This is an advanced blueprint system that allows you to create animated walking actors and cars, rollercoasters and tracks, skyrails and tracks, and working transport tubes using only splines - no code required.
Features:
Fully procedural
cars, people, rollercoasters, transport tubes, skyrails, and more!
Fully supports First and Third person BP
Spline Event system to add your own blueprint code at points along spline!
Advanced Heirarchical Tree creation functionality - simulate traffic propagation!
I like the idea of Spline driven path generation! It is definitely cheaper than A Star or any comparable pathfinding thats for sure. Right now from your tech demo, I can see it is still a bit rough around the edges but it definitely has potential. =)
The thing is though, why wouldn’t I just use waypoint nodes (i.e a list of destination points) or something like that for giving my agents a set path? And what if obstacles are introduced in the path or the game designer wants to add some variable movements?
Not trying to be discouraging, just thinking of some questions that might be important for you to consider.
Best of luck!
Waypoint nodes are fine, but they just define a path A-B in a straight line and you would need a hell of a lot to fill a big map, this allows very specific configuration of route round a level, that is very smooth due to the spline curve - actors walking along a pavement or around a map, cars filling up the roads. This will also support randomizing of the actors to give a feel of a varied population - each actor can have a different mesh and/or animation set to keep things fresh, and traffic can have bodywork presets that are randomly selected.
In short - this is incredibly simple to use, would be faster and easier to achieve a good result, and doesnt clutter up your level with many waypoints - one controller for each path, thats it, and you can accurately see the path while laying it out.
Your second point is what I am currently working on - I now have collision for each actor which stops all the actors on that track with an event so its easy to add an angry wave or beeping horn to your stuck traffic - also they can recieve damage and be ‘killed’. I also plan to add optional turrets to the vehicles that would track and shoot actors of classes specified on each splinetraffic controller.
I want to stress that this product is not being designed to replace AI. It is designed to either complement it - or be used in situations where AI is not necessary but is being employed due to lack of alternatives; this could be used to populate a museum, be a moving target in your firing range, cars racing against each other in your 3d main menu or a rollercoaster cart riding a track in your theme park, or a plane flying about in the sky, all by changing a few parameters and drawing a line
Hey Bhanshee, yes and no - collision and physics on a spline is quite a finickety business - unreal4 wasnt intended for it so I have had to script my own movement and physics engine for the purpose. However - I have partially developed a way of getting pandemonium style games working properly in unreal, though it is quite complex and at the moment very CPU intensive. When I have finished this project I will investigate further in to it and possibly release a starter package for spline-driven games with the spline movement in C++.
Check the new video above for a demonstration of my spline-physics engine in action
Do you know if there’s a way to have splines move dynamically in real time by allowing the player move waypoints? Like if you were to make Rollercoaster Tycoon and the player needs to move tracks around in-game.
Absolutely, it would need a small amount of blueprint for your player character to add ‘the grab to rail at nearest place and switch to splinemovement’ and play the ‘grab animation’’ bit, but my splines can certainly be used as skyrails. as for the vehicle over rail, thats a built in feature, you just create a child class, choose your mesh, set it to use either steady movement or simulated physics movement, use it in map
I think the skyrails is a great idea tbh, im going to give it a go, ill post a video when I’m done.
Moving the construction script to an event that fires when a user has finished ‘manipulating’ the track would do the generation - as for the track manipulation in realtime it would just require passing variables to the SplineTraffic actor to switch it to low-cpu usage build mode, an ingame spline manipulation tool (I have a physics gun that might work well for the task with a bit of coding). Its definately possible
Great to hear! and thanks for the suggestion I’ll keep working on this flat-out, cant wait to see you use the skyrails in your game - and if there are any other tweaks or additions you feel would be a bonus, let me know!
I’m first in line! I see what you did here. I tried putting the RollerCoaster plugin in the semi-arid desert environment but I keep jumping trac at every control point. Viva a system that works!
Sorry , ive had a load of stuff IRL that have distracted me from this project, but I’m going to finish and submit it very soon - if you want a copy before this (it is fully functional, just could use more development) pm me
It would be an honor to test this in the first hand. I would love to [FONT=Arial Black]
But I think you can not distribute it to any forum user yet. You need submitting it to Marketplace before.