Advanced Climbing System

Hey,

I’ve been working on a climbing system for the past weeks. It’s still a work in progress and I’ve been thinking about restarting the whole project and cleaning up unnecessary calculations and variables.

For better visualisation, a small demonstration:

Nice work! Animations look really clean already.

Thanks! Sadly the computations are heavily optimized for those specific animations, so if I were to decide that I would like to use other animations I would have to do a lot of adjustments. But I am working on a optimization-friendly version.

Do you mean computationally optimized (cpu intensive) or aesthetically (like making sure the hands are in the right place)? Looking great btw.

I mean aesthetically. For example: I have implemented some delays directly into the code that make sure that the player is not able to move during some special events. And since those delays are not as long as the actual animation, I have adjusted them according to what I felt looked best. If I were to use another animation I would have to go back to those nodes and adjust them, so that’s one point I would like to fix.

Looking really nice so far. I have 2 questions:

  1. Is this using root motion or not?
  2. I didnt see any climb up to surface animations here, is that something youll do tho?
  1. So far I did not make use of root motion since I wanted the system to be as dynamic as possible. That way there are no limitations as to how far away a ledge is allowed to be. Of course the designer (or whoever decides what looks good) would have to decide how far away the ledge is allowed to be so that the everything still looks good.

  2. Climbing up to a surface is not yet implemented due to a lack of a nice animation. As I’ve stated before I try to work as closely with the animations as possible and therefore I didn’t want to implement the climbing up to a surface if I did not have the proper animations.

Looks great. Any you are planning on releasing this either on github or the market place?

I was indeed thinking about releasing it to the marketplace, but not the current version. I would like to restart the project and reshape the system to be customization-friendly. Also, I would like to clean up everything. Because right now many parts are still uncommented and would be difficult to understand without some guidance. And if I am really to release it to the marketplace I would like to release it under a fairly cheap price because I think many UE4-Users are building games for fun and do not have a huge budget.

Sounds good. I agree completely with you. I am funding my game from my own pocket as i think a lot of people are doing so really appreciate it when people release quality assets at a good price. Look forward to seeing updates in the future :slight_smile:

Nice work :slight_smile:

Yeah, you have no Idea how much I need this,
But anyway, looks great!

Really excellent Bugmee, incredibly flexible and solid hand-grabs! I’m intrigued that you do it all without root motions.

A couple of features that I’d really like to see…

  • climb up… just as Adeptus mentions
  • vines… no need for ledges, just scramble about any surface that’s been nominated as ‘vine’

Really interested to see when this is done and on the marketplace. I’m a buyer :smiley:

I know this is going to sound crazy, but even if the price is a bit expensive… i.e. north of USD 100… if you’ve developed the skills and put your time into building a solid all-round climbing system that works reliably: USD 100+ is WELL worth it for a top-notch product with (reasonably) responsive support, though I also admire that you are considering us chronically-underfunded indie developers.

Update:

Since the last time, I’ve restarted the project (code is now mostly clean), included IK for the feet and added support for circular objects.
Some of the animations have also been refined and the whole system is a lot more customizable now.

Once again, a small demonstration:

You add climbing up, multidirectional vine climbing and multidimensional pole climbing and i am in for over $100. Looks great man.

Looks really impressive. What’s the approach - does it require placing of dedicated actors/components or works automatically on any level geometry? From the videos I’m guessing it must be the former method, but would be interested to know some more technical details.

It works automatically on any level geometry, as long as you set its collision to overlap my custom trace channels. Basically the system checks for a ledge and then checks if the ledge is climbable from that direction. So as long as you set the trace response for said geometry to overlap with my custom trace channels (doable with one mouseclick) , the geometry is climbable.

Update:

Hopping between ledges is now implemented in the new system.

Todo:

  • climbing up to the surface
  • documentation

Requested Features that may be implemented:

  • vines
  • poles

As for the pricing: I’ve thought about making it available for 30 USD. I’ve put a lot of time and effort into this project, but I don’t think overpricing it would serve anyone any good. Besides I’m really looking forward to seeing my climbing system implemented in other people’s games :smiley:

Obligatory demonstration:

Looks awesome! i would be interested in getting it when you release it. Does it use Blueprints or c++?

Wow, this is amazing compared to the one I made a year ago. Good work!