Unreal Tales - FL UE4

[Alley]

This image is probably a little less interesting but it has significant meaning.

I completely changed the approach in regard to storing equipment. The previous approach had not changed since 2015 and consisted of abusing inheritence to create completely new items based on a parent generic item. There was serious problems with that as you had to figure out what the item actually was. Engines weren't truly engines, if your ship engine was "engine50", the game would understand what you are using is something called "engine50" instead of an engine with the stats of engine50.

Unreal added Data Tables and I started to experiment with it. The above screenshot is a data table meant to store engine data. The beauty of data tables is that we can also open them in Excel, which means Unreal is not needed to mundane tasks like tweaking an engine's stats or adding a new one (I doubt localization will happen). In the end the approach is very similar to FL's INI system.

I've started switching the engine component to use this system and thus far the performance of this subsystem has been significantly improved thanks to this change, and so is the ease of use.

---

Alley was right.