Configurable weapon system: assigning instances of varying types at runtime

Questions & Answers
1

I’m working on a configurable weapon system that takes three parts: a fire pattern(an arc like a shotgun blast, three projectiles in a row, circluar pattern etc.), an ammo type (bullet, rocket, cheese etc.) and a weapon mod, which overwrites things like damage or rate of fire. I thought it would be a fairly simple task but i’m running into problems. I must be still half asleep or something…

My initial design is to have a ConfigurableWeapon class that has three fields: pattern, ammoType and mod. These fields are types of abstract class that you would inherit from for individual ammo types etc. The user would pick what they wanted from a list, then when the game starts the weapon would be set up. Also, the A.I. controlled enemies would use the same system, with pre-specified settings per enemy prefab.

I thought I would use a static helper class that has a dictionary that stores an enum as a key, and the type to be added as a value, then return new instances as needed but I can’t for the life of me get anything working this morning!

There’s probably a more elegant way of doing this, or i’m overlooking something obvious, so any suggestions would be appreciated.

I can post the code if needed, but seeming as i’m still trying to figure out the design it’s mostly just abstract class definitions and some inherited testing classes.

2

Alright so after some lunch and caffeine I took another look at my design and decided I was doing it backwards. What I’ve done now is rather than trying to pull instances into the weapon when fired, instead store the firing patterns in a static dictionary in a manager class and using enums stored in the weapon, look up the appropriate pattern and pass it a reference to an ammo type stored in a different dictionary (also in the manager class) to be instantiated. Works so far, if a little obtuse.

I’ll leave this up as an answer for now but if anyone has a more elegant way, i’d be interested in hearing it!

Thanks for your help Fattie, I decided to just go with prefab ammo types for simplicity, makes things easier in that regard.

Now I just need to add the weapon mod part and I can start blowing things up in all manner of entertaining ways!