Weapon enchantments - designing the code architecture?

Questions & Answers
1

I’ve been thinking for a couple of days now about how to implement weapon enchantments through Unity.

For example:

  1. Iron Sword (10 damage on hit, 1 attack per second)
  2. Swift Iron Sword (10 damage on hit, 2 attacks per second)
  3. Iron Sword of Fire (20 damage on hit, 1 attacks per second, target burns for 5 seconds)
  4. Swift Iron Sword of Fire (20 damage on hit, 2 attacks per second, target burns for 5 seconds)

I would like to be able to achieve this without having a unique prefab for every single possible combination, primarily as doing so is both time consuming and could eat up a lot of space.

The way I would do this in a “regular” Object Oriented architecture would be decorators.
(Read: The way I WOULD do it, not the way I HAVE done it, this could still be entirely wrong!)
ie,
Weapon sword = new SwiftEnchant( new FireEnchant( new IronMaterial( new Sword() ) ) );

However, I can’t see how a decorator model could exist within the component based architecture of Unity.

Can anyone help me out by pointing me in the right direction here? It would be much appreciated.

3

The way I would do this, is to have a base item (in this case Iron Sword) that has variables inside for the different possible enhancements.

For a simple setup, you could have booleans for each of the types to set if the weapon has it, and a companion variable to set how much it affects the weapon. Like a bool ‘hasSpeedEnhance’ and a float saying how much faster (or slower for penalties) it swings.

You could also use class inheritance and interfaces to allow for more flexibility, where the base weapon doesn’t need a variable for each type. On attack it could call a method in the derived class that gives it a chance to modify the stats of that attack.

2

You can define yourself some enhancement class that holds the information (attacks per sec/ dmg multiplier/etc.) and then put all modifiers on a weapon in a list.
Using Linq or just iterating you can then easily get the total effect of all enhancements on a weapon.