Birds

Distribution UE Marketplace
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143

Birds is currently setup for single player setup. I’ll look into multiplayer in future updates.

145

Really nice Asset, however I am having problems with a water plane. My scenery is basically a ship which sits on a water plane in the map. My birds take off, fly but somehow fly into the water to land on the ocean surface. How can I tell the birds to avoid the water?

146

You might try disabling their collision during flight.
If the birds collide with anything during flight they will always fall down to the ground or in your case the water.

147

It is not a matter of them colliding with anything in the air and falling down. The birds circle in the sky and then when they go to land they are not registering the water plane and fly right through it to land on the sea floor. So they more or less disappear from sight. Would it be possible to tell the birds to avoid the waterplane mesh?

148

Can anyone help me on this matter?

149

I guess you didn’t see my reply to your IM. Have you placed ground targets in your level? When its time to land the birds don’t just land anywhere, they land where the ground targets are. so if they are flying to the bottom of your water then I’m guessing something is not setup correctly.

150

Disregard this post! Was sitting in submission hell while I was chatting with you via IM. :slight_smile:

151

Hi,

I’ve bought this, but I expected higher quality considering the price.

  • There is no take-off animation - from close up, the birds look very fake. Real birds crouch, ‘leap’ into the air, and flap fast while transitioning to flight. At the moment they just switch instantly from standing to full-speed flight.

  • There is no landing animation - watching crows, I see a common pattern of normal descending flight, when they are close to the ground there are two (sometimes three) wing beats to slow speed, then a short ‘drop’ into a slight crouched landing position, then they are standing as normal.

  • The wing shape on the crows is wrong for when they are flying - crow wings (unlike seagulls) typically remain quite flat, but currently in your plugin the crows’ wing tips bend significantly downwards when they are flying, making their flight look very wrong.

Some of this is covered in the YouTube video because the birds are only shown transitioning from running into flight, not standing into flight. At the moment, the plugin content will only be useful for very distant birds, and not at all useful for anything closer to the player. This is quite an expensive item, and you have been working on it for several years, so I had really expected more.

Do you have plans to improve these aspects, or should I ask for a refund?

152

Thanks for your input in helping make Birds a better product. I shall add improving the crow animations to the list for future updates. :slight_smile:

153

Thank you, that would be much appreciated. How long do you think that will take please?

155

Ive try many way to replicate it… i cant do it :frowning: i dont understand what to replicate, theres so much task and everything… ive try many way but im lost. Those bird are laggy when running on dedicated server… i only want them to be smooth flying…

156

This appears to be a “Create Project” as opposed to the normal “Add to Project” asset. What’s the best way to get all assets imported and working into an existing project?

157

Birds is not yet setup for multiplayer. it is on the list for future updates.

And to add Birds to your project just copy the Birds folder (\Documents\Unreal Projects\Birds\Content) to your games content folder.

158

I see there’s been an update - can you describe the changes please?

159

There is now a pigeon character. Not sure if there are other changes.

160

watch?v=auaiRiLPNRg

New in Birds v3.0:
A new Bird Has been added- Pigeon.
In v3.0 the Birds no longer use Tick, this comes with a significant performance boost.

We are now in a full AI Controller and Behavior Tree environment. The Birds will keep track of all Enemy Actors in their Perception range. If an Enemy gets too close the Birds will run then fly away. In the air they will fly to random Sky Targets. After flying for a while they will either return to the ground or perch on a Perching Target. Both Perching and Flying can be enabled or disabled on a per Bird Basis depending on your desired behavior.

161

I’m having trouble getting v3.0 working. Could you walk me through this?
In trying to put together a super basic setup in a new level I can’t get the birds to fly away when approached by the player.
Here’s what I did:

  1. Create a new level
  2. Drop 1 crow, 1 ground target, 1 perch target, and 1 sky target into the level
  3. Drop a ShootingThirdPersonCharacter into the level and set auto possessed by player 0 (verified has BirdEnemy tag)
  4. Run and approach the crow
    Expected: Crow to fly away
    Actual: Crow doesn’t react

What I discovered during a couple hours of trial and error while trying to whittle away the example level to the point where the birds change from reacting to not reacting was that the landscape seems to play a role for some reason. And the original landscape for that matter. When I remove the original landscape and create a new landscape and set the the player and bird on the new landscape, the bird no longer reacts to the player. So I don’t know how to process this. Any suggestions?

If it helps at all, if I tinker with the Bird_AI_Controller and change in the Begin Level Flying block the SetMovement node’s NewMovementMode to Walking instead of Flying, the crow starts reacting to the player, with a funny looking animation of-course.

Any help with this would be greatly appreciated. I’m running UE 4.22.1 BTW.

162

I’m guessing the fix for your issue is that you need to build navigation with a nav-mesh volume in place. however you should also have more than one of each target. :slight_smile:

163

So I added another set of each targets, dropped in a nav mesh bounds, and built navigation. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem like that changes anything. I’ve attached a video here showing my situation. Hopefully something stands out as I’m sure I’m doing something wrong here. I just don’t know what.

164

In that example you are working with everything way too close together. Try making the ground at least 30 times that size and build navigation.
To explain, one example is when the Bird is flying, they fly to a random Sky Target and when they get within 2000 Unreal units of the Sky Target, they switch to a new Sky Target. In your setup the bird is always within 2000 units of all the Sky Targets. Same issue with the Ground Targets. spread everything out, see if that helps, let me know. :slight_smile:
If a NavMesh is in place- these Birds should work with any landscape or Geo you put them on.
Also if the bird is set to begin the level flying- put them up in the air. in your example the bird start flying but then instantly collides with the ground and switches back to walking.