Following Touch Interface Designer (for designing and managing touch interfaces) and Impact Designer (for designing and managing impact-related special effects), I am releasing a new tool: Weapon Designer, for designing and managing weapons in video games.
Let’s take a detailed look at the features of this first version.
What's Weapon Designer?
Weapon Designer is an Unreal Engine plugin that lets you easily design weapons for your game—whether it’s a pistol, an assault rifle, a sword, or anything else. It includes all the classes and functions you need to design every weapon in your game in just a few minutes. This tool is simple to use and easy to integrate into your project.
Create weapons quickly
Weapon designer supports all types of weapons. From a pistol to a sword, including a shotgun, a rocket launcher or a war hammer. Thanks to the functions exposed in Blueprints, you can quickly and easily design the weapons you need for your game. With Weapon Designer, you can design the weapons you need in just a few minutes!
Designed to be modular
Weapon Designer was designed to handle a wide range of use cases, which is why the weapon classes were built to be modular. You can quickly adjust a weapon’s characteristics in real time using a weapon profile. You can customize a weapon’s behavior by adding modules; for instance, the plugin’s built-in modules allow you to add features such as jamming, overheating, or weapon degradation.
Weapon Profile
Weapon Module
Realistic or arcade projectile
Physics-based projectiles enable realistic trajectories and gameplay. They support gravity, ricochets, surface penetration, homing capabilities, and more. Raycast-based projectiles enable arcade-style trajectories and gameplay. They are much simpler and more efficient than physics-based projectiles, which require more computation. Nevertheless, they support ricochets and surface penetration.
Weapon Designer also supports laser weapons with a specific projectile type that accounts for the impact characteristics of a laser.
Surface-based impact
Weapon Designer includes a custom physical material that allows you to add context to surfaces, enabling you to define when and how a projectile reacts upon impact. The plugin also features a custom damage type containing all the data needed to apply damage based on the impact type, along with additional variables to facilitate the application of exotic damage (fire, water, magic, etc.).
Automatic Pooling
Weapon Designer features an automatic projectile pooling system if you use the Weapon Designer subsystem. This improves performance and memory usage, particularly when multiple weapons are firing simultaneously in your game. To ensure optimal performance, Weapon Designer is written entirely in C++.
Blade Collision
Melee weapons feature a collision detection system. When combined with physical materials and custom damage types, a melee weapon can get stuck in a surface or slice through it. You can control both the precision and frequency of the collision detection. For performance reasons, melee weapon collision detection is independent of the frame rate.
Weapon Pickup
A pickup system enables easy interaction with weapons in the game world. This system avoids cluttering weapon classes with pickup-related logic.In the future, it will also help optimize memory usage by preventing the loading of all components and assets associated with a weapon (VFX, SFX, modules, etc.) into memory.
And there's more...
These are just some of the features in Weapon Designer. Check out the documentation.
Join the community
Join the Touch Interface Designer developers on the LIGS Community discord, where you can share your insights on this tool.
What's next?
Weapon Designer will be regularly updated to fix any bugs, improve existing features, and add missing ones—whether suggested by the community or simply things that haven't occurred to me yet!