Superpowers Unreal Plugin
An Unreal Engine C++ plugin providing nine fully network-replicated superpowers as independent drop-in components, built for a multiplayer battle royale. Production-grade replication infrastructure rather than a tech demo.
Developer
2024
SuperPowers is a self-contained UE C++ plugin where every superpower is its own Actor Component that drops onto any Character class with no base-class lock-in. Flight, globe shield, ice riding, invisibility, random teleport, scale adjustment, super jump, super speed, and thinning are nine independent components that can be mixed and matched per character. It was built for a multiplayer battle royale; the client shelved the game before completion, but this plugin layer is the part I owned end to end.
Every power is fully multiplayer replicated rather than client-side cosmetic, and they all follow one consistent contract: client input fires a Server Reliable RPC, authoritative state lives in ReplicatedUsing properties registered through GetLifetimeReplicatedProps, and OnRep handlers apply the mesh, animation, and movement changes on every client, with ForceNetUpdate to cut perceived latency. Input is wired through Enhanced Input mapping contexts and decoupled via a shared OnInputSetupDelegate so each component self-registers.
Several powers carry real systems depth beyond the replication boilerplate. The globe shield implements an IDamageableInterface, accumulating absorbed damage until a threshold breaks the shield. Random teleport runs a ten-attempt rejection-sampling loop, validating each candidate destination with a capsule sweep plus a ground line-trace before committing, so the player never teleports into geometry. Super jump uses Enhanced Input Ongoing and Completed triggers to charge and release a jump. Scale adjustment replicates capsule radius and half-height alongside the actor's visual scale so collision stays correct at any size, and super speed drives a per-actor CustomTimeDilation rather than touching global time.
The value of this piece is that it's infrastructure, not a one-off effect reel. Nine powers under one replication contract, each independently attachable, the kind of reusable system a real multiplayer project builds on. I also authored two UE C++ tutorials covering powers from this plugin.
One replication contract across nine very different powers. Flight, invisibility, and scale adjustment have almost nothing in common mechanically, but forcing them all through the same server-RPC-to-RepNotify pattern was what made the plugin coherent and reusable rather than nine bespoke features. The challenge was designing a contract general enough to fit all nine without becoming so abstract it added friction.
Replicating collision-affecting state correctly. Scale adjustment is the subtle one. Changing an actor's visual size client-side is trivial, but if the capsule radius and half-height aren't replicated alongside it, server-side collision desyncs from what players see. Getting altered-size collision authoritative and consistent was the hardest correctness problem.
Safe teleportation in arbitrary geometry. Random teleport can't just pick a point, it has to land somewhere the character actually fits and stands on ground. The rejection-sampling loop (sweep plus ground trace, up to ten attempts) solves this without hard-coding valid spots.