[FONT=arial black]Customizing Your Weapon The Way You Need It
What’s up everyone, I am been a lurker on the UE4 forms when not posting stuff in the PROXY game build and need to become more active but I figured since I finally have made some headway with this Gunsmithing bench system I can finally post something on it. This is still a work in progress and I come from more of the artistic side of things when it comes to games but in the last year I have really pickup up on blueprints but still feel as I am still a noob to other programmers
I have always been a fan of features in games where you get the chance to assemble your own weapons for your character since it kind of as a sense of individuality and personal preference in a game when you play with other people or even simply put you just want to deal the most damage. With that in mind that is what kind of drove me to develop this component swapping system with this bench. You can use this system even without a bench if you so choose like they have done in games like Crisis and the upcoming Homefront game, but for now I am using a controlled area for interaction.
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Updates: Last Posted 10/8/2015
Improvement to character movement
Camera movement for iron-sights and open sights to have independent aiming positions
Three weapons can be carried and each to have their own builds
Mock up range built for better component testing
**Short Term Fixes**
*Spamming aim button will snap camera out of position temporally
*Need to be able to hold fire and toggle aiming
*Weapon housings store build configurations
[/SIZE]Latest Rundown of the Bench https://youtube.com/watch?v=ygJ1W46WAjQ
[FONT=arial black]—FUTURE TASK LIST—
1. NEED MORE WEAPON COMPONENTS - only having two weapon housings is not enough but will also need to build housings for the additional weapon category’s for pistols, shotguns, support, sniper rifles and possibility of a special weapon class for continued testing. 2. Handling of sub components – Might need to make a new menu system for placing attachments and switching out the internals of the weapon for those finer tuning of numbers on the overall weapon performance. 3. Working animations – begin work on a master Anim_BP that can handle the animations of the master skeleton of the weapons as well as animations that need to be fixed on the character 4. Preview weapon – Allow for a preview camera to show your weapon in all of its beauty with interaction from mouse of game pad controller 5. Saving out builds – when switching out to different housing systems there needs to something to take into account what the last components were that were being using and store them so that weapons build does not change every time you change housing parts. (Yay for Arrays)
**6. **Texturing – Texture the bench so the UMG can better be seen against it and plan for weapons to have exposed parameters for their materials, this might also fall into the same menu as the sub component menu.
7. UMG - All around improvement to the look and feel of the menu, also would be best to get this working with game pad for cross controller use.
So…This is where out path cross again?! I was going to keep this as a on going development thread when updates come out in the future. Other than that do you think there might be anything you would like to see added?
The animations on that weapon customizer look awesome. I’m not sure if this is going on the marketplace or just your game, but if it is a part of your game one thing that I would love to see is a loot based system where people will find parts to certain guns and have to assemble them. Some parts having a better effect than others.
Yep, there are secondary parts that can be added to the barrel component right now but there is not any real way to control how or where each additional part can go to. The other thing I still have to get working is the secondary functions for attachments on weapons such as under barrel launchers, grips or even “laser” pointers. Even the housing system can possible have MOD’s installed to change the attributes of the weapons performance.
I am still currently drawing up some menu ideas on how to bring up a secondary menu for the sub-components.
Once I can get some more functionality out of the bench I will have to go back and get everything in the marketplace standard, but even more so it would be awesome to see what people could come up with on their own gun customization system.
Thanks I am glad you liked it, if I can include the bench interaction I definitely would like to and even if you don’t want to use a station to do the weapon part swap out you can totally make this work on the fly.
Just for the mechanics for the possible game I have in mind (still currently documenting) I am more for you prep before you go out on mission and that loot aspect for finding the part you need to make the components was one idea I had as well. I just have to tread carefully and not fall into that gameplay feature of bad grinding mechanics.
This is looking awesome. I’m finally going to get a modular First Person Fire weapon System! I’ve been advocating for such a system for over a decade. I was going to take it on in UE4 providing an Assembly System for everything: Characters, Creatures (Face|Body), Armor, Melee Weapons, Fire Weapons, Props, Furniture, Crafts, Vehicles, Machines, Hybrids, Level Architecture, and Structures.
During the R &D of the Golem Collage Construction, I devised a method of attaching mesh components in a arbitrary fashion, dubbed Soft-Sockets. These are vertex points created at run-time relative offset (local space) to the a Bones*/Hard *Sockets and stored in a save game object. Soft sockets are associated to the mesh asset and additional data can be added to provide filtering for parts allowed/not allowed to attach. Dependent on 3rd Party 3D Authoring Tool its cumbersome to create bones for separate modular pieces.
The Animation is definitely a nice touch. If aimed towards the Market Place, I would anticipate Developers using the system to generate Pre-fabs to supply a library of Weapons for their games (even if player customization is not used). Perhaps you can provide additional load-out configuration packs and user load-outs for additional sales. A modular content production offers greater flexibility across the board.
Are you interested in collaboration? I’m in talks with several 3D Art Vendors to provide a continuous supply of parts for systems like this. Perhaps we can expand on your current framework to provide Assembly systems for other Entity Types.
Added new update to the bench, this time around it was more of the character mechanics that were updated and at the same time there has been allot of rewriting of the blueprints to optimize functions of the weapons with the character that is using it. As well as a three carrying weapon system for the player to use and change the parts of the weapon attributes while in play. Hopefully for the next update I will be able to figure out getting weapon housings to save their own configurations and be called again with those last configurations saved out.
