Hello Epic Community!
I am currently working on an indie game that is heavily based on destruction. I plan to leverage the Chaos destruction system to accomplish this and am trying to set up my pipeline.
The main requirement for my game is that once the player breaks structure, they are awarded XP. Structures are generally going to be standalone objects and small buildings. (A wooden fence, a stone wall, a small hut, etc). There is no partial destruction. Once a a structure has taken enough damage the whole thing will break.
Now I am trying to figure out a scalable pipeline. I have watched every talk about chaos destruction on Epic Games’ YouTube and read through all the chaos and dataflow documentation and am missing a couple pieces:
I am trying to build this off of a similar pipeline that Lego Fortnite uses for Geometry Collection Creation. I have a collection of modular meshes that I assemble into my structures in editor, select all of them together, and then convert into a geometry collection. From there, I want to set up a few dataflow graphs to automatically handle my fracturing.
For more straightforward props like fences and stone walls, this is not a problem at all since they are all generally fractured the same. The issue is when I need to fracture a structure that contains multiple materials.
For example: If I have a stone and wood house, I want the stone to fracture more chunky, and the wood to fracture more splintery. I wanted to set up a graph that can check for keywords in the geometry collection like: “wood” or “stone” filter them and fracture them accordingly, but whenever I create the collections, they always seem to just get named SM_01, SM_02, etc.
I have made sure the source static meshes are named SM_Wood and SM_Stone as well as making sure they are named correctly in my viewport but the naming always seems to go to SM_##.
____
It has left me wondering if this is the correct pipeline for a game like this. As a workaround for now, I plan to just combine separate geometry collections into the same blueprint and handle it that way, but for a long term solution it feels wrong.
I would love to hear if anyone has any advice on my overall pipeline, as well as dataflow graph creation to help assist me with this.