We’re talking about The Verse Stronghold Template with the devs today on the July Creating in Fortnite Live Stream. If you have any questions, feature request or feedback about the template, drop them in this thread. The devs will be taking a look.
Thank you!
Hi! I tried to recreate the Stronghold example and ran into some issues. The steps don’t seem to be in the right order making it quite difficult to follow.
I also had some issues with the AI not following the designated paths. This was due to the navmesh not allowing them to go through areas they should be able to go through and instead getting them to try and move through a wall.
Is there a way to edit the navmesh in UEFN? Not only to keep the AI on the correct paths, but also to keep the snipers in the towers, and not have them try to chase the player.
you can activate the debug mode and see exactly the path to understand if collision can create issue during navigation. How to activated is explaned in the tutorial 
Yes, I know about that. What I mean is the navmesh changes from green to another color in an open area where there is no collision and attempt to send AI through a wall where there is a collision. In Unreal engine, you can do things with the navmesh to work around these kinds of issues.
Dear,
first of all i think that is good to provide example of different game mode to the creator community,so thank you for your effort but i want to share with you my personal experience.
I used the “tutorial” on the site in order to create my version of the game (2324-5631-9406) building an Island from scratch.
A lot of step in the tutorial are missed and verse code too does’t work if you use a step by step approach like describe on the site.
After checking carefully the template i discovered some “istruction” for debug inside the verse code in the template callind a debug configuration file not documented in the tutorial. fixing it on ly project i was able to male verse working …
Audio too does not work (Bank) has expected there are two files (CB e CBM_Dialogue.uasset) inside the original template that when imported in my custom project break the map (maybe other customisation somewhere) or maybe i use the wrong import way.
My feedback:
Creator need working tutorial to learn. Most of us we’re “script kids” not “real programmer” and is very hard jump on UEFN to make something different from creative 1.0 without clear tutorials and example
My finally wish: make me a “real programmer”.
Hoping this can help you to improve future tutorial
M.
I’m making a Stronghold map from scratch, and as a longtime Unreal bot wrangler, there are a few bot issues that I am seeing:
(1) There are many surfaces the bots should be able to navigate on that the nodes will not function on (the blimp wings for example), I had to make invisible static meshes to get the bots to work there.
(2) Bots are very bad at doors, even ones way larger that the bot’s collision radius.
(3) Path Node (Patrol Point) connections are very hit and miss, sometimes a change far across the Island will break path connections, forced connection arrays on Path Nodes would be great (Unreal has had this feature for about 20 years.) —Thanks for your development work on this, I am looking forward to seeing UEFN mature!
Hello Tasty, thanks a lot for the feedback, can I get a further information about the issue “the navmesh not allowing them to go through areas they should be able to go through”? Are you hitting this issue by importing custom assets or using Fortnite props? It is very likely the navmesh generated in the area is not considered as a navigatable space for the AIs, but they shouldn’t move through a wall as well. The AIs would only navigate through a wall when you enable the Environment Damage setting in the Island Setting, so the AIs would break the walls and navigate through.
The navmesh changes in UEFN can only be done through the props which impacts navmesh or device like AI Navigation Modification.
Hello mimmo_the_root, thanks for the feedback and hope you enjoy the Livestream event and the template. I’ve forwarded your feedback to the team and we’ll looking into the opportunities to improve the tutorials.
Can I get more information on the “debug configuration” file you are looking into? If it is stronghold_log.verse then you will need the script when you copy the logic from other scripts, or you would need to clean the Log(“”) usages and replace it with your owned logger instead.
The CBM_Dialogue asset file is the Control Bus Mix asset associated to the Audio Mixer Device in this template, so we can apply a custom mix when a Guard is spawned. To make it work you’ll need to create a custom Control Bus (CB_Dialogue) and then use the Control Bus Mix to make associated changes. This is an optional asset you need for the game experience, while if you need to learn more about the Audio Mixer setup, here is a great learning resource to work with Audio in UEFN.
Hello LoPing, thanks for the feedback and issues raised here, hope I can help you to clear these AI issues as much as possible.
Regarding your issues above, can I get some further more information so I can help more on them?
(1) What did the navmesh debug view shows in this case? Did it generate the green navmesh for AI to navigate through? It sounds like the area was not considered as navigatable to the AIs from what you described and the fix you have is to manually add assets to help on the navmesh generation.
(2). AIs would be able to navigate through doors (You will also see a case where the Guard walk through a sliding door after the intro explosion in the Stronghold), while the issue you’ve encountered here is likely a case where the navmesh data is not generated as expected, it would be very helpful to have a navmesh debug view to help understanding better on this.
(3) Thanks for the suggestion about the connection array and we’ll look into improving the device usability to help on this. Regarding the connection failure on the Patrol Path Nodes from changes far across the island, is it a visual bug only or the Guard AIs would just not do the Patrol behavior as you expected? As long as the navmesh is not changed, the Patrol Path Node usability should not be impacted. I’ve tried to reproduce this locally but didn’t see the same issue you mentioned, I’d appreciate if you can share more information about this so I can investigate it further!
DreamMaker, thank you for your response. Developer participation in the forums helps so much (I developed in the Apple/Swift/Scenekit world before coming back to Unreal and the Apple folks never read the forums so Scenekit pretty much died).
#3 would be the greatest wish: being able to hardwire/force connections was something I ended up using all the time on path nodes in Unreal for literally 20 years. I will post some screen shots, as until yesterday’s livecast I didn’t know about the debugging mode for navigation.
BTW, In the old days of Unreal Tournament, the UE had all sorts of path nodes (for elevators, jumping, sniping, springboards, etc.) and it was very easy to subclass things. It looks like most things in Fortnite are final classes now.
Screenshots:
Shot 1: Even though I replaced the small sliding doors with much larger garage-door-style doors, nav and bots will not go through this one. It looks like the ‘step-up’ on the door may have been throwing it, so I made an invisible static mesh ramp and that seemed to help.
Shot 2: Nothing on the outside of the blimp is navigable, no green grid and only red blocked connections. The blimp is stationary, and the physics/collisions are unchanged (FortniteBuildingMeshPhysics), the same as the blimp interior which generally navigates fine. the only differences I can see are that the outside static meshes have two materials and that their collisions are more complex.
Shot 3: This is an example of a link between nodes that was fine, but randomly stopped working. The green grid is due to some static floor meshes that I added to get anything to navigate the ships wings, I plan on making some simple invisible static meshes to overlay the wings.
Hi DreamMaker. I have been using Fortnite props for the buildings, more specifically the Military prefabs for the base.
Here are some screenshots of guard tower showing the prescribed path and the navmesh. The guard has difficulty moving around in a loop and will jump off the tower.
When dealing with prefabs, I sometimes have to make static meshes (which I make invisible) to overlap multiple areas so that you have a large green mesh area. I also find that even small bumps (a foot or so high) can confuse the bots, so for those I sometimes use invisible static mesh ramps. Basically, I try to get the most connected, most smooth green mesh areas possible since sometimes the bots won’t effectively use multiple smaller green mesh areas, even if they are quite close.
If I were hypothesizing, I’d say that the bots were optimized for landscapes (continuous and smooth) versus prefabs (discontinuous and jagged).
I did a lot with Unreal Tournament bots and am still a newbie with Fortnite bots though!
Yeah, that might be a good workaround. Thanks for the tip.
Great, thanks for all the details provided in the thread and it helps me a greatly to understand the problems you have.
In your screenshot 1, there is a navmesh hole at the door location between the two nodes, which stops the AI navigation and also make the nodes disconnected, I’ll investigate more on the IO Blimp prefab to get a proper fix in future releases so you don’t need to rely on the workaround.
In your screenshot 2, the area of this prefab was not originally designed for the AI navigation, so it indeed misses the needed data, I’ll do a further investigation along with the issue above.
For your questions in screenshot 3 and 4, the navmesh data looks correct while the issue you’ve noticed looks to be an intended behavior for the Patrolling Mode used on these nodes. In screenshot 3 it was set to Back And Force so you don’t see the connection between the first and the last node, as the AIs would move from the first and the last node and then traversal in a reversed order. In screenshot 4 it was set to Looping so the the nodes are visually connected and the AIs would keep moving through the first and the last node in the path.
Below is a screenshot for the 3 different patrolling modes that we afford on the AI Patrol Path Node device and the connected lines are visually different based the mode used.
Hope this answers your questions above and feel free to reply to this thread if anything is unclear.
Hello Tasty, thanks for the details provided here, I’m confident you are hitting the same thing that LoPing had on the IO Blimp prefab, where it was not properly configured to support the AI navigation.
I’ll investigate more on this with the team and get back with fixes in future releases, before that you can try the tip of adding static meshes to help the navmesh generation as LoPing suggested.
Thanks, just as a FYI all my Path Node groups were always set as looping. It did help a bit when I saw that having Path Nodes from two different groups close by caused collisions (In creative mode I couldn’t walk through two path nodes in different groups placed very close together). Pretty strange, but easy to work around. Obviously UEFN is still pretty new, so things aren’t going to be perfect.
Got it! I tried a few more times but didn’t see the same issue of having the Patrol Path Nodes shown as Back And Force as what you pasted in the screenshot 3 and will investigate further with the team.
Patrol Path Nodes associated to different group should not be impact each other, can I get a better idea of the collision issue you have hit? Thanks!
Here you go, DreamMaker, it took a while to duplicate the issue!
I only see the path-node-collisions when the nodes are placed too close and the “stem” on one doesn’t come down; so that’s probably not considered a bug, just something that may want to be mentioned if someone at Epic writes a Fortnite Bot tutorial (“Make sure the ‘stem’ descends when placing path nodes, otherwise things will get very very ugly.”)
Shot 1: I just added the #3 path loop and one of the nodes is too close (its stem is inverted).
Shot 2: In Creative Mode the player can’t walk through this node (not surprising, the node may have collision on until the stem is placed properly).
Shot 3: The minor collision error propagated errors all over the map, including on different numbered paths that were nowhere near the collision error. When I fixed the collision by moving the flawed node so that it’s stem dropped properly, the path errors all over the map unfortunately remained. My bots were very confused!
Shot 4: It took quite a bit of work to get the errors to go away (just fixing the too-close nodes didn’t do it). The developer of the path nodes may have assumed that they would always pin correctly (perhaps Creative forces it), but in the Editor the too-close/unpinned path nodes can happen, and will mess up all of the path nodes in semi-random ways making repair tedious. Of course, if a map maker makes the error once, and they spend hours fixing it, they will probably have learned their lesson.
It’s almost like there is a common data structure for all navigation points and a navigation point that is only partially initialized throws the common data structure’s pointers out of whack.
HI DreamMaker
correct. I was speaking about stronghold_log.verse. Code in the tutorial have inside log trace … but there no information about this file, so “script kids” like me first time make “cut and past” of verse code from the tutorial to learn receive error due to trace inside it and start getting crazy to make it running.
Hoping this can help you tutorial for future. Remenber people like me coming from creative 1.0 must be drive in verse, is not so easy for us to make it working
Have a nice w.e.
M.
