Able Ability System Info and Support Thread

Community Marketplace
1652

Following the Able tutorial 1 on youtube. ( Able Tutorial #1 - Creating a Simple Ability - YouTube ).

As soon as I change damage target to Target Actor, the ability gives data validation errors on save:

No Query Dependency Defined: stdAttack with GetCopyResultsToContext
/Game/Abilities/stdAttack contains invalid data.
Data validation FAILED.
Files Checked: 1, Passed: 0, Failed: 1, Skipped: 0, Unable to validate: 0

Any idea what would be causing this?

Thanks for your time.

1653

It’s complaining that you have the Task Target set to “Target Actor” but you don’t have Targeting defined on the Ability or a Dependency setup on a Query Task (you need one of the two to use the Target Actor Task Target). If you have a query Task setup in your Ability, just make sure you add a Depedency (right click on the Damage Task and set the dependency on your Query).

1654

Able 3.50 being submitted later today, notes below:

1655

, you are magnificent. Thank you.

1656

Good idea is a good idea. Thanks for suggesting it.

1657

So I recently got the system and I have been trying to figure out the ins and outs of the system ever since.
I got stuck on many simple things and for the most part your tutorials helped me figure out what I was either doing wrong or how to approach a problem. So that was cool and helpful.

But I have still some things that I am trying to figure out how to do at all, and several things that I have figured out how to do, but I am unsure if they would be considered best practice.

Anyway, enough of preamble, I really really like the system and hope it can achieve all I am looking for it to accomplish, so let us get down to the heart of the matter.

#1: I guess is maybe a bug;
If I had an animation to play that I wanted to loop. It would work fine if the animation was shorter than 1.0 seconds, since that is the default length of the loop property. But, something that took me some trial and error to find out was that, if you have animation longer than 1.0 seconds both the loop length and ability length needed to be equal to or greater than the animation length for it to loop. Otherwise it would not loop and I assume because the animation would start, but would never signal that it was complete, thus not allowing it to start again. If the loop length and ability length was exactly the same length as the animation, it would still not loop in some cases. I think this was due to possible rounding error of the animation length. So increasing the loop length and ability length by 0.01 would allow it to loop again. Maybe this is just my lack of understanding, but maybe it is something that needed fixing.

#2: An issue I could not find a solution for;
I would like to have something like an ability going with an animation, and allow it to be cancelled out in the start or in the end of the ability - before committing to the ability and after it had done it’s “thing”. Sort of an abort window in the start for a certain period, in case you quickly decided to do something else, like a dodge away. Let us say for the sake of example the first 0.5 seconds. Also, in the end of the ability, the animation could also be cancelled, sort of like if the damage had been dealt and now you could, if you wanted, shorten the last bit of the animation by cancelling it out.

In both these cases (the start and end of the ability), I would like to react to something less specific than a bunch of inputs but rather something generic, like “any key”, so if the player controller either moved or used an input that would start another ability, regardless of which input that was. So a “cancel on any key”.

I tried channeling in the ability settings, but could not get it to work well, and required a lot of specific inputs to look for, and even with this approach I could not figure out how to cancel on moving.
I tried a condition check, but couldn’t figure out a good way to check for generic input that would not be confused with that initial input that started the ability in question.

Any help on this issue would be appreciated.

#3: It would be cool to have a tutorial that is a bit more complex;
To understand what is the best practices, flows and ways to communicate with several abilities interacting. For example:
-1 Pawn 1 does ability A, an axe swing. Ability A scans for targets. One of the targets, Pawn 2, is using another ability that interupts swings. Have pawn 1 cancel ability A, transition into ability B, some form of ability showing the pawn being stunned. Have pawn 2 react that it successfully interupted an ability, by playing some particle effect and sound effect in the location where pawn 1 detected a hit on pawn 2 with ability A.

I hope you get what I am getting at, some communcating between pawns and having things be affected and changed based on different bit of information back and forth. A best practice of those scenarios would be really awesome.

#4: Just thought of another thing as well, an issue I ran into,
In one of your tutorials you show how to extend calculating damage based on for example the armor type of the target. That is fine and all, but I tried to put this kind of logic more easily accessable in a blueprint function library, so that this logic would not have to be copy pasted into every ability that was going to determine damage the same way. But it seems function libraries are off limits to be called from inside the ability, atleast in the determine damage methods. I would really like to know why and how to better solve this situation so that I could alter a damage calculation in one place rather than ten different abilities. :slight_smile:

1658

Great update! And I want to know does this feature supported? Feature: My one ability is looping, and I found this ability’s task’s Disable just only check at first loop, but I need to check every loop, in order to Enable/Disable some task at runtime. btw, my ability is activity ability not passive.

1659

Yea, it’s in there. Just missed it on the notes.

1660

#1 Sounds like maybe you have Animation Interrupt on Stop enabled? Or you are using some Animation Mode (Single Instance) that is causing Able to reset your Animation Mode back to whatever it previously was when the Ability started after the Task ends. I highly suggest you check out the Ability Animation Node mode for Able as that won’t reset your instance, dynamic montages should be fine as well.

#2 You can put branches in your first 0.5 seconds of your Ability if you know what they are trying to branch to (either hardcoded or return the expected Branch ability in Blueprints). Otherwise I’d just interrupt the current Ability in progress, no reason why not.

#3 In your example you could just do what you mentioned, Pawn 2 cancels the Ability of Pawn 1. Pawn 1 can override the “On Ability Interrupted” in the Ability A to play some new Ability that transitions to the stumble / stun Ability. I’ve been trying to think of some new tutorials lately (a bunch of stars have to align - e.g., I have to make all the assets to I can distribute the example, etc), so it’s definitely on my mind to add a few more examples.

#4 You should be able to use Blueprint Function Libraries with the callbacks. Not sure why you wouldn’t be able to. Maybe you had the Context Sensitive option checked? I’ll try that locally and see what I find.

1661

Updated was submitted this morning. Took me a bit do the integrate as I had to touch every file to update the copyright info (and 4.24 is a nightmare to maintain due to it being before the UProperty -> FProperty mass change). As always, let me know if you run into any issues once it goes live.

1662

Thanks a lot for taking the time to help. I will try to recreate what I can to more clearly explain the troubles I have run into. Let me start with the 4:th point.

So to show what I have done I made this picture of what I experienced.

Top part of the image is a blueprint function library and I made a simple pure function without any logic in it.
Left part is an ability damage calculation where I try to call this function, and it does not show up.
Right part is a character blueprint in the event graph where I try to do the same and it shows up like expected.

I assume I have done something fundamentally erroneous.

1663

Ok so I recorded a recreation of what I experienced to show what is happening. I am sorry for the poor video quality, I just threw together the recording to show the issue.
I will explain some of the things going on.

I add a play animation task and add a montage. I hover over the animation length shown in hte middle (it says 2.03 seconds, but the quality is a bit poor).
I uncheck stop on interupt (that you suggested might be the issue), I change to dynamic montage.
I copy the ability length to the loop end time (length is 2.033333 despite animation showing as 2.03 in the main window, I assume because of two decimal rounding). I play the ability again to show it not loop.
I change ability length to 2.05 as well as loop end to 2.05. I play again and the ability loops.

Video link: https://youtu.be/b5DL0O-Vu5o

I hope that makes it clear.

1664

Huh, weird. Likely the loop time is so close to the actual ability time that when it goes to loop it’s filtering out the Animation Task when figuring out what to loop (it removes any Tasks that aren’t within that Loop Start / Loop End times). At least that’s my wild guess. I’ll look at it once the pending update is out in the wild.

1665

So let us say that I want to be able to cancel the active ability playing by moving in any direction according to axis mappings. Then I would put the logic outside of the ability itself instead of inside the ability, where the axis mappings are handled?
I have tried different things but to no avail can I get an ability to cancel out, from inside the ability, if “any key”, either a different ability or movement is triggered. Is my understanding correct?

While going throug the documentation to make sure I did not miss anything, I noticed that the task “Branch” variable “Identifier” under “Dynamic properties” is not mentioned in the documentation. I am having trouble seeing how and where I can access this identifier. It does not seem to available in context or branching ability data in the “CanBranchTo” function. Would you mind pointing me in the right direction?

Lastly, could you look at the picture in the link that I posted in comment #1631 and tell me what I am doing wrong when trying to access a blueprint function library from inside an ability?

1666

Yes, you would want to put that in your character somewhere. In theory you could put it in the Ability Task Tick - but that’s a bit heavy IMO. I would just make a gameplay tag called, “AbilityCancelOnMovement” and when your Ability plays, add that tag to the character. In the Character’s Tick (which has to run anyway) - check if the Player is playing an Ability, and if that Ability has that tag - if so and the player is moving, simply cancel the Ability.

I go into that in the latest video a bit. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOJ0WR9B75E Those are “Dynamic Bindings” which allow you to swap the value of that field at runtime. They’re called automatically by Able under the hood. In theory, since their just BP functions, you could call them - but only by the Ability’s own blueprint, not by anyone else.

With regard to the Blueprint Library, I can’t really say. I haven’t had a lot of time to dig into it yet. If you open up the Ability Blueprint and just filter methods by “library” - you’ll see quite a few methods (I get Oculus and a few other VR items). Looks like a normal Blueprint function library under the hood, BlueprintPure / BlueprintCallable both seem to work. You might want to make sure you setup a proper category so you can find things directly “MyFunctionLibrary|MyFunction”. But, that’s all I can offer at the moment. I can look once this update is out and my plate thins a bit.

1667

Able abilities aren’t Actors, they’re Objects. It’s likely you’re running afoul of the issue outlined here: https://answers.unrealengine.com/que…in-an-obj.html and here: https://answers.unrealengine.com/que…nt-326679-form

That first post has a few workarounds, but that’s the core of it. Just an old issue nobody has gotten around to properly fixing yet. A less hacky solution, in my opinion, would be to use a Blueprint Interface instead, as this will give you the freedom to change the function’s implementation per-class.

1668

3.50 is LIVE.

HUGE HEADS UP

  • Part of the delay for 3.50 is because the MacOS build was failing due to shadowed field warnings (meaning you have some local/global field named the same as an already existing field). This required changing the name of EVERY Task Realm and Task Target enum under the hood. In my local tests, UE seemed to handle that just fine - but I’ve already had at least one person who ended up with **ATT_MAX **as their Task Target type - which isn’t valid and Able will crash on you. So, **PLEASE DOUBLE CHECK ALL TASK TARGETS / TASK REALMS **once you upgrade.
  • Again, as part of these changes, Ability Contexts, Ability Scratchpads and Task Scratchpads are re-used. Make sure you properly overload GetScratchPadClassName in the Ability BP AND overload the ResetScratchPad methods so you can clear our any data in your scratchpads between runs. If you don’t do this, you’ll get weird errors.

Known Issues so far:

  • ResetAbilityScratchPad / GetAbilityScratchPadClass are showing up as “Create Ability Scratchpad” in the editor. Stupid copy and paste error. The one that wants a UCLASS returned is the GetAbilityScratchPadClass, the one that doesn’t want a return (and passes in the Scratchpad ) is the reset.
1669

UPDATE:

Real dumb bug with the Context re-use (it’s not clearing out Targets from previous runs). Going to get a hotfix out with that change and the fixes for the known issues I mentioned above.

Able 3.51 submitted.

To work around the issues, you can disable Ability Context re-use in the Able settings, or just wait till this hotfix hits.

1670

Just saw the lock made it in, too. <33

1671

Can anyone get a Cone query shape to function properly? If I use a cone I rarely get a collision. If I use a sphere I get hits, same collision channel, same filters, drawing the collision query shows the query cone intersecting with objects.

With the cone I also get some bizarre results if i use an FOV of 110. The edge points seem to extend a couple thousand units to the side.
With cubes i get hits, but drawing the query in-game the size and orientation of the cube changes (generally a non cube shape) depending on the direction I’m facing.

I dont know if this has something to do with my character/controller or if these collision shapes are just funky.