4 directional movement for enemy

ThatGuyMiniB · November 17, 2015, 1:54am

So I am making a top down style hack n slash and I have the player moving in only 4 directions(Up, down, left and down). What I want now is for the enemies to move in a 4 directional way as well. Honestly not sure where to start with this so any help would be appreciated :).

Thanks in advance!

MieszkoZ · November 17, 2015, 2:50am

You have only 3 (reasonable) ways:

Implement custom CharacterMovementComponent and make sure externally requested movement vectors get axis-aligned
Implement custom PathFollowingComponent and axis-align movement vectors passed down to AI’s movement component
Implement grid-based NavigationData along with pathfinder that will generate grid-paths. If you properly generate paths the rest will just work.

Those are the proper ways. I bet there’s a trick solution for it as well, but I don’t do tricks

Cheers,

–mieszko

MieszkoZ · November 17, 2015, 3:48am

The only way I can imagine getting the result you seek in BP is by micro-controlling AI’s movement. I mean telling AI where to go in a straight line and once it gets there tell it again, and again, and so forth.

You should be able to get a “path object” in BP, that could guide this kind of micro-managed movement.

I’m sorry but we don’t support this kind of movement for AI out of the box

MieszkoZ · November 17, 2015, 3:55am

No, I said I can imagine doing this in BP. But either way you’ll need to put some work in, there’s no single switch you can flip to get this behavior.

ThatGuyMiniB · November 17, 2015, 3:07am

Those all sound super complicated XD how would I go about starting the setup in blueprint? I have tried to find stuff on custom character movement component in blueprints but most of the stuff is c++.

ThatGuyMiniB · November 17, 2015, 3:52am

So I would need to use C++ then in order to achieve what I am looking for?

ThatGuyMiniB · November 17, 2015, 4:00am

I’m willing to put in the work just trying to look where to get started. I’ll research what you suggested some more and will come back if I have questions.

Thank you for the help!

ThatGuyMiniB · November 17, 2015, 6:51am

So I have been researching but am having trouble making sense of any of the 3 ways you said I could possibly achieve this.

Justin.Dooley · November 17, 2015, 9:55pm

As a super simple limiter, when you tell the AI to move, make sure that either the X or Y value on the move to is equal to your current location. That would make sure you are only moving either vertically or horizontally.

ThatGuyMiniB · November 18, 2015, 12:09am

So this is what I have for AI so far. Idk if I am doing this correctly or not, but right now it will move to the play when the player passes over a trigger. Should the next step I do be to get player location and then do a break vector and then set actor location to the player?

ThatGuyMiniB · November 19, 2015, 9:46am

Little update. I now have ai movement that can move randomly and then chase the player in vision but what I want to achieve now is to put points on the map and make the ai randomly move to those points but only use one axis at a time. So basically no moving diagonally.