Able Ability System Info and Support Thread

ExtraLifeMatt · April 7, 2020, 8:37pm

Able v3.28 has been submitted.

Notes:

Added Task check system.

OVERVIEW: The past few patches have been aimed at making Custom Tasks references less fragile. UE4 has a hard time replacing Custom Task references in the Abilities (when you recompile the Custom Task in Blueprints, the system needs to fix up all the old class instances to point to the new class instances). There’s a couple reasons why I think this is happening, but all of them require engine level changes - so that’s out. Instead, Able tries to catch the bad references after the fact and fix things itself. While the current system of hot swapping works for me, other users haven’t been as fortunate due to what I think is a timing issue based on peoples CPU / HDD speeds and the async nature of BP compiling. This additional system gives another layer of hopefully catching these bad references and fixing them.

HOW IT WORKS: The new system is transparent to the user. Whenever any type of Custom Task is added to an Ability (or already exists on an Ability) - that Ability will store a bit of data about that Task. The Class name, start/end times, etc. Occasionally (every 1s currently, or on Save/Play), the Ability will check for any out of date references - if detected, it’ll re-create the Task in place and the user should be none the wiser. This data is only used by the Editor, so it won’t bloat your cooked assets. If you open up an Ability with a Custom Task and it gets marked as “dirty” despite you not changing anything - that’s because it’s trying to cache some of that Task data. Just save it or ignore it (but it’ll keep doing it till you save it with the cached data).

Added “Clear Context Targets” option to Collision Sweep / Query Tasks, this option will clear out Targets in the context before adding new ones.