I’m having what feels like a really simple logic problem: I have a persistent data manager that curates information for each individual level, and when an area streams into memory it consults the data manager, gets a list of all the items and NPCs that it currently contains, and spawns them.
Since I’m trying to keep the data manager and the individual levels decoupled, the manager doesn’t know anything about the level- all it has is an ID for each level, and a corresponding set of lists that contain characters, items, and any other persistent content that needs to be spawned.
To actually place all this stuff in each level, I place individual Spawner prefabs in areas where it would make sense for a person to stand or item to drop, and when the level is initialized it takes the list of persistent content, iterates through its list of spawners, and instantiates one item of content on each spawner.
This works perfectly well, but because I spawn my content by iterating down a list, altering the list’s indexes changes where things are; if spawner 0 is a bench, and spawner 1 is a corner, picking up the loot from spawner 0 and then re-loading the room will cause whatever was located at spawner 1 to move to spawner 0.
The only way I’ve been able to think of to avoid this would be to couple my data to my geometry more directly, and instead of using spawner objects assign each persistent object’s struct a transform to spawn at. I’m hesitant to move in that direction because it’s less flexible, but I’m not seeing an awful lot of alternatives; am I headed in the right general direction?
