Well im planning on adding more
Debuffs and wanted to know if there is
a easier/more efficient way of doing
this.
There is. Consider the following and see if it’s applicable to how you need your systems to work.
Actor Component - can be created in the Content Browser, it’s a piece of reusable functionality that can be added / removed from actors, during run-time too - that’s what we’re doing here. The general idea is:
- design an actor component that acts as a buff / debuff for each effect that you need (inheritance works here, too, btw)
- each component encapsulates the necessary functionality
- when the player interacts with the world, a component is spawned and added to the player character
- while active, the component affects the player
- when the component’s effect has expired, it destroys itself automatically
Here’s an example, it’s a bit simplified and there’s plenty of room for improvement.
The component itself:
It has 2 exposed variables, Duration - how long the effect lasts and Magnitude - how strong the effect is. When spawned (on the player), it looks at its owner and directly modifies Player’s walk speed by Magnitude. It then starts an internal timer, waits for Duration, restores the speed and destroys itself.
This is, obviously, imperfect and just demonstrates the idea. Ideally, you’d have an interface in the base class here that tells the player to accumulate the Magnitude. And the player would interpret that. The Actor Component should just increase / decrease a SlowDownEffect float variable.
Here is how the player acts on it:
And I’ve placed a trap in the world:
The trap is an actor that spawns the effect on the player when they walk into it. The component can be given to the player in any other way you need, of course.
The first traps slow down by 300 for 5s, so hitting 2 in a row, stops you in place:
Do note that this method does not limit you to granting the effect to the player only. The component can be given to any entity in the world that shares the interface. It does not use arrays or indexing (although nothing stops you from keeping the spawned actor components in an array). You can also make the components responsible for creating the appropriate widget visualising the effect since it’s the component that runs the timer.
This method is very modular, infinitely scalable, easy to maintain but requires a bit extra upfront work. It also allows you to dramatically declutter player character by keeping the stuff it does not need to really worry about in the components.
