Able Ability System Info and Support Thread

[ExtraLifeMatt]

@JSwigart

Is it possible to pass data from one ability to another other? I’m trying to prototype some abilities that don’t seem to map into the way Able works, so I’m looking for recommendations. I like the system but it feels like it has a narrow band of utility when it comes to setting up abilities, particularly abilities that involve more than 1 phase of state.

For example, I have a “ground pound” ability that is split into 2 abilities. I’ll call them Pound_Air, and Pound_Land for reference

Pound_Air - The first ability is activated when the character is in the falling state and they press the attack button. This ability loops and starts an animation with the characters fist raised in preparation. It also has a branch which checks for whether the character has landed. When the character lands, this ability branches to Pound_Land

Pound_Land - This action immediately starts an animation, effects, and sounds for pounding the ground, as well as some radius queries and damage tasks.

The problem is that the Pound_Air needs to perform some logic that results in some information that Pound_Land needs, such as evaluating whether the landing (based on velocity, etc) should be a heavy or a light Pound_Land, and there doesn’t appear to be a mechanism to pass data between abilities. Requiring different

It looks like the closest thing available would require modifications, and that would be the key value set on the ability context, and extend the branch task to copy the key/value set like it does the targets, but it doesn’t feel ideal. It also doesn’t feel ideal to make a bunch of individual ability elements just to account for the different phases of a broader ability concepts. It’d be great if these abilities were authorable similar to how montages are authorable, with several discrete ‘sections’ that represent different phases of an ability. In that case the in air and land could be part of a single ability, which is far nicer to work with and also limits the scope for issues like this where data sharing is necessary.

Have you set up some non trivial abilities like this? And if so, how did you resolve these issues?

Sorry for the delay on this, I swear Epic only sends every other notification.

No, currently there is no way to pass information from one ability to another. The way I got around that in the Chain Lightning example is just to store that info on the target (or the player itself) and the other ability just asks the player for the info. You could pass in the old context into the new ability to let it grab whatever, but I currently don’t have that setup.

@JSwigart

Also, why does the code of UAblBranchTask ultimately pass the current context ability to the CanBranchTo function? I thought for sure it would pass the desired destination ability. Otherwise having multiple branch tasks within the same ability wouldn’t be distinguishable from each other in the CanBranchTo code. Am I missing something here?

It should pass the current context and the Ability it wants to transition to. If it’s not, that’s a bug (although I swear that was fixed recently). I’ll verify again.

@Kenyon1977

Hi
Does able ability system allows additive animation playback? So we can layer one animation over another, and possible by body parts?

Layering your animations is driven entirely through the Animation Blueprint system. Able does have a special animation node that will blend between animations you call in Able (if you’re using that mode) so you can dynamically blend between sword swings or what ever, but if you want to actually break it up so the top of the skeleton does one animation while the lower half does another - you’ll have to set that up yourself.