Hindsight is 20/20

During this week I did my best to add a single feature that is necessary for carrying items between levels.

TLDR:

Due to the way we went about building the world and items inhabiting it, there was no easy way to do this task. The only way to do it would require much more time than I had available, before the end of this month. While I would like to build it I would want to scrap most of the work I had done before to rebuild it.

Longer story:

The easiest way to keep items between levels would be to keep the player loaded in the persistent world then stream the level in. The largest blocker on this is past me. I wrote the dungeon generation in a hurry so that I could get a much testing time as possible to ensure there were no major flaws. However that system does have one major flaw in that the only way to regenerate the dungeon is to open a new level. This introduces an issue where you need to open a level to generate the dungeon which cannot be directly translated into level streaming. If I had the ability to time travel I would want to jump back to when I started building the system to use dynamic level streaming instead of standard level streaming. (A quick rundown of the difference between those. Dynamic loads the level into the world and by default creates a unique instance of it. The way I'm doing technically isn't level streaming as the level is already loaded in when the primary level is loaded then I create a unique instance of it to place in the world.) Alongside that I might not even use level streaming as that also introduces an issue where the rooms have to all be the same size and spaced the same distance away. A better way would be to use actors where the doors acted as anchor points and I linked them together when the player wanted to travel from one room to the next. Overall this experience reminds me of my midterm project where we decided way too late to tackle carrying items or data between levels which was a terrible idea as we barely had enough time and I am running into the same problem with this project.