I have a design question about the situation where we have many identical objects that can be individually manipulated by the story player.
For sake of the discussion, let’s assume we have a crate with 500 pebbles. The player may take a pebble from the crate, carry it with him, write on it with a pen, drop it somewhere, etc. We don’t know beforehand how many pebbles he will take, it could be 0, 1, 10, whatever, and what he will do with them. Modeling 500 separate pebble objects seems not like a feasible approach.
Without refering to a particular authoring system, what are in general good ways to model this? Should the authoring system have facilities for dynamic object creation (during playtime). Whenever the player wants to take a pebble from the crate, create a new pebble object? This would require specific functionality in the authoring system.
Or could it be modeled using one ‘500-pebbles’ object with a counter and a list of locations? Or are there yet other ways…
I’m looking for suggestions on how to handle such multiple identical object situations in an authoring system.
Thanks for reading…