Hi, I’m trying to create a mechanic similar to the alt-fire on the Redeemer from Unreal Tournament. So basically you fire the weapon, and then the camera gets centered on the projectile while you control its direction using the mouse. The player character cannot be controlled during this phase and will remain stationary until the missile explodes.
I’m kind of torn between two ways on how to handle the input flow:
Use a normal actor based projectile and then have the input events from the player character control the projectile movement.
Use a pawn based projectile that will be possessed by the player controller, and then have the pawn directly receive input that controls its movement.
So I wanted to get some additional opinions on how best to handle this scenario. Which method would you use for the implementation? Or if there are other ways to do it, I’d like to hear that as well.
Here is another suggestion for you -
make your projectile a static mesh component of your character. Add a camera component to this projectile mesh.
You can then use set active node to choose which camera you are looking through when you press F for fire.
You can also, with a bit of logic using gates and sequence nodes flip flop between your input events to the character moving the character or, the position of the projectile.
This is nice because you can then add a scenecomponent2d to the character and capture the view from the projectile and display it in a widget that appears as a small subwindow in your viewport.
so,
you could press F to fire the projectile, make it visible, display the projectile camera view in widget and start moving the projectile in world space.
you could also move your character or the projectile by using the normal movement inputs and if Z is pressed you adjust the projectile, if Z not pressed you adjust the character.
When component projectile hits something you can reset its postion and make it invisible.
I have, out of curiosity just run a little test and I am sure that this would work and be very cool.
You could potentially expand so that the character has several projectiles to fire but one is enough hey?
Hope you understand what I mean.
cheers
Podge.
Thanks for your detailed solution @Podgyhodgy. I’m actually trying to keep the design very similar to the Redeemer, including the fact that the player will not always have this weapon. As a result, I was thinking of having the projectile mesh spawned by the weapon instead of the character.
After having given some thought about it yesterday, I’m not particularly fond of adding a special condition in the character blueprint for dealing exclusively with the redeemer. On the other hand, if the projectile itself is the pawn, then it can handle the input on its own without external intervention. But I couldn’t find any posts about using a pawn as a projectile. What do you think about that?
As for your suggestion, using a smaller screen to direct the missile is a pretty neat idea. I might try that out as the next experiment. So thanks again for that.
I think spawning it as a pawn would work fine. (don’t know Redeemer - don’t know many games actually, the programming is the best game I think.) I have been making a multiplayer physics driven helicopter and what I do there for missiles is spawn an actor which has physics enabled. I then apply a force to the spawned actor and away it goes. I don’t see why a pawn would be any different. After all, a pawn is simply an actor with extras bolted on. You can apply a force every tick for a missile or just one initial impulse for a shell trajectory effect. The same could no doubt be done with a pawn and if you possessed it then it should not be too difficult to apply forces to to it depending on your inputs. I really like using the physics aspect. applying forces actually works out simpler than trying to control its movement manually - once you get the hang of it.
Thanks for the explanation. I’ve never used force to control the trajectory at runtime. But from what you’ve said, it seems like quite an interesting approach. I think it would be a good opportunity to learn about guidance systems.