Able Ability System Info and Support Thread

[ExtraLifeMatt]

@AngeIV

Hmmm seems like this Scatchpad solves my problem with “Stoneskin” from earlier
But getting back to issue at hand… I made a template ability. it has variables and a function “start”. This function do stuff from the variables without really making much on it and not SET anything in the ability itself. It got as well a basic “can trigger” check.
Now… I’ve made a child ability and I though I could just run “on ability start” and do same function “start”. I cant run it on ability start - because it seems the function “start” even though is inherited in this class, it still refers to parent only and is read only, so it would “modify state” accordingly to error message.
So my question - Is this function still running if it was in the parent execution tree? And most importantly is it running with child variables or parent variables setup?
If I have repeating logic that does same thing over and over again for multiple abilities, how to execute it properly not breaking the abilities?

Second - are scratchpads part of the documentation? I haven’t looked into it for a while. if so - I will just read about them before asking stupid-*** questions

edit.
3rd question - How to make sure you can trigger an ability ONCE? In example I want the racial traits to be able to apply once. It doesn’t have any “cost” so a client whom gets into code and cheats could apply racial traits over and over again gaining for example infinite skill points. I could make it run in a infinite loop, so maybe check if component has this ability running already? to avoid stacking? or maybe there’s a simpler way? I dont mind it running in a loop (also is I have passive that are infinite loop, whats the best “Ability time” for such ability? as long as possible? few seconds? one minute?

edit.
4th - Can I for example improve on how ability works based on stacks? So each time it gets reapplied I add another effect base don number of stacks? How to do that? For example I have ability “human” I want it to have 20 stacks. On each stack (level) I want it to do “something” but every 3 levels I want to do “something else” ? Whats the best approach?

1. You should be able to right click on the event and “Add call to Parent Function” if you want to chain up to your parent class. Other than that, I’m not 100% sure how BPs use inheritence, but it should be that simple.

2. They should be under the Custom Task section. The documentation is (finally) get some love during this fun lockdown, which is why you’re starting to see new art and such in a handful of pages.

3. Once ever, or you don’t want it to stack? The former you’d just have to give it a hidden cost. Set some bool on your character that you persist and that bool being false is the cost basically, once the Ability is activated, you set the bool to true and save out the character data. If you just don’t want it to stack, then you don’t have to do anything. By default, Abilities can’t stack on each other. You have to mark them as passive and set a stack count if you want stacks (note: there isn’t really any difference between Active and Passive abilities under the hood, so having a Passive that works like an active is fine, and vice-versa).

4. Just apply the stacks, when you go to calculate damage, or apply some secondary effect, just grab the total stacks on the Ability and do some simple math like by dividing the total stacks by 3, or use modular division, etc. You could also use a Datatable where the row is the stack(1 through whatever) and the column (5 do X, 7 do Y, 12 do Z) is what to do.