Blueprint Variant Extensions

For technical reasons, most of the visuals are defined in Blueprint Assets. Changing these outside of the UnrealEditor can be a hassle. To do this, you may use a UGothicModExt_BlueprintClassVariant.

UGothicModExt_BlueprintClassVariant

This class basically does the following:

• You assign a SourceClass (the blueprint you want to modify)
• It then creates a new BlueprintClass which inherits from the given SourceClass
• It calls ModifyVariant, which you can use to modify the new BlueprintClass Template
• It lets you get a SoftClassPtr to your new class

Internally, Unreal has multiple ways to create and define Components, the API of this class wraps access to them nicely, so that you don’t need to bother whether a component is Native or defined via SimpleConstructionScript.

Inside ModifyVariant, use

• GetComponentFromTemplate to modify a component that already exists on the Blueprint
• AddComponentToTemplate to add a new component to the Blueprint (this can be your own custom script class to inject logic!)
• SetVariantProperty to modify the value of a property via string based PropertyPath (for Properties created in BP)
• GetVariantDefaultObject to access the variants CDO directly

All non-abstract classes inheriting from UGothicModExt_BlueprintClassVariant are collected and automatically created after script compilation finished.

Example

class UMyBlueprintClassVariant : UGothicModExt_BlueprintClassVariant
{
  default SourceClass = n"Blueprint'/Game/Items/Weapon/1Handed/BP_ItMw_1H_Sword_Bastard_02_Visual.BP_ItMw_1H_Sword_Bastard_02_Visual_C'";

  UFUNCTION(BlueprintOverride)
  void ModifyVariant()
  {
    // Gets the first UStaticMeshComponent from the template (in this case a Native component)
    UStaticMeshComponent Mesh = GetComponentFromTemplate(UStaticMeshComponent);

    if (IsValid(Mesh))
    {
      Mesh.StaticMesh = SomeOtherStaticMesh;
      Mesh.RelativeScale3D = FVector(5.0, 5.0, 5.0);

      for (int i = 0; i < Mesh.GetNumMaterials(); i++)
      {
        Mesh.SetMaterial(i, SomeOtherMaterial);
      }
    }

    // Gets the first component with the given type + name (this component was purely defined in BP)
    UHitCapsuleCollisionComponent HitCollision = GetComponentFromTemplate(UHitCapsuleCollisionComponent, n"HitBoxCollision_Weapon");

    if (IsValid(HitCollision))
    {
      HitCollision.CapsuleRadius = 40.0;
    }

    // Adds a new component to the template
    UNiagaraComponent MyFX = AddComponentToTemplate(UNiagaraComponent, n"MyFX");

    MyFX.Asset = SomeNiagaraAsset;
    MyFX.RelativeLocation = FVector(0.0, 0.0, 40.0);
    MyFX.RelativeScale3D = FVector(1.0, 1.0, 5.0);
  }
}

To get the SoftClassPath to your new variant, use

SomeBlueprintSoftClass = UMyBlueprintClassVariant.DefaultObject.VariantClassPath

This will output a stable SoftClassPtr that will be populated after the script compilation finished.