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I hear people call things DevLogs. or other fancy terms. Of course I have plenty of questions. Sometimes it seems I forgot soMething I thought I knew weeks ago. Sometimes this journey feels like pulling teeth. It always starts somewhere.
Quite often also includes lots of free or and open source stuff. Which I should try to list, I will put that on my ToDo list.
So It started as an idea that free associated doing a UDummy course. I decided to interrupt my art project type game for this that i have been working on for a couple weeks. I initally used a metahuman, which was ok but so laggy to work with, but it enabled me to put most of the logic in a BASE enemy class so I can re-use it.
And as a bonus, it seems Reallusion has a contest that also includes the use of several pieces of software for free.
2024 Reallusion 3D Character Contest Announcement
Having looked at the free Character Creator stuff on the marketplace I decided to give it a go. Exploring or bumbling through the Character Creator → Blender → Character Creator _> Unreal Pipeline.
So I have some State Trees, actually based on a custom C++ class, the reason for it is ease of switching. State Tree is less fun to work with then advertised, and there is not a ton of information on it, but still makes more sense than Behaviour Trees which I want to avoid.
I have not tweaked the Physics Asset too much, as I this is not the final design, but it’s enough to give me a couple chuckles. And some of the initial gameplay elements.
I have several quests now but I had an idea how I would get out of the Patrol state and into a goofy victory dance state for the enemy, and now I have a pile of unused spaghetti. So quest to figure out if I am going to have a generic montage or if this is going to be something I need to recreate like the animation blueprint everytime I change the model. Think I also saw something somewhere about using generic ABPs…
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iClone8, a very quick animation so I can set up a Parade State/montage/event. The plan is to have a selection of ‘victory dances’ to play when the enemy reaches a patrol point. Probably add some sort of malus to the player, as an example, get grifted for some $, which is currently what I am calling the ponts scored.
Currently I have a State Tree for Patrolling
A State Tree for Ragdolling, which really just lets the enemy BP handle most of what goes on, and returning to the Patrol State Tree.
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Well it turns out variables can be animation montages, which is just what is needed. Next little task is to look at ragdoll (enemy character) penetrating collision objects. I already have a surrounding array of collision actors for out of bounds and call a respawn, but I would prefer to bounce the ragdoll around. Also the ragdoll can get knocked into that windmill and then stuck, or stuck under some poorly thought out geometry.
Going back and getting an example of a goal in action. Was better part of a day to get this clown head out of Character Creator, into Blender, sculpt and modify more, add some duped and decimated meshes for collisions and all the renaming involved in that. Would probably have been easier to make a simple clown head from scratch in blender, but I liked the materials. Also, as it turns out, problems with Chaos Physics ultimately means I will not use these particular collision meshes anyway.
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At the point where more work is involved in workarounds. Might have to repost these in different threads.
Interpenetration Problems with characters, ragdolls and moving geometry.
Here’s the hole launcher / ball return getting a character stuck. I have also managed to get the player stuck as well.
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Failure to Launch
Here’s the popper not launching the enemy character at all, but it works as expected on the player. I currently do not know why.
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A diffferent type of failure of the popper with interpenetration.
Some Fail mitigation by disabling the collision of the trigger while the popper is in motion and then re enabling it - seemed more sensible then trying to figure out a tick gate to have the collision ‘recheck’ or reset. (search for that if you want reinforcement of the increased uselessness of internet searches).
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