So I’ve been learning about game feature plugins and how great they are. I don’t see why I shouldn’t make pretty much all my content in game feature plugins. I have all my core systems defined in c++ and now its just about generating the content on top of those systems: guns, abilities, etc.
Is making a game feature plugin for every single gun, item, ability, individually too much?
Should I just make a guns plugin, items plugin, etc.
I know obv that “it depends on your project” but I’m just trying to get a feel for best practice or caveats I might run into later down the road when making a certain design choice.
Write it first to see if it works, then write it to make it perform / be extendable.
I think for every individual gun it’d be too much, for example, a bunch of weapons with hitscan logic might all want to use the same static function to determine their firing behavior.
Yeah thats a good point because I have made some intermediate systems (actually the hitscan is a perfect example) which I was toying with either keeping in my base project, moving to a plugin, or moving with my content into a game feature plugin since none of my base code depends on hitscan, only a select handful of content.
In terms of dependencies: I have weapons as primary data assets and I’m pretty sure that even if they are introduced in a game feature plugin they will still be picked up by the asset manager. However, there is still a major issue I thought of: For certain game modes such as
gun game, the gamemode needs to depend on pretty much all of the guns and even possibly other forms of content in the game. This means the gun game mode would need to be in another game feature plugin which depends on all the rest, but I’m hesitant to go down that path since it seems like bad practice / will lead to some tight spots, to have a plugin that depends on game + every game feature plugin.
EDIT: I should note that i have no intention to use game feature plugins for the sake of turning them on or off or any of the actual utility they provide. I just want to use them for project management.