[SUPPORT] Advanced Turn Based Tile Toolkit

[Monokkel]

I'm not sure what you mean about disconnecting that function, because then the GridManager will never be activated, so I didn't try that yet.

But in the pic below, the top group of errors is what I get if I start the game, and immediately exit it without actually doing anything.
The lower one is if I actually play through the scenario (2 player units vs 3 enemy units, enemies won). It does work in game just fine though, which is weird I guess.

If you want, I could upload the game or something, but other than adding those Blueprints to spawn the buildings, I haven't altered anything.

What I meant was indeed to not run ActivateGridManager or any later function to rule out whether the errors were caused by your own function. But looking at the errors it seems unlikely that is the case. Do you still have the delay node before activating the grid manager? I'm guessing these errors might come from the player controller trying to access the GridManager before it has been activated. If you have such a delay, remove it and see if it disappears. If you don't, or if you still get the errors, you can send me a copy of your project at knuteiliv@gmail.com. Do not include the Saved or Intermediate folders and zip up the rest.

[Axebeard]

I tried your suggestions, and removing the Delay node actually got rid of the errors completely. I still have to do some more testing to see if the grid is being applied correctly, but it looks good so far.

Separate issue: how do you change the Transparency Threshhold on the HA_Wall object? I'm using it with custom meshes and it works well as far as becoming transparent when the mouse cursor is behind it, but I'd like it to only change when it's closer to the camera than it is currently.

[elec2ron]

Hi,

Have been looking at your height map example map, i see you are using decals and am wondering how you are able to stop the decals punching through to the levels below or above?

Edit. Ah, so you set everything to not receive decals except for the HISM?

[Monokkel]

Hi,

Have been looking at your height map example map, i see you are using decals and am wondering how you are able to stop the decals punching through to the levels below or above?

Edit. Ah, so you set everything to not receive decals except for the HISM?

Yep, nothing more fancy than that. This can of course be impractical in some cases where you want to use decals for decoration on surfaces that are close to walkable terrain, but I have not found a good way to get around this.

[elec2ron]

Thanks, although i must be missing something as i still cant see how it works. The concrete platform blueprint has receive decals on so as i understand it the decal should punch through to the platform below, but it doesn't.

Trying to get the same behavior on my own map but no luck so far.

Edit. Ah i see you can control the distance the decal projects with the x scale.

[Axebeard]

I've been messing around with the HA_Wall actor and made versions for floors/ceilings/etc. It gets pretty messy when it comes to having multiple floors. I have a two story building made of these actors, but once a unit is on the second floor, it's almost impossible to get the target cursor to select an area on the first floor. I have a suggestion that might help with this:

Add a function to cycle through "layers" of the level, based on their location height. Similar to the way you have automated cover on the SciFi map example, but make it so for example PageUp and PageDown cycle through the the layers of the map, while making the rest transparent. Or, disregard the transparency (as we can easily enough set that up already), and just make the targeting cursor locked to the current layer.

[Monokkel]

Thanks, although i must be missing something as i still cant see how it works. The concrete platform blueprint has receive decals on so as i understand it the decal should punch through to the platform below, but it doesn't.

Trying to get the same behavior on my own map but no luck so far.

Edit. Ah i see you can control the distance the decal projects with the x scale.

You figured it out on your own again before I got back to you I've tried to find the sweet spot for the default decal size where the decals will still fill the ground on fairly steep inclines and still not bleed over to meshes above or below in most cases. If your game does not have steep inclines you can experiment with reducing the x scale further.

I've been messing around with the HA_Wall actor and made versions for floors/ceilings/etc. It gets pretty messy when it comes to having multiple floors. I have a two story building made of these actors, but once a unit is on the second floor, it's almost impossible to get the target cursor to select an area on the first floor. I have a suggestion that might help with this:

Add a function to cycle through "layers" of the level, based on their location height. Similar to the way you have automated cover on the SciFi map example, but make it so for example PageUp and PageDown cycle through the the layers of the map, while making the rest transparent. Or, disregard the transparency (as we can easily enough set that up already), and just make the targeting cursor locked to the current layer.

I did experiment with some different ways of doing this when I first implemented multi-level grids. With the current setup tiles that are on a higher level grid-wise (meaning that there are more tiles directly below it) can potentially be lower in-game than tiles that have fewer tiles below them. For your suggestion to work you cannot look at a tile's grid index, but instead at the actual height of the tile in-game. I've tested this out and have a solution below that will hopefully achieve the result you are after.

First make the following changes to VectorToIndex3D (changes highlighted). This will return whatever grid index is closest in height to the location inputted by checking all possibilities. Slightly less efficient than the default implementation since it does not break out (can be improved), but does the job.



Now with those changes made we need to change the value we input. In the GetHitTileLocationAndIndex, instead of getting the z location of the hit location of the mouse, we use a custom height variable. This is the one we want to adjust with PageUp/Down. With this solution we can still hover on click on tiles that are far away from CurrentLevelHeight if there are no good, close, candidates. You can always add a branch comparing the height of the outputted index to CurrentLevelHeight if you want to prevent this.



Lastly, we want to skip the following branch in ATBTT_PlayerController in Display path on hover:



Hope that gives you the result you want.

[Axebeard]

As long as the collision of the mesh does not block RangeTrace units will be able to attack/see through it. If you are using the procedural WallTrace method in BP_GridManager having the meshes block WallTrace will prevent units from walking through them. If your chain link fence actor is of the tile class you will also be able to block walkability by modifying the edge costs in the tile's public variables and setting blocked directions to cost 0.

I was poking around in collision settings on my mesh and couldn't find anything for RangeTrace or WallTrace, are these in one of your actors? I've been using the HA_Wall as the actor for all of my architecture. Not sure if that's the best thing to use or not though.

Also, is the SciFi gamemode standalone, or does it rely on the main ATBTT gamemode? I'm sure most people are using the SciFi one since it has a cover system and stuff, but I don't see cover in the main mode.

[Monokkel]

Axebeard: They should be in the collision settings for the mesh of the actor you are inspecting. Do you see the usual collision channels, but just not the custom ones? If so, might you have altered the default config files of the project in some way?

The scifi versions of blueprints are all child blueprints of the regular ones. If you open a blueprint you will see what blueprint/C++ class is its parent at the top right hand side.

[xLacie]

Hi there,

I've been learning how to use this toolkit and experimenting with implementation of various mechanics. One thing I'd like to make is tiles with meshes that could be stood on, which would change the pawn's stats. What I have so far is a blueprint which inherits from Tile Actor. This blueprint has a mesh (it's a tree stump) which the character can step on. Just above the mesh there is a collision box which, when overlapped, compares the index of the blueprint to the index of all pawns on the grid, and if they are equal (i.e. pawn is standing on the stump tile) it calls an event on the pawn to increase it's stat (like health). This is done with Begin Overlap and End Overlap events, where End Overlap calls a ''reset stat'' event for the pawn that has left the tile. This is working so far, but I have encountered a weird problem. While the pawn is standing on the tile, their stat will be increased, but it will decrease if the camera is moved. If the camera stays centered around the pawn everything works fine, but moving the camera to look at/attack enemy units seems to trigger the End Overlap event, despite the pawn standing in place.
Any ideas what could be causing this? I've never seen such behaviour.

[Skulldug]

Hello Monokkel, I am changing markers(Meshes) using the sci_fi grid manager with hexes, all are working except the hover tile, the stock hover marker is showing with the path, and my custom marker stays stuck at 0,0 on map..do you have any idea what I might have messed up..or am I missing something ?

[Haukifile]

Hi!

First of all, thanks for your work on the toolkit, it's been amazingly helpful! I am developing a project with a Fallout-style action point system for moving, shooting etc. I got it working almost as intended, but ran into a couple of problems:

1) AI turns lead to a loop where the pawn runs a set amount and spawns back to the starting points, runs again and spawns back, etc. Output log shows an error, which leads to me thinking that the array of move choice candidates is not being generated correctly, but I can't find the reason for this. Any ideas where to start poking around? Most of the pathfinding functions seem to use the pawns current move variable, which I've been replacing with the current action points variable, but I'm not sure if it's the right way to go.

LogScriptCore: Warning: Script Msg: Attempted to access index -1 from array 'Move Choice Candidates' of length 1 in '/Game/AdvancedTurnBasedTileToolkit/Blueprints/Gameplay/BP_Grid_Manager.BP_Grid_Manager_Cecide the final target from viable options'!

2) The game deducts one action point if the pawn attempts something without having enough AP. For example firing a shot when the AP cost is too high leads to the skill deactivating correctly but the pawn is left with one less AP regardless. I can't seem to find the right spot for the fix.

Edit: Got the second issue solved, removed the ap cost from the skills and replaced them with my own ap cost calculations.
Any help is much appreciated!

[Monokkel]

Skulldug: For the skills, the target marker is individually defined withing each skill. Go to Skill_Move and change SkillMarkerMesh to whatever you want to use.

[Skulldug]

Thanks Monokkel, I didn't even notice that...I am also using custom skills...All fixed up, Thank you. All the best in the new year to you !

[Monokkel]

Thanks Monokkel, I didn't even notice that...I am also using custom skills...All fixed up, Thank you. All the best in the new year to you !

Easy to miss All the best to you as well. Here's to another year of productive game development!