hi rondmc
I can not recommend you whether to switch engine or not … but I can certainly tell you that this product is exceptional by any standard. This developer is undoubtedly a unique person who invests so much into his product out of true love for what he does - which leads to a super-winning product in my opinion.
Hi ,
New feature “big units out of experimental” which has been released in the new version of the toolkit 1.9 does change only the grid manager?
Do you think is it possibile for us to upgrade to new version that implements big units by just migrating the Grid Manager or should we need to migrate the Turn Manager and other core blueprints?
We are very interested on that feature but we are still suffering from the big migration to version 1.8 and we still didn’t completed the migration yet.
Can you point us to the right direction to obtain the working big units feature without re-transporting all our project again?
Also, we are interested in the work-around for transporting arrays with the action system correctly: should we transfer only the new Action Manager which has been untouched within our project?
Thanks in advance,
Aplogies to all for my delay in replying. I had a deadline at work that needed to be met. I’ll get to your questions now.
I think my suggested method of upgrading is to manually move the changes you have made to a fresh ATBTT project. I know this is a bit of a pain, but since you presumably have a better overview over your own additions than of my toolkit you are less likely to break something that way. This update is likely the last transformative update I’m going to make in a long time. Future updates will be more about adding features, which should be easier to add individually to a project. Since this update changed some fundamental stuff when it comes to the abilities and turn order, transferring these features would almost certainly be more difficult than the other way around. Sorry about that, but my priority is always to make the toolkit as good as I possibly can, and sometimes that is difficult to reconcile with keeping it easy to update.
Hmm, this is odd. My guess is that collision is not set up correctly for your mesh. To test this, does the heightmap functionality work properly when using the static meshes uncluded with UE4? If so, check out UE4’s guide on importing static meshes. If it does not work with UE4’s regular statc meshes either, get back to me and I will figure out how you’ve set it up wrong.
Are you talking about setting up checkpoints? This should be possible with some work. What you essentially want to do is that when you click to place the first checkpoint you move the unit in the grid array without actually moving the mesh. Then you run pathfinding from that new tile. When you place a new checkpoint you store the grid indexes of the old path and append them to the new one. You could do this by using the SimulateMove function in GridManager. Then finally, when you have placed all your checkpoints and want to actually move you take your newly appended array of grid indexes (that makes up your path), convert it to vectors (the same way as it is done after SimulateMovement is done in BP_Unit) and input this into a queued move action, also like in BP_Unit. This is a bit tricky to do, so I would only recommend trying this if you have had some practice working with my toolkit already.
Thanks Leo 
This is indeed a passion project for me and I’m glad that it shows. @RonDMC: You’ll of course have to figure out for yourself what engine you want to choose, but I’m honored that my toolkit has such a big impact on your decision. I would recommend going with the engine you most enjoy developing on. Even though you will get a lot out of the box with my toolkit it is a long road from a fresh ATBTT project and a finished game, so choose the engine that you think will be the most enjoyable to work with. I’m personally a huge fan of Unreal Engine and enjoy its workflow much more than Unity. I could argue for hours about why I feel Unreal is superior, but I’m sure you could get similar but opposing tiraded if you asked around on Unity foorums, so I grudgingly admit that a lot of it comes down to taste 
Hmm, it is hard to keep all the changes in my head, but yes, I think the big unit stuff mostly comes down to the grid manager. There are also some smaller changes in BP_Unit and some of the abilities. The big unit system is actually mostly the same as the last version. The main changes was increasing the max unit size and adding hex grid support. In the abilities I added some changes to prevent AI unit from treating all tiles occuptied by a big unit as separate units, in order to improve performance, and some consistency improvements for clicking “between” tiles for units that occupy an even number of tiles. I think it should be possible to move this stuff over to an 1.8 project without too much fuss. I would search for “Big” while in the engine and look through all functions and variables that include this in their name, as well as where they are placed and what they are connected to.
Hi ,
first of all thank you for this impressive toolkit. It´s very simple to use it and customize it to one´s needs.
But now I´ve struggles on how to implement a repetitiv map (like where I scroll out west side and end up east - like in Civilization). Do you have any thoughs about how this could be realized?
BR
Hey there. Thanks for making this blueprint. However I’m having a weird issue here.
I’ve managed to copy all the assets into my project/game in their own folder separate from everything else. The idea was to copy blueprints I plan on using and modify them to suit my needs. However, when I copy the Unit Blueprint to anywhere outside of that specific folder, it seems to have many errors.
Examples include:
Can’t connect pins Self and Unit : Self Object Reference is not compatible with Unit Object Reference.
Can’t connect pins Unit and Self : Unit Object Reference is not compatible with Self Object Reference.
Can’t connect pins Target and Victim : Self Object Reference is not compatible with Unit Object Reference.
…
and so on. Why is this happening when I try to copy or move the Unit Blueprint to any other directory?
The youtube video [Old] UE4 - Advanced Turn Based Tile Toolkit Tutorial - 2 - Customizing the grid - YouTube states there is a “cross corner” flag on the grid manager however I’m not finding those at all on both GridManager and GridManager_Adv. Any clues? Was this feature removed? I couldn’t search just this thread and other searches have turned up empty.
Yeah, the tutorials are unfortunately somewhat outdated. Especially the early ones. Making updated ones is high on my list, though time is in very short supply these days. Cross corners used to be something that globally affected the grid, but I changed it to be more flexible by making it possible to specify corner crossing for each corner. If you set a diagonal edge cost of a tile to -1 that corner will be blocked for movement between adjacent tiles.
Awesome! Thanks for the quick response and excellent tutorials and package.
How much modification would I have to make for simultaneous to turns play out?
For example: both players (or one player one AI) set all of their moves ahead of time, and when end turn is triggered both teams engage all of their actions.
I’ve spent a few hours with this template, I am understanding a bit better how it works. It is somewhat tightly coupled with turn -> animate -> turn loop. This leads me to believe making simultaneous turns will be quite a bit of work since I’d need to re-do how the simulation is executed.
I can also imagine a hacky system where all attacks work like overwatch, and the turns play out in sequence only after end turn is hit.
Any advice? Thanks again.
Well, I think the message is wrong.
What I want is diagonal movement.
Movable areas should be represented as if the Diagnostic Movement variable in GridManager is unchecked. However, I want to move the unit naturally including diagonal lines, such as when checking the Diagnostic Movement variable. I don’t know if the meaning was conveyed properly using a translator.
What should I do?
No worries
Short answer is that it is very difficult. Not impossible, certainly, but the toolkit is based on the assumption of sequential turns, so this is only something you should attempt when you feel you have a complete understanding of how the toolkit works. If you still want to try this, the general approach would be to delay running actions in the action manager until all moves have been selected and then running the actions while enabling the bWithPrevious boolean. That is just the first step, though, and it would certainly require heavily rewriting the ability system and turn manager. It might be complicated enough that it would be a better idea to build a project from scratch and port over the ATBTT functionality you need as you go along.
Ok, I see. I misunderstood. To get this effect go to the CreateBaseEdges function in BP_GridManager and change the default move cost values for diagonal directions from 1 to 2. Like so:
https://i.imgur.com/oaN7wvX.png
And you get this:
https://i.imgur.com/l4Wv7dh.png
hi
I am aware of the time limit available to you, I’ll just be happy if you can give Estimated times (more or less) For the following questions:
-
When do you think there will be tutorial(support) videos (I make substantial changes to your system and would like to understand more thoroughly how everything is built and I find it very difficult with the old videos that are no longer relevant)
-
When to evaluate you will add “Make generic solution for animating actions happening during movement”. For this is something I really need and misses?
Thanks in advance
Ahh really appreciate you taking the time to explain that to me. I’ve gotten much further along now, even have a movement planning phase although it’s not entirely working yet.
I’m trying to mod the template as non destructively as possible by subclassing everything and not messing with the original core files. Unfortunately that doesn’t seem possible with the turn manager since many blueprints refer to that directly.
It looks like in the Jungle Raid sample map that the game locks up if you kill the active unit with an overwatch attack.
Hey Leo, time is indeed a very limited resource these days, and it will become more and more difficult to find time to work on the toolkit until December, when my thesis is due. After that things should return back to normal. Because of this I will certainly not be releasing another large feature update until well after Christmas. And when it comes to the “Make generic solution for animating actions happening during movement” card, that is something that is very hard to know when will be done. That point is more on the list of something I would like to do at some point, but I have not thought of a good way to implement yet. When such a feature would be added would depend on when and if I’m able to think of a good solution.
That being said there are several ways you can go about implementing actions within other actions already; just not a generic one. The most simple is to call actions within other actions using the QueueAction node with “immediate” set to true (which will bypass the queue and play the action immediately). This works for some things, but is not ideal in other cases, where you have other options available. If you look at the overwatch ability in JungleRaid it is set up to activate at a certain point during movement using a combination of action queues and event dispatchers. Also, if you look in HydrasLair you can see that I implemented revealing tiles in the fog-of-war by splitting up the movement action over multiple actions (one per tile) for the player unit. If you describe to me what particular thing you are trying to implement I might be able to help you find a way to implement it.
As for tutorials, this is something I’m trying hard to make time for. I’m hoping to make a tutorial on the ability system before the end of this month, but I cannot make any promises. That is the tutorial I feel there is the most pressing need for, so I’m trying to get it done as soon as possible. It might very well be that I do not make any other tutorials until after Christmas.
I apologize that my support is not as good as it used to be, as time is in very short supply, but I’m trying to do my best.
Great, seems like you got the right idea How difficult this is going to be depends a lot on your implementation and how exactly you want the simultaneous turns to work out. The best way to go about this is probably for you to attempt it on your own and ask here if you get stuck. Since I have not tested this out myself my feedback will probably be most useful for solving specific problems you run into, rather than outlining a complete (and probably flawed and different than what you’re after) solution for simultaneous turns. Best of luck!
hi
You have nothing to apologize for, I have written in the past and will write again your support for the system (even with the lack of time you have) is exceptionally good for my opinion.
And thank you for your answer, I will wait like others as much as necessary, for me (and I believe for others) any extra you give is a tremendous bonus and I can only say a lot of thanks.
As for “If you describe to me what particular thing you are trying to implement I might be able to help you find a way to implement it” I will definitely use it soon
best of luck with the thesis
Pretty happy so far with my progress! Indeed I had to pretty much rewrite all of Ability, Turn Manager, and Action Manager. So far so good for a first pass.
It’s actually not too big of a hack. I created a new QueueParallelAction. The action manager, in addition to queued actions, will now play through a parallel actions track.
Still scratching my head at figuring out how to know when actions have finished playing since they take variable amount of time I’m assuming.
You mention you are low on time. I would like to recommend a Discord channel specific to the Toolkit. Then, we could help each other out sometimes rather than requesting direct help. Unless you already have one; in which case, could I have a link?
Hi all, I managed to find the time to make some new tutorial videos. The first one was just uploaded to YouTube now. Another two should be added later today.
Sorry, seems like I ignore your comment. This is a bug I thought I had fixed. I guess some of the changes I did made it reappear. Thanks for letting me know. I will look into it.
Thanks, I’m trying my best.
Looks great One of my hopes when adding the actions system was that implementing simultaneous turns would become easier. Since I have not had the time to test it out myself it is great to see that at least some aspects of it are relatively easy to set up. Looking forward to seeing your progress
I’m low on time at the moment, but I always make the time to answer all questions. I’ve considered making a Discord channel, but at the moment I prefer keeping all the support in one place; namely this support thread. The conversation flow of a support thread rather than a Discord is more suited for bunching up all questions and answering them together when I have the time. With Discord I worry that I’d end up spending a lot more time providing support, which is something I enjoy doing, but I have a hard time justifying spending lots of time on until after Christmas. By that point I might reconsider making a channel.
Hey! I made an unofficial discord server we can hang out and help other out:
@ Feel free to PM me and I shall make you moderator/admin if you’d like.