This is the particle effects on the Birds with shadow casting. You can enable
“volumetric shadows” in your project settings, this is because the feathers are casting shadows as masked (see image)
Or if you don’t want to do that in the Bird blueprint on the particles you can disable cast shadows (see image). they are so small that they don’t really need shadow casting, so I think I’ll disable this going forward in the next update. thanks for pointing it out.
This error should be fixed in the new update. its nothing to be concerned about. Something other than one of the Birds hit the perch target (probably a projectile) and the perch was looking for a blackboard value that didn’t exist. This error doesn’t interrupt functionality. In the new update I’ll tell the Perch targets to check if the Hit is a Bird or not, and do nothing if it’s not.
in this example every 10 seconds the level blueprint checks how many NPC Bots are in the level and if its less than 2 then a new Bot is spawned. This is so the Wolves always have cannon fodder.
I’ve just started optimising my current game map and using Level Streaming as my frame rate is beginning to drag from having so much going on in my level.
I’m just wondering about birds. There is always going to be a persistant level plus the levels that get loaded in and out. I’m curious about the best practise for your Birds (and other AI). Should I have them in the persistant level or can I use them in other levels when they get streamed?
You can always spawn or destroy the Birds however you wish. That is up to you as a game designer.
There is no one way to do things. You could measure the distance between the Bird and player character 0, and if over a certain distance- destroy the Bird. Or you can take a more node based approach, for example if player character 0 is over a certain distance from the beach node- destroy all the Birds in the beach area. Then when the player gets closer to the beach node have some spawn points spawn the Birds. There are many ways to do the same thing, it’s all up to what you think is best for your setup.
Understood. Thanks! I think I’ll have different Birds in different volumes and see how that goes. Trying to make everything as optimised as possible as my game is growing out of hand by the day
Thanks for the latest update to Birds. Weirdly, Gunshot doesn’t seem to work in scaring the birds away anymore. I’ve not changed anything since it was working in the previous version. The sight perception seems to still work though as when player character controller gets close, the birds fly away!
Sorry about that, I disabled for some testing and forgot to re-enable. I’ll get that patched up today and resubmit. –UPDATE– The new update is now live. Shooting and Enemy Tag now working as intended.
Your project is looking awesome! I’m getting some serious Half-Life vibes. Keep me posted, i can tell you have already put quite a bit of work into it!
I’m glad your liking the Birds
P.S. I saw you had 999 subscribers, I’m proud to be the person to flip it to 1K.
haha! Thanks man! I’ve hit 1k! Only took about 10 years! Next milestone… 1001
Yes, the Birds are absolutely awesome man. How gonna figure out how to shoot them next. I’m just sort of deeply in environment design at the minute which is taking a lot of time. Yeah my game is a scfi adventure game. Half Life and Fallout are huge influences for me.
I can’t wait to get all your other animals running about as well! One thing at a time though! I need to justify why I have Pigs running around in a scifi adventure game
Hi, I’m thinking about buying these birds. And I want to know: Can the birds fly through the window into the attic and out of the window if the player climbs into the attic?
And the Birds are now reacting again to player proximity and and sound! Love this.
Would adding a flock system be something you would consider adding to Birds at some point? So some way of having many birds all landing at the same place/flying away from the same place. And even having flocks flying in the sky? Would be very cool!
Like vultures circling animals that are going to die or flocks flying and making nice patterns.
Here’s some more work in progress and the start shows player running towards Seagul and scaring it away and then another one on beach gets scared away with gunshot
I just tested in 5.1 and 5.5 of Unreal, and wing flap sounds and individual calls (Seagull, Pigeon, and Crow) are sounding. are you using an older build of Unreal?
I’m using UE 5.5 and I noticed that I can hear audio only when the player is tagged “BirdEnemy” and even then, audio seems to be played only once. Is there a cooldown ?
You bring up a very good point. The Birds give a wing flap and Bird call sound when they fly away, also when the’re perched they give a Bird call when they play the Bird Call animation. However they don’t while flying.
So I have added this to the new update (the update is now live- Unreal 5.1 or newer)- In the Behavior Tree I have added a new service called “BTService_PlayRandomBirdCall” (See Image)
If you open the Behavior Tree and select the service you can adjust how often the Birds will play a random Bird call. Once you select the service- you can adjust the interval and the random deviation.
By default the interval is set to 50 seconds, and the random deviation is set to 40 seconds. So with this setup every Bird will give out a random Bird call every 10-90 seconds. You can play with these numbers to make the Bird calls more frequent or less frequent. For anyone who wishes to disable the Bird calls while flying- just delete the service.
I hope you find this update useful, I think it was a good idea to add, thanks for pointing it out!
