Item Data Architecture v2

Hi!

I decided to quickly cover some technical aspects of the development and updates that I'm implementing to the current item architecture.

Usually video games that handle large database of items, the actual items are only data containers which contain item information like name, weight, rarity and so on. This basic data container (in Road to Vostok it's called ItemData) approach is really common and useful but it's problematic once the item database gets larger (like in Road to Vostok now).

The problem with this basic approach is that if you only have one high-level data container like ItemData, it's good for all the basics stuff like item details, but whenever you start adding lots of "special" items to the game like attachments, medicals and so on the high-level data container gets really flooded with all the little details from those special items as well. This also becomes quite unpractical because if you store for example medical data on that high-level ItemData, then there's unnecessary information for multiple other items like consumables because they don't have any medical properties to them.

The solution (also quite common one) to this issue is to have "subdata" for different kind of item types that inherit the main high-level item data but have their unique properties that is accessible only through those specific item types.

I have now implemented this exact architecture where there's one high-level item data container ItemData and then support for multiple subdata's for each item type.

The main subdata sets in Road to Vostok are currently:
AttachmentData
MedicalData
ConsumableData
EquipmentData
AmmunitionData

This won't be visible to the player in any way but this new data structure helps will help multiple aspects of the development and it was kind of must-have for Public Demo 2 since there will be all kinds of usable items, multipliers and character stats.

ps. This was also one of the reasons why I didn't include lootable items in that Public Demo 1 v2, because I wanted to rework this architecture first. Otherwise it would have required features that would now already be obsolete with this new item architecture.

- Antti (Developer)