Setting up ASC on Player State

This page describes the minimal amount of setup to do with GAS Companion for ASC living on Player State. It is a direct follow-up of the Quick Start page where we setup the project to use an ASC living on the player character.

Overview #

Demo Project #

Note: You can download this 4.27 project which contains the bare minimum amount of setup in a BP only project to have the ASC living on Player State with GAS Companion 3.x.x version.

This page will go over how to do the same in a blank project based on the third person template.

Summary #

Game Mode Setup for ASC living on PlayerState:

Pawn: GSCModularPlayerStateCharacter (bp child of it)
Controller: GSCModularPlayerController
PlayerState: GSCModularPlayerState (bp child of it)

GSCModularPlayerStateCharacter does not have ASC and forwards to the player state. If you need to edit values of the ASC (for instance granting abilities), you'll need to make a BP child of the player state. GSCAbilitySystemComponent will be available there.

If you need to interact with ASC from your Character:

You can call GetAbilitySystemComponent with your actor, it should return the ASC living on PlayerState.
You can add GSCCoreComponent as an actor component on your character and the exposed API (methods, events, etc.) should behave as if ASC was living on the Character.

Character #

Create a Character Blueprint inheriting from GSCModularPlayerStateCharacter either:

From scratch using GSCModularPlayerStateCharacter as the parent class (or your project specific Character class child of GSCModularPlayerStateCharacter).
By duplicating the ThirdPersonCharacter Blueprint that comes with the third person template and reparenting it to GSCModularPlayerStateCharacter.

That's all there is to it, you can choose to also add both:

GSCCoreComponent as an actor component to your character and the exposed API (methods, events, etc.) should behave as if ASC was living on the Character.
GSCAbilityInputBinding as an actor component, if you need abilities to be bound to Enhanced Input actions when granted from the Player State BP (that we're going to create in the next section)

Player State #

With the ASC living on Player State, you'll need to create a child Blueprint of GSCModularPlayerState to be able to access the Ability System Component in order to grant abilities and attributes.

Create a new Blueprint class with GSCModularPlayerState for the Parent class. Once done, you should see GSCAbilitySystemComponent in the components list.

Right click in the Content Browser > New Blueprint Class then choose GSCModularPlayerState for the parent class

Once done, you should see:

For the Player State Class Defaults

For the ASC when the ASC is selected in the components list

And if your Blueprint doesn't contain any Blueprint node, an aggregated version in data-only mode (might need to close and re-open the Blueprint)

Replication Mode #

Player State exposes a ReplicationMode property in case you need to change it from the default Mixed mode. You can mouseover the property to get a brief description on each possible value, and / or head over GAS Documentation related section to know more about it.

As a general rule of thumb, you want:

Full - for single player game
Mixed - for multiplayer, player controlled actors
Minimal - for multiplayer, AI controlled actors

Granted Abilities / Attributes / Effects #

GSCAbilitySystemComponent provides three array properties for abilities, attributes and effects to be granted to the Owner Actor (in this case, the Player State).

Here is the tooltip for each of those:

Name	Description
GrantedAbilities	List of Gameplay Abilities to grant when the Ability System Component is initialized
GrantedAttributes	List of Attribute Sets to grant when the Ability System Component is initialized, with optional initialization data
GrantedEffects	List of GameplayEffects to apply when the Ability System Component is initialized (typically on begin play)

Abilities and Attributes are granted when InitAbilityActorInfo() is called, typically on Character Possession for server, and on Player State replication for clients.

Know that attributes (and abilities) are removed and granted again to their default value whenever this method is invoked (you can override this behavior in a project specific ASC c++ class by overriding GrantDefaultAbilitiesAndAttributes which is virtual)

Game Mode #

Now that we have both the Pawn and Player State created, we can update or create a new Game Mode blueprint with the following configuration:

Game Mode recommended to be based on Game Mode Base

Test #

Let's test out the setup really quickly.

Grant Abilities and Attributes #

Open up the Player State Blueprint, then if you're not in data-only mode, select the Ability System Component in the components list, and add some abilities and attribute sets as shown below:

First we'll grant some abilities and attribute set on the Player State Owner, just as we did in the Quick Start page for ASC on Characters.

For the Character Blueprint, if you want to create an HUD UMG User Widget and add it to viewport, you can follow the below implementation. Additionally, you may want to define an input to manually activate an ability (here GA_Jump).

Note In 5.0, Receive Character Restarted was removed and Receive Restarted available in engine should be used instead.

You can choose any User Widget child of GSCUserWidget (there are 3 different UMG implementation in GAS Companion Content folder), or your own one.

PIE #

If we test in PIE, we should see the HUD widget initialized with the values set by the initialization Datatable (here DT_Player_Attributes)

HUD widget should be initialized with values defined in GrantedAttributes for the Player State's ASC

And if we input showdebug abilitysystem in the console, we should see the gameplay debugger displaying information about the state of our ASC on Player State Owner and Character Avatar.

For the first page of the gameplay debugger showing granted attributes

Type AbilitySystem.Debug.NextCategory to navigate to the next gameplay debugger categories.

For the second page of the gameplay debugger showing granted effects (if you granted some in the GrantedEffects array for the Player State's ASC).

For the second page of the gameplay debugger showing granted abilities (if you granted some in the GrantedAttributes array for the Player State's ASC).