Early feedback for custom NPCs functionality

General Feedback & Requests
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First of all I want to mention, I am not interested in Guards and Wildlife, so this is all about fully custom NPC’s, i.e. verse behavior + custom actor + custom animations.

  1. I would like to have more control over the navigation mesh, i.e. where NPC should go and where not, where to jump, climb and swim, and where not. +The automatic generator can get things very wrong from what I have seen so far. Some sort of navmesh creation tool, for editor, should do that.

  2. There can be lot of NPC types. Some can swim, some not, some can jump, some can jump only a little, some not at all, etc (+ a NPC can differ in dimensions). I would like to set these properties for the pathfinding function and get the respective path (point 3).

  3. The NavigateTo function is rather limiting. The NPC moves & turns at some preset speed and manner, and I can not analyze the given path. It would be crucial to have an alternative, a function that returns the path as Array of 3d coordinates, and I can handle the moving my self- speed up and down, control the turning, set very custom speeds in general, analyze the path for advanced A.I. behavior, etc. Also, sometimes, the movements need to compliment animation and via versa.

  4. This in order asks for a better movement fn then current moveTo. Because it’s linear and doesn’t respect Physics/collisions. I remember RigidBodies functionality was in development? That would be perfect, to move the NPC with addForce in collision capsule or similar. However, it would be also great to have something like a simple setPosition fn, so we can create own easing logic and so on.

  5. For the custom NPC, for example, to aim, we would need to get data into control rig. What is currently not possible? Aiming and looking is Not always the same, for all kinds of NPC ideas, and control rig could handle this beautifully, we just need to get data into it, like we can in UE5. I can think of a trick, to do this with animations, but that is rather sad :slight_smile:

I am very happy that custom NPC support is in works and excited about future were we can create dope COOP/Player(s) vs NPC(s) game experiences. Keep the good work going.

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Thank you for your feedback. While I cannot guarantee a response, I can confirm that this has been forwarded to the appropriate team.

1 Like
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Nice!

4

Some more:

  1. Seems like for custom NPC I can not get information, of if the NPC is in water, or its jumping, etc. So I can not play the appropriate animation from Verse. I saw there is an Animation Preset feature, but that seems to be not explained in documentation.