Item system from excel with lots of items and variety

Development Pipeline & Plugins Editor Scripting
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1

I am trying to design some kind of item management system. I have the following requirements:

  • lots of items share meshes (for example I have 15 different machineguns and each use the same mesh)

  • lots of items. 10 groups of weapons each with 5 difference sizes and each with 10 different options. So I end up with 10x5x10=500 weapons for example.

  • item “tuning”. So I can take any item and add bits to modify them. These are basically just stat multipliers.

  • in-game shops where you can buy and sell items, characters etc. (not real money)

  • many characters each with unique variety of 12 different sockets to mount different types of equipments. These will be hand created as they all have unique meshes but I’d still like to have variations of each.

Now because this is a huge number of items I’m looking at using excel to create the stat sheets" instead of manually creating blueprints and child blueprints for each item (and resuing lots of art assets). However I’m kinda stumped how to do it all.

How could I automate lots of this inside excel so I could just import a .csv into ue4 to create items? I’m not asking excel advice but how should I make it all so it works in unreal? I obviously need to have a master blueprint for each weapon type I think. Like machinegun, rocket launcher, laser, missiles, penguin launcher, nuke etc… but how do I handle each of the 10s or even hundreds of sub items so I can inside excel adjust all of their stats?

And how do I handle these items in blueprints. How is an unique item made in bp so I can buy a k-221b weapon at store or take the k-221b that is in my inventory but has low number of hitpoints. Or buy the k-221b with modified scope from other store.

I understand it is really vague and big question so I would be glad if you have any pointers to give or links to any examples of maybe how other games have solved these issues? I’m doing this all in blueprints. I do have understanding of things like structs, enums and arrays and I know little bit of bluprint childs but I’m just having trouble making it all come together in some way. I really need a push to right direction.

2

adding modifications aside, the short answer here is to use a data table to store all of your information. to make a datatable you will first need to make a struct that contains all the information that you want for the item (wep type, name, mesh, level, dmg, etc). from here you could just jump into making a excel sheet or you could create a datatable in engine and export it so the formatting will already be done for you. there are tons of tutorials out there for making datatables.

once you have the datatable made you would then want to create a item base class that takes the information from the table and applies it.

3

I happened to have a similar idea, but eventually I gave up on it. In the process, I implemented a plugin to package Excel directly, making it easier to use formulas to manage large amounts of data. Is it what you need?
[Spreadsheet to Code in Code Plugins - UE Marketplace]