"Fabricating" a unit

[TK-Master]

@BoredEngineer;210150

Now we need to somehow spawn components. One way would be to spawn them in a construction graph of the Hull but it means that first I need to somehow pass a complete specification of the components into the Hull, including what kind of mesh should be there (if different engine have different visual appearance for example).
The other solution would be to spawn a base component Engine, in the world. During spawn provide it’s parameters such as which mesh should be used and what other parameters it should have. Then spawn an empty Hull and attach components to it one after another, storing pointers to them in Hull’s array of component. Something like that?

Yeah pretty much… you can make a function in your root blueprint that takes in some parameters, then spawns and attaches actors during begin play and/or in construction graph (if you need to construct a ship with specific parameters within the editor).

You could also add a few empty “pre-attached” static mesh components to your root blueprint, then during construction/begin play, add any meshes you need to those components, then simply store some variables (like power, ammo etc.) so that your root knows what kind of attachment it has.

So you can do everything from within one blueprint really if you want to, it all depends on the complexity I guess… if every part needs to have some really specific functionality that goes beyond storing a few variables then it makes more sense to have a base blueprint for each type.