[SUPPORT] Advanced Turn Based Tile Toolkit

Monokkel · January 25, 2019, 11:26pm

crossmr:

there is some lingering bug. It seems to work for a few rounds, and then something seems to go out of sync with it. After working through multiple rounds and multiple shots, then suddenly it’ll get to a point where attempting to shoot has it start the camera action and then it ends the action without doing anything. Doesn’t make much sense to me. I must have something wired incorrectly but even with breakpoints, I can’t seem to see anything. It comes back to the delay and queue action on the event graph and instead of continuing on, if I’m stepping through the debug just cuts out there. In this latest test where I was only doing aimed pistol shots, and nothing else, I must have gotten 8-9 rounds in with about 2-3 action cam runs per round before it started acting weird. One odd thing that pops up during the debug is that sometimes, the “OwningUnit” on the pistol aimed ability returns “none”, which doesn’t make any sense to me. Interestingly while it returns none, the target still returns the correct target value. I’m also getting some errors in the log which I’ll post if they tell you anything. it seems somehow my unit is getting unset? or I’m losing track of it, but I’m not sure how. I’m not leaving the function anymore. All the camera work is being done in the shooting ability using casts to the camera and binds within it.

This actually seems to be related to a unit dying. I notice when a unit dies, for some reason there is a slightly extra delay. I did change the dying animation, but I put the anim notify on it that it is supposed to have, and no bug seems to be produced when shooting without all my special camera work. I just ran for 9 rounds without a bug, and then finally killed 2 units both that produced this slightly odd pause after their death and after that, the shooting ability started messing up with the camera. I’ve just verified this. I started another game and moved everyone in close, so that I could kill someone as quickly as possible. As soon as the first unit died, the very next unit couldn’t do a pistol shot with the special action camera. This is really really odd. It also gave that same error that I posted in the screenshot, but doesn’t really give details as to where this is happening. The output log gave that same yellow error, but the error log didn’t produce any errors that could be clicked to show where in the blueprint the issue was happening. I’ll post some screens of how I changed the ability. What I’m seeing in game is that when this error is generated and it messes up, it seems to be getting to the lerp, the camera slides and then the ability suddenly ends without anything else happening. But it does seem to be shooting in the code. e.g. units are taking damage and will “die” on the code side of things, but the animation doesn’t match because the “render beam” and other second half code from the ability never seems to get run.

I’m also going to attach a video so you can see what happens. this time it was slightly different. I was able to shoot one or two times normally after the unit died, but then it went sideways on a move, you can see the camera jump away before the move is finished and the walking sound just continues. After that shots which use the action cam don’t work, but the shotgun blast (which doesn’t use it) works fine. Each time I had an action camera shot fail, one of those yellow faction errors was generated in the log. It also looks like my error handling code was working somewhat correctly. For my test I had the units to always use the action cam 100% of the time, but the two shots after the unit dies are both done with the normal camera and not the action camera. That means the owning unit was being read as “none” for those shots.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=gkspCLBkyGI

After more testing, this seems entirely related to a unit dying. A unit dying does something to break this and all my other camera work, and I’m not sure what or why. Any insight on that might be appreciated. I haven’t changed anything regarding death except to return a bool on “take damage”, but I don’t use that now for anything and to change the death animation. I put the included one back in, but it seems to make no difference. It also doesn’t matter how the unit dies. I killed the unit with regular attacks (no special cam) and special cams were still messed up

I sent you a PM about a possible solution earlier, but I’m replying again here for the benefit of others. I had a similar bug with actions seemingly starting and ending early in a test build. The issue turned out to be the death animation being set to loop. The units turned invisible after the first loop, but it continued repeating the animation while invisible. This activated the anim notify at the end of the animation every time, triggering EndAction and thus mucking up the action queue. Check your animations and make sure none of them are sending notifies more often than they should and check if that solves things.

Checked it out and confirmed the bug. This is not an issue that should have any impact on gameplay, but I’ll fix it in the next update. To remove the warning, input OwningUnit into the Units input of the “Activate” QueueAction macro in the event graph of BP_Ability_Grenade.

Good to hear that mobile performance is decent even with your fairly complex game.

JPhilmore:

Good idea with the “print string.” First off, it doesn’t work with the example map either. I have been able to narrow the problem to the Turn Manager. It doens’t seem to be able to receive any calls to its events. On “setup core blueprints” in atbtt state, the “initialize” event is called. Before and after this in ATBTT state, a print string will display. As far as I can tell, in every other BP, print strings are displayed. In the “initialize” event in Turn Manager and in the “Notify Play Ready” event in Turn Manager, neither of these will print strings. I did try changing whether it was replicated and/or reliable and this didn’t change anything.

**Also, I should add that I’m using the “execute console command” and doing server travel, rather than doing the open level function. I guess my research lead me to do it this way so that it was less impact on the memory and so that information could travel with me and the connected players. **When I did this with the “open level” function it works, but I think that in the end this isn’t going to work for my game.

Why wouldn’t it be receiving calls when I do the server travel way? And any thoughts on the way around this?

Hmm, honestly I have no idea why the open level function would work, but using the console command will not. Why isn’t Open Level going to work for your game? Do you know what central ways these two approaches should differ? Networking is not something I have a complete overview over.

Well, there is not any in-built event that signals when the camera has stopped moving. The camera centering on a new unit is handled by the FollowTargetTick function in which is connected to the tick event of GridCamera. If PanToCustomLocation is true and ActorToFollow is a valid actor then the grid camera will pan to that location using a lerp. I guess you could add a check in the event tick of where you compare the actor location of the camera to the location of FollowTarget at the end of the function. If they are nearly equal you could fire your custom event. You would control access to this check through a gate node, which you would open at the start of a new actors turn and close after your custom event has fired. That is one possible approach, in any case. Hope it is enough to get you going.

Welcome Those are general topics that are not unique to the toolkit, but here are a couple of good resources.

For networking I highly recommend you start reading this wonderful guide by @eXi.

For extending to c++ you should of course first have a good knowledge of C++ (which I’ll assume you have. If not learncpp.com is a great resource). For combining blueprints and C++ I recommend starting with UE4’s documentation.