I currently don’t have a copy of UE4 because right now I’m planning out my game. I’m going to be getting UE4 soon (with in the week) and I’ll actually be able to get my hands dirty with UE4 so here is my problem/question.
Parameters of this game or system:
Start out in 1st person, then when you get into cover the camera zoomed out putting you into 3rd person to view your character and around corners or over cover or whatever the situation brings up.
I’m trying to figure out how to do a simple cover system (at least theoretically it’s simple) where you walk up to a wall or cover and you have to press X/A/ or some Keyboard Binding probably ‘C’ and it takes you from 1st person to 3rd person view and you’re able to strafe and aim while you’re attached to the cover, but It will be fairly easy to pull off of the cover when needed. Kind of like how Gears of War or Rainbow Six does it.
How I’d think of doing it:
Have a collision box/sphere on your character that constantly checks for valid cover or walls to lean against, it would also check the size of the cover. Let’s say my characters are 6 feet tall and they get up against a 7 foot box or crate they wouldn’t need to crouch to get into cover because it protects the character, but if they want to crouch they could. Then if they got against a piece of cover that was 3 feet tall they’d be exposed from the waist up so when they got against the cover it would auto crouch them behind the cover.
So my question is: Is there a tutorial on how to do this, and can I get a link or should I just try and figure it out myself?
I’ve looked on AnswerHub, I have checked some of the Wiki but I didn’t see any information on cover systems or anything like that.
TL;DR: I’m making a cover system, link me to a tutorial or documentation on the subject.
I googled it and I looked through some stuff but there wasn’t anything really helpful, I’m trying to make this game mostly out of just Blueprints (for now) and I don’t want to really add any external C++ Code because I don’t want anyone to say “Hey! That’s my code, give me money!” or something along those lines, I guess I can try and write something out in suedo-code then test it with Blueprint, I’ll look at more BP Tutorials to understand it better. If anyone else has more suggestions that would be awesome.
And thanks erWilly for putting me on the right track.
btw, Gears of War and Rainbow Six using a hidden nodes that place the LD in the maps, It was a cover system out of the box from unreal 3. The node did gather a lot of info in the build time.
The other clasic system is send a short ray to know is are smoething in front of you.
Yeah I was looking at wall grabbing examples, and they used a sphere connected with the character to see if they were up against something to grab onto, I was thinking about somehow using the same system but then it coming up with a little bit of text saying something like “Press C to get into cover” then when they hit ‘C’ and they’re against valid cover it calls an animation and camera movement that puts you up against the wall and pulls the camera back. Maybe even getting rid of the whole camera movement thing altogether. I think if I get the system worked out it can be useful to other people especially if I’m able to do it in all Blueprints. Then I’d just need someone to make the animations, I could probably do it but I have no Animation experience. It’d be awesome if one of the GoW developers could get me a hint to how to do it, or a link?
If I do get it to work then I’ll upload the blueprints and animation files, another question, can you actually export the blueprints of a level or game? Like I said in the original post, I don’t actually have UE4 so I’m not able to look through and see what exactly I can and can’t do.
I’ve done 8+ Hours of research and no one knows how to make this cover system, I’ve seen some not so pretty looking cover systems where they’re procedurally generating the valid cover spots and it auto attaches your character to the wall. So I’m thinking I’m going to have to do it the long tedious way, here is my idea.
There would be “bounding boxes/collision boxes” (BB/CB) along all the walls and valid cover points that your PlayerController (PC) can run into then a little bit of text shows up saying “Press C to get into cover.” then when the player inputs the command ‘C’ it calls an animation to slide you into cover and simultaneously zooms your camera out.
Pseudo Code (Sort of):
if {
PC collides with BB;
print text “Press ‘C’ for cover”;
}
then {
Slide Animation (SA);
Camera Zoom (CZ);
}
if else{
CC != BB;
return 0;
}
I am not a experienced coder but couldn’t you do something kind of like about to where if the PlayerController collides with the BoundBoxes then It calls and animation and play that animation.