Benjamin Dixon - Project Lead/Gameplay Programmer

The problem

This week has been a slow one for me personally. While I've been allowing other people access to the player to finish up their work I have been trying to solve the problem of the system design for the class ability systems. I wanted the abilities to be something that could be swapped out and changed depending on a player skill tree. That being said right now as we have the player primarily in blueprints using function pointers would not be an option. I did some more research and found various solutions to this problem but many of them were specifically tailored to a non networked game. 

The Solution

The gameplay Ability system. In my research I discovered a built in unreal system which is made to handle networked games. This system allows you to create "Gameplay Abilities" for actions that you player to do in game, these actions have "Gameplay Effects" that will influence "Gameplay Attributes" that are held on either the player or the player's state.  This will allow me to create a set of gameplay attributes that will be affected by various gameplay effects and give that to each player that will allow me to have abilities and skills that affect those attributes, and the system should handle the networking natively.