Multiple sockets for multiple weapons? Or...?

Development Programming & Scripting
1

What’s the best to handle having multiple weapons for a player character?

The weapons may be rigged differently or not at all and so each weapon needs to be adjusted (with a location/rotation offset).

The easiest way seems to be to have multiple sockets, one per weapon. But would many unsued sockets impact performance? If there 100 weapons and 100 players that’s 10K unused sockets.

Other ways include having one socket and storing the offsets in code, or storing offsets in a per-weapon blueprint, but these make it difficult to preview the character holding the weapon view the “preview asset” feature.

How do you do handle multiple weapons?

2

The ideal is having all similar wepons sharing the same socket, thus same orientation, scale and pivot point. For projectile guns, typically the pivot point is in the middle of the trigger mesh. See Lyra starter Game and shooter game for examples. For melee weapons, as seen in Infinity Blade and Action RPG, meshes are oriented towards z axis with pivot point near the handle.

Offsets can be determined per weapon, but, as you want many weapons, it can become difficult to manage.