have you already
downloaded the bonus assets? Click here.

Customizing the UI

If you head over to the UMG folder (Inventory System > UMG). For
most of the widgets (atleast the ones that contain amounts) if you
head to the graph, you can set the amount’s color in the
ItemAmmountText_Color variable!

Another easy way to customize the look of InventorySystem, is changing the way your
slots look. You can do this by heading into InventorySystem > UMG, and opening up any
of the WBP_XXXSlot blueprints. Once in here, make sure you’re on the designer tab, and
update the “SlotImage” brush, as can be seen below:

There’s one exception to the above method though - and that’s the WBP_HotbarSlot

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widget! This widget can have two states, a selected state, and a deselected state. We
recommend that you use two different images for these slots, since that will make it a lot
easier for the user to distinguish between a selected slot and the other slots.

To update these images, open the widget, then press the Graph tab, and ensure you are
on the “Event Graph” tab. Now find the “Event Tick” node, and update the textures for
the True and False pins. The “True” pin will contain the selected slot texture (4.1), and
the “False” pin the deselected slot (4.2). See the image below:

Even more UI customization is possible, but not officially supported. Please stay tuned
for future updates to feature more exposed variables to change the color of the slots etc!

Using the crafting functionality

InventorySystem has a crafting system built into it! Crafting is enabled by default, and
can be disabled by unchecking the checkbox “Is Crafting Enabled?” checkbox in the
InventoryManager component.

The first step to using the crafting functionality

is adding your recipes. This is done by opening
up the DT_Crafting datatable (located in
InventorySystem/Datatables/DT_Crafting). To
add a recipe, press the + button in the row
editor, and give your row a name (don’t worry

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about what you call it, however, I would recommend using a descriptive name). Next,
use the dropdown to select the ItemToCraft (what the user should get if they use the
recipe). Now also change the AmmountYouGet to the number of items the user should
receive when crafting. Next press the plus for Ingredients, and expand the newly created
item by pressing the >. Change the item that is required, and the amount of it that is
required. NOTE: You should not have the same item in your recipe multiple times. Repeat
this procedure for any further ingredients you may want to add.

Once you’ve added the ingredients, you need to decide if the user can craft this right
away, or you want to wait with unlocking the recipe until the user has progressed in your
game. If you want the user to be able to craft it right away, then check the “Is Unlocked”
checkbox, otherwise, you can use the code below (updating the ItemToCraft parameter)
to unlock the recipe during runtime:

A final crafting recipe that is unlocked by default will look a lot like this:

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In order to start using this recipe, please remove your save file (see the troubleshooting
section for more information about this), and reopen the editor. You
should now be able to see your new recipe when pressing i in-game.
You can see the duck added to my crafting display below to the side.

Using the Chest functionality

InventorySystem’s latest update contains chest functionality! Please note that you will be
required to use Unreal Engine 4.19 or later, and the latest version of InventorySystem for
this to work (at the time of writing).

To get started with adding chests to your game, create a new

blueprint class. Now Use the All Classes part to select
BP_StorageChest as your parent class.

Now that you’ve created your chest blueprint, open it up. You
easily change parameters like the default number or rows/columns,
and the mesh now. To edit the number of
rows/columns, edit the Rows and Row Size parameters under
default (as shown next to here).

To change the mesh, open the Default Root > StaticMesh

component, and update it’s static mesh value. You can now drag it into your level and

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start using it. To open a chest, move close to where you placed it, and press O. You need
to be looking at the chest for this to work, since it raycasts from the player’s character.
You can now drag anything from your hotbar, or if you open your inventory (using E),
your inventory into the chest, and it will handle saving/etc. automatically. If you’d like to
add custom behavior (like an opening/closing animation) to your chest, then please
override/use the “Event Close Chest Override Me” / “Event Open Chest Override Me”
events in your event graph. You can see an example that prints a message out when the
user opens/closes the chest below:

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Troubleshooting Tips

I’m sorry to hear you’re experiencing an issue using InventorySystem. I’ve compiled a
list of common issues, fixes, and things to try when experiencing an issue, with which I
hope to enable you to solve the issue as quickly as possible. Please note that the list of
common issues/fixes will grow over time.

I added an item/recipe, but it isn’t showing up!

This is likely caused by there still being an old(er) version of your unlocked recipes or
items in your save file. In order to fix this issue, please remove your save file (See the
below section).

How do I remove my save file / reload InventorySystem?

When experiencing issues with InventorySystem, the most likely cause is your save file
still containing old data after you’ve updated your datatables/settings. In order to fix this
issue, open up your operating system’s file browser, and navigate to your Unreal project.
Now head into Saved/SaveGames, and remove the “InventorySave.sav” file. You may
want to close your game/editor before doing this, and reopen it after.

Still having issues?

Now that InventorySystem has gone free, please use the below contact information:

For Further Support: Please report any issues to [email protected]

Multiplayer Footnote

If you’re having issues using Multiplayer, then please note that it is currently not
supported, and your mileage may vary. InventorySystem was designed with Singleplayer in
mind, and we did our best to make it as easy-to-use as possible for that scenario. Our
apologies for any inconvenience this may cause.

Conclusion

This will conclude the documentation of the InventorySystem, we hope you were able to
get started using InventorySystem, and can’t wait to see what you’ll create next!

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