What is the preferred method of customising NPCs in C#?

Archived Forums Questions & Answers
1

I have an NPC C# class script. Ideally I want to have an NPC prefab, and have the ability to add custom dialogue via the inspector. As far as I can gather, there is no way to have ArrayLists or Hashtables exposed via the inspector - so that's not an option.

I don't really want to have to require a customised version of the script for each NPC as the only part of the script that would change per NPC would be the dialogue. I could write a dialogue script for each NPC, and then turn the current NPC script into a Controller-style script attached to a random gameobject and use that to process the dialogue on request, but again that's not really the 'clean' method I was looking for.

So the question would be, how can I apply instance variables for an NPC class without having to write a specific script for each instance?

3

Is there a reason why you cant use List or an array of string? These work fine in the inspector.

Here is an example using List:

...
using System.Collections.Generic;
...

class MyNPC : MonoBehaviour
{
  public List<string> dialogue;
  ...
}
2

Have you considered using configuration files, that contain the instance specific data (e.g. as XML) and make the name of the config file configurable via the inspector?

4

Kudo's to Mr. Tulleken for the List info, but I've decided that I'm going to go down the custom inspector route for these NPC objects as while having lists is cool, I really need nested hashtables inside the lists, and so I'm going to have to build them with a lot of drawing GUI group loops..

http://answers.unity3d.com/questions/4238/how-can-i-make-a-custom-inspector-for-this-object-in-c - If anyone fancies fleshing this answer out a bit, that'd be hugely useful..