Hello I am new to the unreal bluescripts and was wondering if some can assit me. What I am attempting is something simple but for the life of me cannot get it. I want to have input text box trigger animations on a character in the world.
I dug into this one tutorial online about search box. I was wondering if that can text box can trigger an animation. So i type " walk" in field and the character on screen plays animation walk animation.
You can do it using switch on string (it will be a bit messy but simple) or using enum.
Switch on String is going to be slow (this is relative speed, and will depend on how specific the user needs to be.)
for example is say one of the commands the user can give is “Place” (for “place at ____”) but the user enters “Put” you now have to deal with that.
or the user enters “walk North” when you expect something like “walk up”, and then there is potential spelling issues that can happen what happens if the user enters “waik up” will this work, what will happen?
will you accept terms from say French, Spanish, Hindi? will the user be able to use a verb from English with a direction from Chinese?
casing is handled with things like ToUpper() and ToLower() but spelling has to be manually handled (I would strongly suggest C++)
this used to be the style for very old “point and click adventure games,” it has advantages in free form expression, but can easily get bogged down with needing to build full on text parsing (not really advisable in blueprints, and even in C++ can still get clunky quickly). you will be binding the player through the language specifics that you expect, the semantics of the language, and you will need to cut off what will basically be a dictionary somewhere; this is why this method of player input is not used much and has only really come back up through LLM integration (if you are going down this rout please be honest with your players/customers and don’t call it “AI” as that is only half true at best)
if the previous is not discouraging then the answer is “Yes”
as long as you can get the branching to function you are just looking at a Play Anim or Play Anim Montage (depending on if we are talking about a Pawn or a Character). if you are going to end up making effectively a “dictionary” then you could do this as a DataTable(with actual strings as the Key which is search with a Hash sort so it will be more performant then direct string compares) where the DataTable will return either the Animation itself, or an index to a separate lookup to like an array of Animations, or into a spaghetti of PlayAnim nodes.
the only draw back of the DataTables is that because it uses a Hash lookup the Key is absolute, so spelling and input sanitizing will be mandatory.