First project: Marionette style control for Pawn using VR controllers

Development Programming & Scripting Blueprint
1

I’m trying to create a new dungeon crawler type game, where you use the two vive controllers like marionette wands that shoot downward lines from each of the controllers and spawns glyphs where the line meets the navmesh, which two separate pawns run at different speed to stand on.

later i plan to add combat mechanics and a random dungeon generator plugin i bought to make a basic roguelike with these new controls to test out the concept before i invest any more years into a larger RPG project utilizing the control method (as well as the dungeon and combat mechanics).

I’m not going to lie, i have NO experience with UE4 VS. i get how to move around and create landscapes and such, but blueprints confuse me.

My first thought was to use a line trace? set from the controllers with an impulse downwards so no matter which way the controller is turned it’s always shooting down. GETting the hit location and moving a previously spawned glyph, since i wouldnt want it to keep respawning new ones, id make it spawn in at the beginning and then move to the hit location. do the same with the two pawns, but have them go to the glyph location.

i guess my question is both if this makes sense and to be honest how to turn that psuedo code into actual blueprints.

2

For that puppet handling, you need reverse IK plugin. Creating such functionality in blueprints will be very hard and reqire lots of trigonometry and vector math.

3

dang, IK is 100% foreign to me.

Thanks for the direction though!

Edit: i took another look at IK just to be sure, and im very confused: how does a system to keep limbs and feet bending properly help me with this. I am sure im noobing this up, but best guess is that im meant to make the glyph the ‘foot’ and the controller ‘the hip’.

4

You just trying too big thing at very beginning. IK is some serious math and resolving equations to find rotations of bones in 3d space, you definetly do not want to code all of it in blueprints.
So for now just code your game without that puppet part.