I worked and added a new feature this past two weeks: passive skills and trigger modifiers. Passive skills is an obvious feature that I completly forgot about but couldnāt do without.
Trigger modifiers are little bit special, it is an object that allows us to listen to game events (like an Action being used by an actor, a Stat reaching a certain threshold or a kill / damage being dealt). These modifiers allow passive skills to trigger only at specific moments.
An example would a be a āFuryā skill, that only grants you an Attack Speed bonus when below 50% Health.
This is a pretty basic example but Iāve made sure weāre able to create many different things.
I also received visual assets from a friend of mine to communicate about the Multiplayer Combat Editor.
Hereās a first draft I can showcase but thereās more in my pocket:
I completed the passive skill feature and Iām moving on to creating the game example for it and improving the usability of MCE (once again). I felt some things were not as good as they could be last time I tried as a user.
Iām planning to release MCE on Itch.Io first as approval times on the Marketplace seem to be long at the moment but Iāll submit in the same time.
Thanks for the kind comment, they mean a lot to me
These past two weeks I worked on fixing the bugs that emerged from the massive clean up of the code and the implementation of the passive skills. I also improved some aspects of the workflow that didnāt feel friendly to use.
Now Iām making every widgets easily customizable. I completly forgot about them in the first place and couldnāt cut them: stuff like Skill Slots and Stat List are mandatory in a game and tied to the systems handling them. I already had everything in place, just not exposed in a friendly way for the user. Iām fixing it.
I also have a āto-polishā list but Iām not sure it will make the cut before the Itch.Io release. Iāll see how it goes and how are my working hours.
I spent the last two weeks improving network performance overall and for AI characters especially. This makes us able to spawn lots of AIās in the same time without much bandwidth issue.
It took me more time than I anticipated thatās why this update comes a bit late.
I also improved the importation workflow / usability of MCEās components and features.
The next weeks will be dedicated to prepare the Itch.Io release. I plan to make MCE available for 30$ instead of 40$, as an āEarly Accessā (for a few weeks).
During this time frame, Iāll improve MCE with your feedback and then Iāll release the final version. Of course youāll automatically get the final version if you purchased the Early Access.
Early Access will only be available on 4.15, final version of MCE will be available from 4.15 to 4.17+.
Iāll produce Video Tutorials and setup MCEās website before releasing on Itch.Io. Iāll be posting updates here so stay tuned!
I have a question about your plugin.
From what I can tell by watching your videos, each skill is an actor component, right?
I was wondering about that setup from a performance perspective. Lets say you can have a large amount of skills. Like for example 100.
Have you tried that and watched if it affects performance?
Many skill systems use more lightweight data to store skill data, in for example a Data Asset, and then spawn skill actors or other assets on demand when the skill is actually used.
I really like having all skill logic pre-spawned in components, but curious about performance.
Yes indeed, it is a replicated actor component which can be pretty bandwidth / performance intensive if done wrong.
I didnt specifically tried 100 actor components but I tried spawning lots of AIās and player characters with some skills.
CPU performance is OK, but they do cause some network traffic.
If 100 characters have 1 skill, skills wonāt be your performance bottleneck. If you have several entities in the game with hundreds of skills, yes it might be unplayable. What kind of setup have you in mind? Something like WoW where every player has hundreds of skills? I think this is hardly doable with MCE.
Little update as well:
I spotted new bugs which Iām trying to fix. Iām trying to get something as smooth as possible so Iām still delaying tutorials & commercials.
Good luck and have fun everyone, see you in the next update
100 skills might be a bit extreme
But if you make for example an RPG skills stack up fast if you
have some active, some passive, and some other game specific skills.
20-30 skills in total I do not consider extreme in any way.
Iāve improved networking performances by switching some features from replicated to locally handled and it comes with a bunch of syncāing issues. It takes me a lot of time to get every features to adapt to these new systems while remaining user-friendly.
To give you a bit more details: building a multiplayer plugin is quite hard as latency is something you canāt get rid of. You just deal with it and hide it somewhere. But āsomewhereā really depends on what game youāre building. Iām trying hard to build a plugin that can be either adapted to your game or āokayā enough to make at least a working game without much multiplayer knowledge. I thought about pushing an early early-access version of MCE in the meantime but too many things were awkward or just not good enough (not to mention the fact that reworking code architecture would have made everything youād code deprecated in matter of weeks).
Other than that, IRL work and other troubles are keeping me away from working as much as I would like to on MCE.
I am sorry for taking so long. I remember that I was initially planning a 2017 February release. It makes me realize the huge work Iāve put in MCE and how much Iāve improved it over the months with more features and a better user experience (and it may also tells how bad I am at completing projects :D).
I have a pretty good idea of how I want MCE to be used and I have high quality expectations regarding the features. Both things takes a lot of time. I hope youāll find it worth it.
Early Access is almost there! I only have to record few starting tutorials and weāll be good to go.
Iād like to restrain EA to only one version of Unreal Engine. 4.15 would be the best for me but I have to ask you guys: do you have a preferred version? Final release will be for 4.15 to 4.18.
I hope to release MCE within this month. Since I initially planned February I donāt want to promise anything (:p).
Just found this project, it is so cool! I am fairly new to UE4 (doing my degree at the moment, but havenāt gone to in depth really, just some 2d side scrollers and making maps for UT). Wanted to start working on blueprint and getting more in depth in my own time but was struggling to make any real headway. I spent time working on different aspects of a game, UI, skills, stats etc. but would love to see the scope of all these together. So this would be perfect for me to buy and study how it all comes together and then have the knowledge to replicate it myself.
Cannot wait to see its final form, and just wanted to say what a brilliant idea this is!
I didnāt post for a long time because I really wanted this post to be the release post. But it is not !
We entered a pretty heavy work period at our studio and my strengths are being consumed a lot more than usual.
Iām still working on the plugin, Iām actually quickly building a game with it. Here are the first result on Steam:
My current workflow is the following: Iām building game content (classes, skills, perks) as fast as possible and whenever the plugin is not allowing me to do something, Iām trying to easily allow it. Iāve iterated through most of MCE core systems, only remain the passive skills and a part of the modifier features. Iāll try to wrap this up as soon as possible and then Iāll have to take care of the tutorials.
Regarding tutorials, Iām getting warmed up with this series:
I learned that Iām going too quickly, Iām not telling what shortcuts / buttons Iām pressing or what window Iām focusing to. Iām not exposing the fundamentals (which might be a good thing) and Iām not always explaining the goal / expected end result or the reasoning of a system overall. Iāll try to be more newbie-friendly in the MCE tutorials.
And thatās it for this update. Sorry for the long period without updates, Iām trying hard to produce quality content and I have pretty high expectations which often leads me to have nothing to talk about (nothing fancy at least!).
Iād be glad to hear any feedback
See you in the next update guys, and in the meantime, keep up the good work and enjoy!
