Is there a way to sort/organize/tag mesh sockets?

Development Programming & Scripting Blueprint
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1

I am working on an equipment system where the eventual plan is to have characters with different socket configurations. We were looking for the best way to manage this, but as far as I know, currently the only way to access sockets is to use the “Get Socket Names” nodes. As far as I can tell, there is no way to categorize or tag sockets at the moment, which makes our equipment system very unstable.

The problem is like this:

Item A has an array that contains locations where it could possibly fit. It passes this location over to the character in the on equip function. The character has an array with all of the sockets listed. Here are the two problems:

A) All characters MUST have the same socket names convention, or things will fail.
B) There is no way to tell if a socket has an object bound to it already, and no neat way to manage that without creating more arrays and mapping.

Unless someone has any clever ideas about how to get around this, is it possible that we could get a few additional features to make socket management easier.

  1. Tags for sockets. If we could tag sockets like “Hand” “Feet” etc, it would be easier to work with edge cases like critters with more than two hands or two feet.
  2. A “Is Bound” node for sockets that would return true if the socket is already bound to an actor (other than the bone) and is therefore not empty.
2

Bump. Would love to hear from the devs on this.

3

Yep, I’m struggling right now with this issue. I’m loading meshes and the adding it to a blueprint to make what mesh editor says will look in the preview. It has tag value and by now, nothing to do in blueprints.

I’ll follow this topic praying.

4

Bump. Still no reply from the devs on this

5

To use Socket Tag as there is support for this in engine you need to create them in Static Mesh Editor, look in menu for Socket Manager and open it. There will be list of sockets already present on mesh. Select one and you will see collum where you can add your tag.

6

You can get which socket a component is attached to with node Get Attach Socket Name
This is for when you combine static mesh components to make a single actor.
This works - I have tried it.
I haven’t tried it but I think you can also get the socket an actor is attached to using node Get Attach Parent Socket Name
there is also
Get Attached Actors which you might like.
they are under the menu heading Utilities-transformation in the actions menu. Who would have guessed?

7

I did use paragraphs but never mind.

8

I have just posted a possible solution for you.