mccartnm / tom

UE4 Ship Building System and Possible Game

TOM

Game experiment for fun with Unreal. The story for which is under development and will eventually, probably, weave its way into this kit. The main purpose for the time being is to exercise tool building with unreal to make it more effective for artists and designers to jump in and build ships.

Technical Section

This includes a modular vessel building kit included to handle customized ships with various mountable parts.

Examples of mountable parts:

• Engine - Things that make it go
• Weapon - Things that go bang!
• Core - Things that power, protect, or otherwise modify the ship

This is all done with the proprietary Hardpoint system. A hard point is just a location on/in the hull that can host a mount. As the artist/designer builds the hull/interior of the ship, they can decide where to lay hardpoints and the mountable types they can hold onto, among other things. The hull system for the ship will do the rest when it comes to exposing available mounting slots to the player.

Note: Really this is just an abstract attachment system for faster design iterations. There are other systems out there that do a similar thing but none with the level of responsiveness desired for this project

Editor Updates

One of the main goals is to make the modularity be available while laying down the hardpoints. Having the ability to cycle through the mountables on a given hardpoint while editing the blueprint is key.

Some of this is still theoretical but the science seems straight forward enough.