Extended Modular Gameplay

Collection of actor components designed to be used on existing game framework actors plugin Pawn, Game State, Game Mode etc.

Installation

Clone the repository in your project's Plugin directory.

Usage

The plugin comes with a series of components designed to be used on various game framework actors. The list:

• UExtControllerComponent (AController/APlayerController)
• UExtGameModeComponent (AGameModeBase/AGameMode)
• UExtGameSessionComponent (AGameSession)
• UExtGameStateComponent (AGameState)
• UExtPawnComponent (APawn)
• UExtPlayerStateComponent (APlayerState)

All of them have unique a macro that you should put beneath GENERATED_BODY() to get additional functions designed to shorthand expressions. You can see the macro name in the according component class that you want to inherit, example:

UCLASS(Abstract)
class EXTMODULARGAMEPLAY_API UExtControllerComponent
	  : public UControllerComponent
{
	GENERATED_BODY()
	// EXT_CONTROLLER_COMPONENT_BODY()
	// ^^^ Include this in your override of the component to get extra utilities ^^^

This will provide a typed Get() given a context. UExtControllerComponent::Get() has 3 overrides for AController, APlayerState and AController to shorthand the extraction making the code shorter.

Example:

UCLASS(meta=(BlueprintSpawnableComponent))
class UTextChatUser
	: public UExtControllerComponent
{
	GENERATED_BODY()
	EXT_PLAYER_STATE_COMPONENT_BODY()

	// ...
};

// Later in code...

// a)
void SendMessageToPlayer(APlayerController* Controller)
{
	auto* TextChatUser = UTextChatUser::Get(Controller);
	// ...
}

// b)
void SendMessageToPlayer(APlayerState* PlayerState)
{
	auto* TextChatUser = UTextChatUser::Get(PlayerState);
	// ...
}

This also helps with possible refactorring. Normally you would've extracted the component like this

void SendMessageToPlayer(APlayerController* Controller)
{
	auto* TextChatUser = Controller->GetComponentByClass<UTextChatUser>()
	// ...
}

However, the day you decide to move the component to APlayerState, this will always result into a nullptr and possible crash.

This also helps cases when you need to access APlayerController from a component that should be on a pawn.

UActorComponent* MyComponent = ...;
auto* Pawn = CastChecked<APawn>(MyComponent->GetOwner());
auto* PlayerController = CastChecked<AMyPlayerController>(Pawn->GetPlayerController());

// vs

UExtPawnComponent* MyComponent = ...;
auto* PlayerController = MyComponent->GetPlayerController<AMyPlayerController>();

For blueprints, you can use UExtModularGameplayLibrary which has all possible typed getters like this:

static UPlayerStateComponent* GetPlayerStateComponent_PlayerState(const APlayerState* PlayerState, TSubclassOf<UPlayerStateComponent> Class);
static UPlayerStateComponent* GetPlayerStateComponent_Controller(const AController* Controller, TSubclassOf<UPlayerStateComponent> Class);
static UPlayerStateComponent* GetPlayerStateComponent_Pawn(const APawn* Pawn, TSubclassOf<UPlayerStateComponent> Class);