Hello,
I am making a true first person game where you can swing a sword around by just moving the mouse. I have already implemented a dead zone in which if you move the mouse the character will not turn and I also have the lower body locomotion ready.
Also, I’m a blueprints user with not much experience.
I have several options for the upper body and I wanted to ask for opinions.
1- Use blendspaces with poses (OFFSET): I guess it would be the easiest way. One blendspace for sword idle where you can move the sword from top to bottom and left to right inside the dead zone and another blendspace for attacking (the poses would have the arms more extended). Going from one blendspace to another will depend on mouse speed and direction (if you move the mouse with a speed greater than X, the sword will swing instead of moving in an idle form from one point to another). I still have to figure out how to make the sword rotate according to if the swing is left to right and top to bottom or the other way around (all the possible combinations).
Another similar option is to make it so that when you click (or hold) the left mouse button the sword will swing when moved and if you click the right mouse (or hold) your sword gets in the blocking mode (blendspace) while you can still move it around. So basically: Idle->Attack/Block. (It would be three blendspaces?)
2- Make rotator. Using inverse kinematics I could make the arms move according to mouse movement. It will be tricky to get the positions right but it might feel more like “free movement”. I have managed to get movement for one arm this way but it is very complicated and I don’t really know how to get it working for what I want to do. The idea is the same as before, just moving the mouse the arms will get in the desired position and depending on the speed it will be a swing and the direction will depend on the mouse direction.
I don’t know if there are other ways to do it with physics. I would like to have as much freedom of controlling the sword as possible, not to have pre-made swing animations. Do you have any better idea (and how to implement it please)? Here is an example (this is third person mine is true first person):
Thank you.