Able Ability System Info and Support Thread

ExtraLifeMatt · April 11, 2018, 2:02pm

v2.21 hasn’t been published by Epic yet. It’s still in the processing phase (hence why I was able to sneak that fix in). Hopefully it’ll be out today or tomorrow.

The whole event vs function thing is a bit of a misnomer. OnAbilityStart/End/etc are all functions, technically. They’re called directly at specific points and not using the delegate system or anything like that. So, if you just overload it from the Function list - it should actually work identically as just dragging nodes off the default nodes that are populated in the graph normally.

That said, it’s all moot as this is fixed in v2.21 so just hold tight and update as soon as you can, then you should be good to go.

anonymous_user_cf025a94 · April 12, 2018, 11:02pm

can’t wait to give it a try, me waiting for 2.21 to release: https://media.giphy.com/media/Jq7y34Hgfy01y/giphy.gif

anonymous_user_e815e8ea · April 13, 2018, 6:35pm

Hey again,

After updating, I can’t find blueprint preview assets. If I select the parent or the class itself in the first window, nothing shows up in the second one. This was working fine before. If I try finding a skeletal mesh asset then it works, but I can’t use these since I’m utilizing the ability node.

I also have the same issue as Talanar where the “unrecognized tab” opens. Does nothing as far as I know, but probably shouldn’t be there hahah.

Edit: Unfortunately it seems that the animation speeding up with weird blending issue is still there. Any comments on that?

ExtraLifeMatt · April 13, 2018, 7:11pm

Hmm, I didn’t change the Preview code. I can check and see if that broke. Refresh my memory on the animation speeding up? I’ll try and repro that this weekend.

anonymous_user_e815e8ea · April 13, 2018, 8:50pm

Thanks! I’ll copy paste Fernmerc’s posts, he has the same issue(s) I have:

Whenever I branch into another ability, the branched ability plays much faster. I’m not sure if it’s the animation or the ability itself, but I tried disabling “scale with ability play rate” and it didn’t change anything. I have a simple sword slash that branches into itself (I tried other abilities as well), and if I press and hold mouse, the first ability plays fine, then the second one plays nearly twice as fast. Then the third one plays normal again, and then the fourth one fast again, and it keeps repeating in this pattern.

At first I thought it was some issue with the blending, that maybe I was branching too early causing it to look like that, but I placed the branch all the way at the end and the same thing still happens. If I just wait a few frames more for the ability to end and then trigger the ability to end, it plays normally, meaning it’s not a blending issue since the pose is pretty much the same.

Any idea what this could be?

Thanks! I also have another issue relating to it when I use looping. I’m trying to implement my bow mechanics using Able, and I have three abilities; one for draw, another one for aim, and another one for fire, in which they branch to each other in succession.

The first issue I had was that the blending wasn’t working correctly, just like with the previous issue. The draw animation ends where the aim animation begins, but instead if I place the branch anywhere other than after the first animation has ended, he will quickly revert to idle and then blend into the aim animation. I ended up placing the branch .2 seconds after the draw animation had finished and even though there’s a really tiny hiccup in between the abilities it’s good enough for me as a workaround right now. If I put it .1 seconds after the draw animation finishes, there’s a chance (~20%) that it’ll revert to idle and then blend into the animation, as it shouldn’t. For all I know there’s still a chance of it happening .2 seconds after and I just haven’t experienced it yet, but it’s just a temporary workaround.

The issue I mentioned came after, in the second ability. If I set the aim ability to loop, and I break the channel condition to escape the loop, it restarts the animation from the beginning to the end instead of just breaking off right away. This one is also really weird, because I put a custom event near the beginning that fires in every loop iteration, but if I break the channel condition midway through the loop and it starts it from the beginning, the custom event does not fire. So then I realized it’s not the ability starting all over, it’s just the animation. I placed an animnotify in the beginning of the animation and it prints a string if I break the channel condition near the end of the ability. I know it’s related to the previous issue, because it works fine in single node; the issues only happen with the ability animation node. Unfortunately I can’t use single node as aimoffsets don’t work and there’s no transition. Ability interrupt is also called when it should be, so it’s purely an animation issue.

In case my explanation isn’t clear enough, here’s the issue laid out plainly:

One ability branches to the other (only issue here is the same one as before, weird blending)

Second ability loops from start to finish indefinitely; all it contains is a single animation task, using ability node.

This ability is channeled, channel condition being mouse press

Mouse is pressed and held all the way until the second ability

Mouse is released any time during the second ability (can be first loop iteration, tenth loop iteration, it doesn’t matter)

Animation replays from the beginning (animnotify fires) instead of being broken out of

Only occurs using ability animation node, not single node

Any help is appreciated, it’s driving me crazy!

SteamPunkProgrammer also posted about what is most likely the same issue:

So I bought the able ability system this weekend, and it works pretty good, but I found an issue. I can’t see to cancel an abilities animation early, I wired up a custom event, cancel the ability (which does appear to cancel the ability itself) but the animation just continues to play no matter what, UNLESS I make it play another animation via a branch instead of a cancel, that will instantly end the first animation. Any hints as to what I need to do to ensure the animations cancel correctly with the ability itself? (I am using Ability Animation Node, have that all setup in the correct fields and I have ‘stop on interrupt’ turned on which I would have thought would do what I want, but it doesnt). If I try to use ‘interrupt’ for the result to use in the cancel ability method, it seems to just reset the animation.

Thanks for your time!

Edit: I think another user also has the same issue as me with the preview asset:

ExtraLifeMatt · April 13, 2018, 9:22pm

The speed up I haven’t seen in the test app I have that loops an animation with a branch on itself, but I’ll see what I can find. Same with the preview asset stuff.

In the meantime, SteamPunkProgrammer fixed the ability canceling by tweaking his Animation Blueprint:

anonymous_user_e815e8ea · April 13, 2018, 9:54pm

If you press and hold F in the test project Fernmerc submitted, every other ability animation iteration isn’t sped up? It is for me, and that’s the same issue I have in my own project.

mesterKG · April 14, 2018, 4:45pm

I’m still getting the crash in standalone when using Able. I’m now using v2.21 and custom built engine with the recommended change that was supposed to fix it. Any ideas, @?

barney87 · April 15, 2018, 8:13am

@mesterKG I get the crash when using standalone too.

@ I managed to get standalone working by changing the Type in UPlugin from this



        {
            "Name": "AbleEditor",
            "Type": "Editor",
            "LoadingPhase": "PreDefault",
            "WhitelistPlatforms": 
                "Win64",
                "Win32",
                "Mac",
                "Linux"
            ]
        }

to this



        {
            "Name": "AbleEditor",
            "Type": "Developer",
            "LoadingPhase": "PreDefault",
            "WhitelistPlatforms": 
                "Win64",
                "Win32",
                "Mac",
                "Linux"
            ]
        }

Is this safe to do? or will it cause me issues?

mesterKG · April 15, 2018, 10:15am

I did the change described by there and now Standalone from editor works like a charm. No custom engine required.

–kg

ExtraLifeMatt · April 15, 2018, 10:09pm

barney87:

@mesterKG I get the crash when using standalone too.

@ I managed to get standalone working by changing the Type in UPlugin from this
{
"Name": "AbleEditor",
"Type": "Editor",
"LoadingPhase": "PreDefault",
"WhitelistPlatforms": 
"Win64",
"Win32",
"Mac",
"Linux"
]
}
to this
{
"Name": "AbleEditor",
"Type": "Developer",
"LoadingPhase": "PreDefault",
"WhitelistPlatforms": 
"Win64",
"Win32",
"Mac",
"Linux"
]
}
Is this safe to do? or will it cause me issues?

Interesting… I’m not sure what changing the Type to Developer does (maybe standalone doesn’t consider itself an Editor app?), I’m slightly shocked that fixes it but ¯_(ツ)_/¯

I’ll do some digging and see what could come out of that, and if it seems okay - I’ll push it in the next update.

barney87 · April 15, 2018, 11:27pm

I also tried setting it to “Runtime” and that seems to work as well. From what I can understand of the UE docs, the developer type may not load module in shipping builds. I have absolutely no idea how any of this plugin stuff works, so it may break other things, all I know that changing it got standalone working.

ExtraLifeMatt · April 16, 2018, 1:42am

It shouldn’t be trying to load the AbleEditor portion anyway for stand alone (there’s no reason for it if it’s just launching the blueprint as a compiled asset). I’m still digging into it. Runtime is definitely not intended as that would load the Editor specific code when running the game - which you don’t want. Developer sounds okay, but I’m still digging to better understand what is going on here and why that seems to fix it

I was able to repro it and track the issue down. Looks like if you have a queue’d up animation that you are blending to, that animation gets updated twice (and thus plays 2x).

The fix is to simply comment out (or remove) this line in the AnimNode_AbilityAnimPlayer.cpp:



            //m_NextSequenceInternalTimeAccumulator += Context.GetDeltaTime();

The MakeSequenceTickRecord does that logic, so it’s not needed to do it before hand. I’ll push that fix out as well as soon as I understand the fix barney87 is doing and what can come from that. Feel free to make the change locally if you need it before then.

barney87 · April 16, 2018, 4:05am

@ I found another bug. After creating a custom task two tasks show up in the add task menu in the Able Editor. One of them will crash Unreal Engine Editor.

To reproduce.

Create third person project
Create new ability based on AblAbility class
Create new custom task based on the AblCustomTask
Click add task in Able Editor in the new ability
You will see two tasks with the same name, except one has a prefix of SKEL
If you click on the SKEL version and save, it will crash UE
If you click on the one not labelled SKEL it seems to work fine.

barney87 · April 16, 2018, 5:46am

@

Also, now that I can finally use Able, I am not sure where to get started.

I have a third person project, and my character shoots projectiles. I use the camera to do a line trace and then offset the rotation of the projectile so that it travels in the direction of my cross-hair. I was hoping I could move my shooting logic into Able.

Here is the current logic I am using (its not quite complete) but it will give you the gist of what I am trying to do.

It doesn’t seem like I can do this (cleanly) in Able, what do you think?

anonymous_user_e815e8ea · April 16, 2018, 6:14am

It shouldn’t be trying to load the AbleEditor portion anyway for stand alone (there’s no reason for it if it’s just launching the blueprint as a compiled asset). I’m still digging into it. Runtime is definitely not intended as that would load the Editor specific code when running the game - which you don’t want. Developer sounds okay, but I’m still digging to better understand what is going on here and why that seems to fix it

I was able to repro it and track the issue down. Looks like if you have a queue’d up animation that you are blending to, that animation gets updated twice (and thus plays 2x).

The fix is to simply comment out (or remove) this line in the AnimNode_AbilityAnimPlayer.cpp:
//m_NextSequenceInternalTimeAccumulator += Context.GetDeltaTime();
The MakeSequenceTickRecord does that logic, so it’s not needed to do it before hand. I’ll push that fix out as well as soon as I understand the fix barney87 is doing and what can come from that. Feel free to make the change locally if you need it before then.

Yesss, this is great, thank you!

ExtraLifeMatt · April 16, 2018, 1:40pm

Thanks, I’ll try this steps and see what I can find. If I had to guess, the SKEL is the uncompiled version of the Custom Task. When you compile a Blueprint it generates a SKEL version (which just has bare bones data - no actual data), and then a final compiled version which is the one you normally interact with. I can try and filter out those SKELs.

There is a Camera Target Type which looks in the direction of the player camera, as well as offsets available. If you look at my Shooter Game tutorial, I do exactly what you’re talking about:

https://extralifestudios.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/ABLE/pages/1212419/Tutorials Watch the Shooter Game video.

barney87 · April 16, 2018, 11:25pm

@
I am not sure that we are talking about the same thing. If I was to use the camera target type and spawn a actor projectile from an offset from the location it the projectiles would not line up with the crosshair. In order for the crosshair to be accurate the offset need to be variable, depending on the targets distance from the camera. Obviously this is not the way it works in the real world, however it feels more natural for the player.

I have drawn a quick diagram which I hope better illustrates how I currently handle projectiles from my third person character. Essentially I get a look at rotation of the hit location from the raytrace and fire the projectile from the character in that direction. (If there is no hit, the projectile will rotate so at the max range of the projectile, it will line up with the crosshair).

anonymous_user_cf025a94 · April 17, 2018, 6:48pm

ok I got some good news.
I finally managed to get the 2.21 working on 4.19.1. This is an instruction for people who just bought it and having troubles running it.

So here’s what I did step by step to make it work (and below I will list what doesnt work):

download release version of the engine from github
hit setup.bat and then generate project files
compile the engine from source
close visual, put the plugin in Engine/Plugins/Able
Hit Generate Project files once again (the one in the engine folder, not the project one)
open solution, compile
run the editor - voila, the plugin is enabled by default, has proper events with context etc.

What DOES NOT work:

getting github version, copying the plugin into the folder before first compilation of the engine and doing the first compilation after putting the plugin there. (so the two step compilation was neccesarry for me)
Getting the 4.19 from marketplace
instaling the plugin through marketplace.

Hope that helps someone.

anonymous_user_875519d0 · April 20, 2018, 1:39am

Glad to hear you fixed the animation blending! Any idea when the update will be out? I’m not sure how to recompile the plugin; I went into the plugin source and commented the line you said I should comment, and I rebuilt the entire solution but I still have the issue. I’m not building the engine from source.