BeginOverlap Damage Per Second Loop?

[LoidTourne]

Right now I have a capsule component on enemy characters. I want to make it so that while the enemy capsule component overlaps with my player component, it will do damage over time. The best example I can give is the PainCausingVolume. I want to deal damage to the player every second that the two capsules are overlapping.

To try and achieve this, I used OnComponentBeginOverlap and branches to start a timer before the enemy can attack again. However when multiple enemies are overlapping, they just add to the timer instead of having their own BP_Enemy Timer. I’m not sure if timers would be the best way to achieve this effect, but I’m still pretty new to game development.

Basically what I want to happen is that if the player touches an enemy, they will be damaged, but they can’t be damaged by the same enemy until 1 second passes. So each enemy touching the player would in theory have their own independent cooldown before they could attack the player again.

[ClockworkOcean]

So you need the timer setup in the enemy parent, so each of the enemies has it.

Technically you could do it all in the player, be it’s too complicated.

[Rev0verDrive]

The Attacker needs to implement its own timer.

Other option is On Begin Overlap store the actor ref and a game time to apply dmg in a struct array or Tmap.

Struct||TMap [ Actor Ref, DmgTime (game time + 1s) ]

On Tick run a check on the array/tmap to see if it is empty.

Not empty:
For each loop -> (DmgTime <= Game Time) -> Apply Dmg, Set DmgTime (Game time + 1s)

End Overlap:
Get actor ref -> Find its element in the array/tmap, apply dmg if need be, remove ref.

This method isn’t accurate enough to guarantee dmg will be applied at the exact 1 sec marker.

[LoidTourne]

Alright, I think I figured it out!
I added in a CanAttack boolean that will set to true when the enemy spawns in, then it’ll turn off when the enemy attacks and delay for 1 second to allow for the enemy to attack again. The AttackPlayer event will handle the timer instead of the BeginOverlap, I think this solved pretty much all of my problems, but might look a bit redundant with AttackPlayer and DamagePlayer

this way the edge of the AttackCapsule doesn’t apply again right after ending the overlap and starting again.

[ClockworkOcean]

Excellent