Use Controller Desired Rotation + RootMotion bugged

I’ve been trying to do some AI that doesn’t turn to the player instantly when chasing him. When at medium range, the enemy should perform a dropkick with root motion. Before, I used “Use Controller Rotation Yaw” and “Set Focus Point” which rotates the controller’s rotation towards me and then instantly turns the controlled enemy character towards me.

I used animation notifies in the dropkick animation to clear the focus at the point of jumping. The result was that the enemy would run at me even when the animation started, tracking my movement until the point of jumping came (where the focus was cleared). However, since I want smoother rotations now, I disabled “Use Controller Rotation Yaw” for the enemy and enabled “Use Controller Desired Rotation” in the character movement settings.

This works fine but not for the dropkick. It seems like the focus point is completely ignored when the root motion is active. Before, focus + root motion would work together, setting rotation (and therefore direction) and root motion respectively. Now, focus + root motion doesn’t work together, as the pawn’s rotation does NOT get updated while root motion is active.

I can’t see this as anything else than a bug, because the only difference I made was that the pawn should not update its rotation immediately, but over time. One works, without smooth rotation, the other one works, without root motion. I hope this gets fixed soon.

Yes, that’s an old bug. Not fixed yet.