ARK: Harmonic Convergence

Development Modding ARK: Survival Evolved
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Hello everybody!

I’d like to announce a mod a friend and I are working on:

ARK: Harmonic Convergence

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The world is in turmoil as the four nations struggle for control of a newly discovered island rich in resources. Aggravated by the conflict, as well as the impending Harmonic Convergence, spirit sightings have been on the rise. Amid the struggles, the Avatar - master of the four elements - attempts to quell the spirits and maintain peace and harmony between the four nations.

Decide which banner you will fight for and claim the island for your nation!

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If you couldn’t tell from the introduction, this mod is based off of Avatar: The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra. The basic idea is to have four pre-defined tribes (or tribe alliances): Air Nomads, Earth Kingdom, Fire Nation, and Water Tribe. Each tribe has custom armor/weapons/flags, as well as the ability to “bend” the element they are named for.

The other main part of this mod, if possible in ARK, is the idea of capturable areas to claim land for your nation. The goal is to run this on a PvP server and somehow outline each nation’s boundaries and make it so that only the borders are PvP zones (the rest of the nation would work something like jslay’s PvP Safe Zones). We have a couple ideas in mind for this part:

  1. (Probably easier) Have pre-placed capture points scattered all over the map and let nations capture them using some game mechanic.
  2. (Probably more difficult, but more rewarding) Provide an expensive but craftable nation flag item that players can place within a certain range of their existing boundaries to claim more land.

Short-term goals:

  1. Basic bending moves for each of the four elements.
  2. Capture points that can be placed by admins and are capturable by each nation and provide specific buffs to the nation that captures it.
  3. Custom armor for each nation.

Long-term goals (if possible)

  1. Custom structures for each nation.
  2. Advanced elemental bending mechanics.
  3. Spirits that appear and attack when resources in an area are harvested too quickly.
  4. Sozin’s comet.
  5. Two boss spirits (think Raava and Vaatu from Legend of Korra) that appear if too many spirits spawn.
  6. An Avatar mechanic that picks random players to be the Avatar (can use all four elements) and changes players at the player’s death.
  7. Custom bending animations.
  8. Custom creatures like flying bison, trinoceros, ostrich horse (“bird horse thing” according to Sokka), etc… (We am aware this is unlikely due to the modeling involved.)
  9. Basic NPC guards to guard the borders of each nation.

Also, any Avatar references in this mod may be replaced with something generic, depending on if there could be any conflict with copyright law or anything like that.

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We’ve already finished a lot of the custom armor and flags, and we’re currently working on getting basic firebending to work, but we’re very new to Unreal Engine. We know this is a huge, ambitious project, but we’re determined to at least get the basic bending done and use this as a learning experience.

We’ve been going through tutorials like candy and we’re making progress, but there are some questions we have that tutorials aren’t answering (yet):

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Is PlayerTestPawn related to PlayerTestPawn_Male and PlayerTestPawn_Female, and if so, how?

How can you make a particle generator activate multiple instances at once or in quick succession while the first particle is still playing? Is it possible?

How do you get a list of what is in a player’s inventory and check for a certain item?

Can you intercept events and cancel them (e.g. detecting an attack and cancelling it so the player does nothing)?

Is there a way to make a particle component point the direction the player is looking on all three axes?

How can you make a custom animation that fires an event at a certain point during the animation?

How do you use a projectile movement component?

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If anybody knows the answers to these questions or would even like to be our mod mentor (or… “modtor”? :/), we’d appreciate any feedback or guidance! We’re eating up knowledge like hotcakes!

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I’m busy but I’ll answer with what I can off the top of my head without going into too great of detail:

It’s the parent of the two gender childs. Anything changed in the parent, added or removed, is inherited by the gender-childs

For this I would look at copying a projectile, an arrow for example, stripping out the mesh, and adding in a particle system component(if one doesn’t exist in there already) that activates on BeginPlay of the projectile and this allows you to spawn as many actors(the projectile) in as rapid or as slow succession as you would like.

Get a reference to the player via some means, overlap check, hit detection, a trace - there’s a few options. Once you have the reference(all options will likely only give you an ‘actor’ reference) cast to either your pawn or just ShooterCharacter and get the inventory component(it’s a variable) then from that get the Inventory Items array(another variable). That gives you all of the PrimalItem’s contained within the Inventory, but from the component reference itself is where you manipulate the inventory with ARK-nodes else it won’t work and you need to handle inventory manipulation from the server.

This depends. I don’t think the pawn has any attack abilities, which is why fists are actually an equippable weapon, but on weapons you can override the function CanFire or CanAttack - something along those lines.

I assume by that image of the fireball is somewhat what you’re referring to? If so, like I mentioned above, if you spawn the actor you’re given the ability to specify a transform. For this, I would “Make” a transform - and some tinkering will be needed with a bit of back and forth to fully realise something that looks realistic enough in regards to the hand locations - but basically you’ll need the actor location of whatever is spawning the projectile and its rotation(I would add 90.0 to the pitch or something - this entirely depends though on how the projectile is setup though, namely in regards to if you left the p/s pointing up, or rotated it to be pointing down the X-axis already(X is universally treated as forward if you didn’t know)). One thing that could help here is the use of AnimNotify’s for calling the projectile spawning as you could have two pre-configured locations for spawning but then choose which one to use depending on which hand called the event(I think they have separate animations as the triggered one is random).

I would suggest googling AnimNotify and AnimBP Custom Events, otherwise I would suggest speaking to Samson on Discord about it as I believe he did some extensive work with AnimBP’s for NPC Bush People.

I would suggest googling UE4 Projectile Movement Component - this is not ARK specific and is an engine feature.

-WM

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Thank you so much for all of your help! This has been extremely helpful in learning how stuff works.

Funny story about the projectile movement component. I had been playing around with it on my PlayerPawnTest but didn’t think it was doing anything, but then I realized I was slowly sliding across the ground while testing something else… and then it struck me exactly how that thing works. > <"

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Things are starting to come together, here is the workshop content page: Steam Community :: Error