UDK Inventory display code
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Simple Inventory Screen in UnrealScript

I don't like learning extra languages unneccessarily; I'm rather a minimalist. So, rather than spend time and diskspace learning ScaleForm for UDK GUIs, I decided to see if I could write a general-purpose inventory class.
Yup, I can!

It's rather plain and ugly; I'm no GUI artist. But hey, take the source and make it all pretty yourself!

Why would you want this?

Lets say you were planning on something that used a LOT of items. You need a flexible inventory display for it, but for whatever reason, you dont want to use scaleform. This code can give you a small, easy to understand (or at least easier than trying to make it yourself) base to start from, and also possibly help new UnrealScript programmers (like myself!) understand the overall UDK Game layout better.

For one thing, it might help explain a little bit of how the HUD works.

The HUD gets redrawn for Every Frame! So, complex activities are not going to fly. What I do, is render the player's inventory to a standby Texture, and then just blast the Texture to screen.

At this point, I have spent many days just finding out if some of the tricks I used were even possible!

Using it

There are some helpful hints in the comments at the top of the main class. You DO have to know the basics of getting started in UnrealScript first though. Things like:
How to compile stuff. How to get your own Gametype loaded.

BUGS:

  1. The "error", is because it doesnt know what to do about PhysicsGun in inventory yet.
  2. The PlayerController.DrawHUD() code might better belong in a subclass of HUD. But that would make this demo longer than desirable.

What it does

Right now, you should be able to use your arrow keys to move the highlight around over objects in your inventory, if you get it loaded properly, and use or integrate my PlayerController code, below.

You can also get the currently highlighted item, via M5InvDisplay.CursorInventoryIndex(). So with only a small bit of extra work, you can then code your own hooks in PlayerController, for keypresses to drop, or use, items of your choice.

I havent figured out how to render a mesh to a texture yet. So, M5InvDisplay compromises for how to display an item.
First, it looks up the name of the mesh attached to the Inventory item. Next, it looks in preconfigured places (IconBasePath, TextureBasePath) for resources with a similar name. It uses the first match it finds.

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Written by:Philip Brown
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