Spreadsheets!
Or really, I’ve been working on implementing a data-driven 1st & 3rd-person shooter weapon system. The general idea is that weapon logic, replication, etc. exists on the code side, and then there’s only a single blueprint for setting up defaults. Weapon data is built using datatables and CSV and loaded as needed, including doing things like loading the correct models, selecting animations, and scaling those animations based on the data. The goal is to allow a large number of weapons to be created without having to modify code or create blueprints for each one.
The below video shows working with the first two weapons in that spreadsheet pic, along with some camera transitioning stuff that I’ve also been working on.
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I’ve also packaged a small project (~160 MB download) that includes a quick and dirty (and ugly) UI that allows weapon modification on the fly, if anyone wants to check out what I have so far. It’s using free assets from Epic, so please forgive any animations quirks and most weapons looking similar. Also, the UI part is a more limited version of what the spreadsheet-driven weapons currently support (mainly because I didn’t want to spend too much time on the UI), so I included a couple weapons on the character by default.