Duplicate a Character and Offset?

Hi,

New to the community, I come from a Blender 3D Animation background. My friend recommended I check out Unreal and Blueprints, having a ton of fun so far. Doing the learning path on Unreal and bought some Udemy courses going through the basics of Blueprint flows.

Thanks in advance for any help.

I’ve been playing with the third person controller and would like to figure out how to duplicate the character, offset the position/animation by a few frames. Similar to the snake arcade game.

I’ve been looking at “follower” tutorials, but these all seem to be AI’s targeting the player and navigating their own paths.

I know it’s a lot to ask for over text, but if you could point me to a tutorial or paid course, that would be super helpful.

In short, you cannot.
Input is consumed by the actor with input. To set it up to also send input somewhere else you’d have to create a blueprint interface and send the relevant calls over / create a character which uses those calls - however I’m about 96% sure this won’t be able to happen over axis input, since they essentially work like an On Tick event.

Also the snake arcade game - do you mean the Nokia snake game? If so, that isn’t multiple characters anyway. just a spline you have components follow.

Hi, thank you for your response.

So, in theory. Could I have a spline that follows the character controller - with other actors that follow along that path running and jumping?

No, think more as the character drops the “points” of the spline, then whatever else follows that spline (mesh parts probably, since the snake in the nokia game is made up of segments).

Anything can then follow along the spline. other actors as well…

If you have to involve jumping, you can probably record when the player pressed jump along the spline and send the jump input/instruction to whatever follows.

If you are trying to replicate movement exactly at a 3d level, there may be other ways to go about it. It just depends on what the end goal is.

My end goal is to have essentially a line of characters all following the leader, just a few frames behind.

Can you point me to any learning resources you’d recommend for some of the above mentioned possibilities? I appreciate your time, thank you.

Its more of a try and do situation.

Youll find most spline related content in the dealings of vehicles/race tracks.
Some even include how to get AIs to follow.

What you might want to consider is to create your own button buffer system, and with that to create a system capable of sending the proper input to a special character class.

The aftereffect/follower trail is fairly easy to achieve if you do it by recording a sequence and setting it up to play back. But when you need it to happen at runtime, unscripted, it takes on a whole different set of considerations.

What may also be a possibility is to create a rewind/physics recorder, and simply set the playback on different instances.

This should be a decent starting point though i havent sifted throguh all of it…

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Thanks for the resources. I also found this digging through the documentation, I wonder if this could be a solution as well?

It could but it’s not really meant (as is) to copy the pose of a frame in the past.

You could red it from the C++ source and modify it so as to allow it to access past frames that you save out in memory. Probably a far too elegant solution for your ran o the mill indy dev thing. But it is worth a look/thought…

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