Polity Manager - Manage Factions & Formations

Pride leads to destruction, and arrogance to downfall. - DoodleBob

• Description
• Quickstart
  • Video Tutorial
• Public APIs
  • Polity.Manager
    • ChangeRelation()
    • CheckRelation()
    • SerializeRelationMatrix()
    • DeserializeRelationMatrix()
    • RandomFactionIndex()
    • Events
      • OnRelationChange
    • Context Menus
      • Reset Relation Matrix
      • Load Relation Matrix
  • Polity.Faction
    • Set()
    • Events
      • OnNameChange
  • Polity.Leader
    • TransferLeader()
    • AddMember()
    • RemoveMember()
• Credits

Description

Polity Manager is an editor based tool designed to manage relations between polities.

The PolityManager singleton (PM) contains a Faction Relation Matrix, a matrix table that displays the relation of one polity to another based on their position, similar to the Unity physics collision matrix.

The Red Team is neutral to the Blue Team and allied to the Empire, but the Blue Team are enemies to the Empire and allied to the Shogunate.

To retrieve these factions from an object, you can attach the Polity.Member monobehaviour or have a class implement the IMember interface (the latter is recommended). This will provide you with a dropdown field listing all the factions that you have created in the Manager.

These utilizes the Faction class which is the main way GameObjects can communicate with Polity Manager. You can utilize this class to build your own classes with this as a field.

Introduced in 3.0.0. The Leader class can be used to group related IMember together and organize them in a Formation. The method for which it gets members is up to you to implement.

Polity Manager is suited for games that needs to manage various groups of NPCs, especially when these relationships are a bit more complex, such as when one NPC needs to react to an enemy of one or more allied NPCs. However, it can also be applicable to simple teams.

It is also designed to be very bare bones so that you can modify it more easily to suit your game's specific needs. It's less of a all encompassing solution and more of a framework.

Quickstart

Video Tutorial

This should demonstrate a very basic implementation of how the PolityManager can control NavMeshAgents with a PolityMember that can react to relationship changes based on their current polity.

You can open the PolityNPC.cs class inside of Example/Scripts to get a better idea of how the class subscribes to events and how it calls public PolityManager methods.

Public APIs

All classes in this package is under the Polity namespace.

Polity.Manager

All public methods can be called from this PolityManager Singleton, referenced as PM, for example PM.ModifyPolityRelation();

ChangeRelation()

Sets a new relationship status between two polities based on their names, adjusting their relation to either Neutral, Allies, or Enemies. If the polities matched, the OnRelationChange event will be invoked to notify all subscribers of the relation change.

Parameter	Type	Description
polityMember	PolityMember	The member of the polity initiating the relationship change.
theirPolityName	string	The name of the polity that is targeted for the relationship change, retrieved from polityName in PolityMember.
factionRelation	Polity.Relation	The new relation to set; can be Neutral, Allies, or Enemies.

CheckRelation()

Compares the PolityRelation of the polityName to the second polityName and returns the enum that indicates their PolityRelation if found. The overload method replaces the PolityMember parameters as strings representing the polityName.

Parameter	Type	Description
polityMember	PolityMember	The member of the polity initiating the relationship comparison.
theirPolityMember	PolityMember	The name of the polity that is targeted for comparison, retrieved from polityName in PolityMember.

Returns The Polity.Relation enum value, which can be Neutral, Allies or Enemies.

SerializeRelationMatrix()

Serializes the PolityRelation[,] matrix and sets the serialized polityRelationMatrixString to its return value.

Parameter	Type	Description
RelationMatrix	Polity.Relation[,]	The 2D PolityRelation matrix. This can be omitted which will use the Singleton's RelationMatrix.

Returns The string of that serialized matrix.

DeserializeRelationMatrix()

Deserializes a string representing the PolityRelation[,] matrix.

Parameter	Type	Description
json	string	This can be omitted which will then use the Singleton's relationMatrixString.

Returns The Polity.Relation[,] matrix which was deserialized from the string.

RandomFactionIndex()

Returns A random index within the Polity Manager's factions.

Events

OnRelationChange

Invoked whenever 2 factions change their Relation.

Context Menus

Reset Relation Matrix

Reset every relation to Neutral.

Load Relation Matrix

If in some case the serialized polity relation matrix did not load, this can manually deserialize & load it.

Polity.Faction

Set()

Sets a new name for the faction. Can be an int representing the index of the faction in the Polity Manager, or a string of that faction name, as long as one exists.

Parameter	Type	Description
factionIndex or factionName	int or string

Events

OnNameChange

Invoked whenever the Name property of Faction is changed

Polity.Leader

TransferLeader()

Finds the nearest IMember from the members list and assigns it as the new leader, transferring all its members to it as well. If a Leader parameter is given, then it will be transferred to that Leader.

Parameter	Type	Description
none or newLeader	Leader	Sets the new leader for the current Leader. Called automatically when the leader is destroyed.

AddMember()

Adds a member to the leader members list.

Parameter	Type	Description
member (optional: overrideFaction)	IMember (optional: bool)	Can use the enforceFaction bool to ensure that the member has a matching faction before being added, otherwise it will just override its faction to the one the leader has and add it.

RemoveMember()

Removes a member from the leader members list.

Parameter	Type	Description
member	IMember

Credits

PBR Sand054 texture ambientcg.com - CC0 License

Polity Manager was developed by Khiem Luong (github.com/khiemgluong)