Pool Mini-Boss

Pool Mini-Boss is like a mini Pool Boss. You can use it to temporarily add items and categories to Pool Boss. When you enable Pool Mini-Boss the items are added to the Pool Boss in the Scene, and they are removed when you disable Pool Mini-Boss. You can have any number of Pool Mini-Bosses in any Scene. This is useful when you don't want to create all items up front, or when you want to use per-character prefabs such as games where you select a character to play.

You create one by finding the PoolMiniBoss prefab in Assets/Plugins/DarkTonic/CoreGameKit/Prefabs and dragging it into your Scene. Then before the Inspector controls are visible, you will need to drag that game object into the Project View to make your own prefab.

Note: If you do use Addressables, it's a good idea to load any externally hosted Asset Bundle(s) containing your Addressables before Pool Mini-Boss needs them so you don't encounter potentially lengthy latency as the Bundles are downloaded prior to pooling. This will delay you being able to spawn anything. However, also note that Pool Mini-Boss will take care of automatically releasing Addressable memory when it's destroyed, unlike Pool Boss.

Here's what Pool Mini-Boss looks like with a couple Items.

 

The category and items sections work exactly the same as Pool Boss, so we won't rehash that here. The difference is that at runtime, the actual pool item clones are not created under Pool Mini-Boss but inside the Pool Boss in the Scene. Look for them there. Controls specific to Pool Mini-Boss are as follows:

  1. Auto-create Items: Checked by default. This means that when Pool Mini-Boss is enabled, the items and categories will automatically be created in Pool Boss. If you uncheck this, you would need to call the CreateItems method in Pool Mini-Boss with your own code at the appropriate time.
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  2. Auto-remove Items: Checked by default. This means that when Pool Mini-Boss is disabled (or destroyed), the items and categories will automatically be removed from Pool Boss, including despawning (or killing) all spawned items and releasing memory from any Addressables in your Pool Mini-Boss. If you uncheck this, you would need to call the RemoveItems method in Pool Mini-Boss with your own code at the appropriate time.
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  3. Remove Behavior Type: This controls what happens to spawned items when the Pool Mini-Boss removes its items from Pool Boss. There are two choices here: Despawn (the default) and Kill. Use caution with the Kill option, because if your Death Prefabs (part of Killable) are part of Pool Mini-Boss, you may not successfully despawn everything or release Addressable memory. Therefore, make sure your Death Prefabs are part of the permanent Pool Boss so this doesn't happen.
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  4. Initialize Time (Frames): This controls how many frames it takes to create all the items in Pool Boss. Default is 1 frame, but you can choose up to 1000 frames to hopefully keep a smooth frame rate if you have lots of items.
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  5. Fire "Items Created" event: If you check this box, you can specify one or more Custom Events to fire when all items have been created. This is useful if you want to use a Triggered Spawner to spawn a wave of the new items.
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  6. Import Pool Boss Categories: You can click this button above the yellow drag area to import all the categories in Pool Boss to Pool Mini-Boss if you want to use them for your items.