Author: Anthony Balladares

Published: 10/23/2025

This week I spent most of my time adding code to allow the player to customize their mech. This consumed a lot of time to get this working and there were a few problems i faced when implementing this feature. First issue i faced was figuring out how to approach this, I ended up creating 2 actors for this, one of them was a console that the player can interact with and the other was an actor that held all the mesh data for the mech. Another issue I came across was trying to put meshes with empty mesh data on the mech, this was an easy fix, since I just needed to change my code so that meshes with a null skeletal mesh can be put on the player's mech. The main issue I came across was trying to get the mech to grab material data. I would come across issues when setting the mechs material to where it would just become null.

In this image the mech used for customization had issues pulling the material data from the player mech, I was also having this issue with the player mech pulling material data from the customizable mech, but added a temporary fix. The problem was because I was using a instance to store the material data directly from the mech, which was causing issues like this. The solution was to create a helper function to store the date in a dynamic instance. This did cost a lot of time trying to figure out how to fix this, but the end results were worth it, as we now have full customization of our mechs.