Able Ability System Info and Support Thread

ExtraLifeMatt · April 16, 2020, 9:46pm

Standalone Game does some weird things with BPs. Does this occur in a packaged project? I’ll keep poking at it.

Able 3.29 Submitted. Notes below:

Fixed a crash when adding Instanced Parameters to Play Particle Effect Task (h/t Roland)

Added an option to enable Preview Asset rotation. It’s defaulted to OFF so, if your mesh is suddenly twisted, just turn the option back on - but hopefully this fixes the reverse case which seemed more prevalent.

Added an option to Play Animation Task to reset the Ability Instance Mode at the end of the Task or not. Previously this was always on, but it does cause an issue for some instances given that resetting the mode also resets the animation tick, so if you see some weirdness at the end of your Play Animation, try disabling this. This is defaulted to ON.

Re-added the Timeline Marker and Scrubbing the Timeline to the Ability Editor. (Whoops, no idea how this got removed, h/t Jeremy for bringing it to my attention).

Removed deprecated Collision Channel field from Query/Sweep Tasks to reduce confusion.

Fix to flickering on Collision shapes when in the Editor. (h/t Jeremy)

Made the Ability Editor a bit smarter about how to watch new Abilities / Custom Tasks for compilation in-case it needs to recreate them.

NEW FEATURE BETA:

Instancing Support - Like GAS, Able now let’s you select how you want an Ability to be instanced. You can find this option under the “Misc” section on the Ability itself.

**Default **- Uses the current behavior which means Abilities are basically read only and all state needs to be in the ScratchPad structure. This has the benefit of only ever needing 1 Ability object in memory at a time, even if there are 100 people using it. However, it does have it’s limits.

Instanced - Creates a new Ability Object at the time of the Ability Execution. That Ability can be written to, state can be stored in it, etc. It will be destroyed/GC’d at the end of the execution. Note that BOTH the Client/Server both get their own unique object, so variables ARE NOT shared in this mode.

Instanced (Replicated) - Creates a new Ability Object on the Server, which then gets replicated down to the Client. Variables that are marked for replication should come down with it, update as expected, etc. Once the Server finishes execution, the object is cleaned up (which will clean it up on the client as well). The Client cannot locally predict Abilities marked with this tag, so I’d avoid using this on anything that isn’t started on the server, or you can live with RTT lag for the Client to start playing it.

This feature is very much in Beta. I have done some small testing to make sure everything isn’t on fire, but it needs a lot more testing before I’m happy with it. Use at your own risk, in which case please send me any bugs you find.