Multiple Damage Types Simultaneously

Development Programming & Scripting Blueprint
1

I am currently working on designing my damage system. I plan everything out ahead of time before I attempt blueprinting, and then make changes as needed. I have seen some information about integrated damage types within Unreal. However, I have a unique issue that I don’t think I’ve seen someone address.

*I want to extend multiple damage types from the base damage class. For each damage type, I also want to define whether it is direct (single target) damage or splash damage, with control over the range of the splash damage.
*Weapons in my game will be capable of inflicting multiple damage types simultaneously. I considered performing a check for each damage type whenever a monster is attacked, but I feel like checking for 8 different damage types per monster when the player is fighting 6-8 monsters at the same time will be hard on performance. Is there a more efficient way of doing this? Am I over-thinking it? Is there a way to simply attach multiple defined damage types to a single damage source?

I can handle the blueprinting most likely. I just a little help with working through the logic of it. Thanks.

2

Why don’t you use a struct containing values of your damage types?
(I’ll call types now elemental)

All your weapons contain a struct that stores the elemental damage.
For example:

Ice : 0.0
Fire: 0.1
Thunder : 0.2
Water : 0.0

etc.

When attacking, you just use some math to multiply the elemental damage with your base damage.

For example:

Base Damage (Stored in weapon or Character Strength+Weapon Base Damage or whatever you want it to be) : 50
Ice Damage = 500.0 = 0
Fire Damage = 50 * 0.1 = 5
Thunder Damage = 50 * 0.2 = 10
Water Damage = 50.0 = 0

Now your enemy stores “Resistance” Struct:

Ice Res.: 1
Fire Res. : -.5 (absorb)
Thunder Res.: 1.0
Water Res. : 1

Multiply the Elemental Damage with the Resistance and then add them all to the Base Damage.

3

Thanks for the response. However, that doesn’t really answer my question. Let me explain my concern more thoroughly.

Say I have a weapon that does 5 Fire Splash damage, and 5 Electric direct damage. Obviously I can add them together (and take monster defense/resistances into account), but if I add them together, how do I make sure the 5 points of fire damage does the appropriate splash damage? How do I add the damage values together without losing the perks of each damage type?

4

Easy.
Create enum “damage type” - direct, splash
In damage blueprint - switch on Edamagetype
Direct goes to - apply damage
Radial goes to - apply radial damage (+with fallof if you want)
In your hero character - you shoot with your weapon, pass first damage (10 with enum direct) to damage bp, then 10 damage with enum splash

If its not enough tell me, ill make simple bp and post screen

5

If you wouldn’t mind, I would very much appreciate it. I’m relatively new, and still learning. Plus before its all said and done I’ll need to include defense ratings, energy shield penetration, and status effect chance/resist in all of these damage calculations. So having a strong foundation will be very helpful. Thanks.

6

Ill send it tomorow, if i forget, pm me, i wanted to send you pm but dont have idea how to do it on mobile…

7

So i created something like this in few minutes… Its very simple approach but it should work (i didnt tested it), you can have much more things here, like damage calculation order etc… damage handling is only simple math :slight_smile:

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If you really want to make games i can only recommend this tutorial: , it learned me really much things. I spend with that tutorial few months but it definitely worth it

8

That’s an excellent jumping off point for me. Thank you very much!

9

I know this is an old topic.

I am going to ask a similar question.

UE5 offers these damage events

AnyDamage - any kind of damage but does not include specific data elements like bone, radial, etc…
PointDamage - focused on specific point of damage like Bones
RadialDamage - focused on radial damage like grenade explosions

Being that UE5 already offers built in Damage events, are we able to use them simultaneously ?

I tried to do that but it seems to gravitate to 1 Damage Event.

10

You can’t sequentially call them in the same frame.

e.g. Apply Radial Damage → Apply Any/Point Damage

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If you want to use them in sequence you have to add a delay between the application so they fire in separate frames.

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Personally I’d write my own custom damage event to handle it the way I want.

1 Like
11

This is also where the game-attribute system might come in handy; you can do quite a bit with this system. Think of how MTG or PoE have all these in/out conditions, but-only-applies-to-X, and whatnot, they do that with attributes/tags and effects (mods).

It’s worth looking into. It’s set up in C yes, but 95+ percent of what you do with and about it is in BP (or can be as much as you want, C is still an option otherwise)

12

This post seems to come up a lot with damage searches on google, so I thought I would correct something from the 2025 replies:

You can absolutely use ApplyPoint and ApplyRadial in the same frame, because they are 2 separate events. However, “AnyDamage” is [probably?] only fired once.

Honestly, the “any” event is not designed well at all, and I would recommend not even using it. A radial will fire “any” and “radial”, and a point will fire “any” and “point”, and a standard applydamage will fire “any.” This makes it very difficult to use the “any” event for all 3 situations, because you would need to manually determine your conditions.

The best answer if you want to use these native functions, is only use point and radial, and not the “any” event at all. Basically anytime you want generic damage, you’ll just use point damage.

However…… with that said, there is still a chance that 2 enemies could attack in the same exact frame with the same one, and that means one of them will be canceled, which makes these events heavily flawed anyway. Trying to determine a delay would be impractical for this situation, without your own damage event system from scratch.

The only reason I used these native events for so long, is I figured the radial damage would be far more efficient than anything I would write myself for AOE damage. But you could always write your own, or use radial + your own direct event.

The best thing I could come up with:

Using a queue system for executing damage on a character. Add damage data to queue array → add a timer to run next frame (or you could execute a function immediately individually, but that may cost more than waiting.) This also lets you add multiple hits with 1 weapon if you want… possibly even merging them first once you know they’re all accounted for, then running the resist calcs.

You need to be able to account for projectiles that are destroyed though! Generally speaking, I never bother with the “damage causer actor” concept. You’re better stamping some type of variable or condition yourself from the original call.

I’m interested to hear if anyone has dealt with this differently themselves?