While this could have gone to Feedback to Epic, I’m diving to Blueprint details enough to figured to post under Blueprints :-). I also checked the Roadmap as well - and couldn’t find anything related to this scope.
So to the key question - I have decent enough experience to design the stuff mentioned below on programming language level - so I try to make sense in more generic fashion on Blueprints:
How would community or EPIC see the Blueprint-designing to evolve into modular fashion? I mean community-shareable, reusable, cross-connectable, LEGO-alike construction.
An example of following:
- Equipment blueprints to allow character to wear things
- Energy blueprints, that have batteries and other various physics-based energy consumption calculations
- Motor/mechanic blueprints would provide the physics movement based on mass and force
- Extensive material map and recipe blueprints, like Minecraft; consuming matter to produce new
When above blueprints are alone, there’s no practical (or sensible) way to use them in same package.
Enter the metadata + support for modularity:
- Equipment blueprints would have a way to have “plug-ins” for expanding the equipment with other items
- Energy blueprints could publish very generic interfaces to expect power in certain forms and to consume power
- Motor/mechanic blueprints could thus be connected to power sources through consumption calculations => force to give real physics
- Recipe blueprints could feed all the above with raw-materials to be refined to wearable things, energy cells, “energy conductors”, to turn into real motors and their fuel
If this makes any sense, then to the conclusion point:
- To be able to pull such a thing off would require Blueprints to be metadata-connectable; in some accessable form
- The metadata could initially be marketplace-level thing (automatically exposed from the blueprint of course)
- Optionally if Blueprints were to made XML/JSON importable/exportable/data format, the metadata could be fluently driven from the raw Blueprint also afterwards
There was a thread that already related to this; to have extended metadata on Marketplace to underline the network/multiplayer support in Blueprints. If this was being considered as important requirement, it could be designed with bigger scope in mind with full indextable/connectable metadata like in the imaginary example above.