I’ve been working on a foliage based resource gathering system and I’m wondering if it’s worth cleaning up and submitting it the marketplace.
In general it allows people to harvest resources from foliage placed by the foliage tool. It’s very easy to setup and only takes a few minutes for each foliage type that you have.
Networking is done through a component that gets added to the player. Inside the network handler component, you’ll need to override the function that returns resources to convert them from the built in type to your own resource type. The built in type just returns the foliage name in string format and the amount returned.
Each foliage component has a function that you can override to determine how the list of net clients is built. Default behavior is to send non-multicasted data to players within the foliage’s “cull distance” and a few functions (spawning / despawning) are more or less multicasted to make sure there are no client / server sync issues. The function that builds the net client list can be overridden of course for people to control exactly who they want to send data to.
So to set the system up one only has to create a child of my foliage component class, set the default values (stuff like destructible mesh, sound effects, particle effects) and set the component class in UE4’s foliage tab to this new foliage component. Then they would have to create a child of the network handler component, override the function that gives resources, the add the component to their player class. Everything else is taken care of automatically. The only issue would be if the person is already using a custom foliage component … in which case they would have re-parent the class to my component.
It’s currently 100% in blueprint format though I plan on doing a C++ version as well.
Is there enough community interest in this for to put it on the UE4 marketplace? If so how much should I charge for it?
Here’s a demo of it in action that I plan on adding with the base project for people to use as a reference point.
