[SUPPORT] Advanced Turn Based Tile Toolkit

[Monokkel]

@crossmr

I’ll attach an image showing my grid settings. The repro steps were to basically load this level, drag the grid manager in and that’s it. The only changes that I’ve made have been the instructions you gave me for deducting the AP points, as well as the changes in the screenshot which I sort of copied from the jungle level. Other changes I’ve made have just been to create weapon abilities, update the health bar, some camera work to make certain objects disappear when they are in the way and that’s about it thus far.

A little more testing here, and it feels somewhat inconsistent? I’m attaching another video so you can see two of the same characters running between two squares. Also if you put two different copies of the same character in the same square they get different pathfinding results. The two photos are two different copies of the swat character both at the start of the game. if I put the shotgun FBI character in that spot, he can move normally to all adjacent squares… that makes little to no sense. All of the character BPs are duplicates of each other with very little changed on them beyond the skeletal mesh, and some accessories for those that need them (the SWAT character has no accessories it’s a single mesh, as is the FBI character, some of the robber characters have additional things like hair/masks/etc put on them).

I’ve now tested all the characters in that spot from the police side and only SWAT are giving odd pathfinding on that square.

After a little further testing, I seem to have solved this issue. This had something to do with their weapon. I have no idea why, it seems most prominent on those with assault rifles (also the robber with the AK-47) but setting the SM_Weapon to “no collision” suddenly allows them to move normally. Your code is quite deep with a lot of functions, so I’m still getting used to where everything is and how to find exactly where I can look to start debugging things, but my guess would be that whatever path trace is being done for the unit is somehow impacting the gun and reading as a wall or something like that. The collision isn’t special, I’ve attached a screenshot of that. I’ll just make sure all the weapons are set no collision from now on.

Okay, that makes sense. The grid is generated using collision traces. Specifically PathTrace for finding tiles that can be walked on and WallTrace to check for walls between tiles that should block off walkability. If your unit meshes and weapons block these trace channels you will end up with some weird behavior, so make sure that PathTrace and WallTrace is only blocked when needed.

@crossmr

Yes that’s what i was wondering thank you. So… “run pathfinding” this is what is run when the game starts correct? If so, do I need to bother using the “add/remove edge” function? The door itself can trace as a wall, so if I rerun pathfinding, won’t it just detect the wall between the tiles and break that connection? or is that a separate function?

Sorry, I was unclear. RunPathfinding does not generate the edge map that holds which tiles can be moved between. This is done by the grid manager at startup. What I meant is that if you run pathfinding for a unit (which checks what tiles it can move to from a tile given its move range) it calculates this move range using the current state of the GridEdges TMap. So lets say a unit starts its turn next to a closed door and you run pathfinding to find what tiles it can move to. The door blocks pathfinding so no tiles in range will be displayed at the other side of the door. But now you open the door through a custom function (Using AddEdgeBothWays, lets say). Now the GridEdges TMap is updated, but since Pathfinding was run before this change happened the tiles on the other side of the door are still not reachable. For this the unit will need to run RunPathfinding again. Makes sense?

@crossmr

Could you expand a little on what exactly allows a tile to be placed? I did some realignment of my grid, but it just refuses to draw some tiles in places they should be allowed. This door for example. It seems like the gap between tiles didn’t line up correctly here. So I took all the meshes involved in that door, as a test and set them no collision. It still wouldn’t allow a tile to be drawn there. I even deleted all the involved meshes, leaving a perfectly open area, and it won’t draw anything there. If I then move my mesh slightly which puts a gap right where the wall would have been, it suddenly draws tiles, but i have no idea why that is necessary. To the right of that room, it’s drawing tiles no problem, out in the main area. I sort of get why it it might not want to lay a tile that is part way across the door, but I don’t understand why it refuses to draw a tile when the door is completely deleted from the level.I’ve even tried sliding the wall back so that it’s in a gap between two tiles and it won’t work.

I have the same issue at a second door, same mesh set, but a third door works just fine. So it isn’t an issue with the door itself.

Hmm, not 100% sure what is going on here, but I’ll give you some pointers. At the start of the game the GridManager finds walkable tiles by firing PathTrace line traces down from the sky to the center of each potential tile (provided heightmap is set to true or multilevel). If this trace is blocked this location will be added to GridLocations. If heightmap is not set to multilevel it will stop here. If it is, the trace will continue down to check for potential new overlapping tiles below this location. After this is done the grid manager loops through all tiles and check the height between them. If it is bigger than HeightImpassableCutoff the connections between the two will be removed. After this, if TraceForWalls is set to true a line trace using the WallTrace channel will be fired between the center of each tile and the center of its neighbors. If this trace is blocked the edge between them will also be removed.

For your doorway I’m guessing that the top of your door frame is blocking PathTrace causing the grid manager to add the top of the door frame as a tile that can be moved to. If heightmap is not multi-level in your game this is enough to cause the tile below the door frame to not be added. The tile on top of the door frame meanwhile is too high up compared to the surrounding tiles to be connected to them. If you are using multilevel heightmap I’m guessing that the height of your door frame is too small to allow a tile within it.

I suggest going through all the meshes in your map and making sure only things that should be walked on top of block PathTrace and only things that should block movement between two adjacent tiles blocks WallTrace. Do this and check if it solves all your walkability problems. During the same pass check that only meshes that should block line of sight block RangeTrace and only meshes that should provide cover block CoverTrace. See if this fixes your problems.

Love the look of your game, by the way. Let me know if you have a Twitter, website or something to follow its development