We purchased a bunch of asset store’s characters, weapons and visual effects:
Shuriken Magic Effect Pack
Cartoon FX Packs
Fireball Prefabs
FX Mega Pack
Magic Arsenal
Magic Projectiles v1.6
Magical
Realistic Effects Packs
Realistic FPS Pack
Sci-Fi Effects
And some scripts to try to ease the work:
Pool, Trigger, Constrain Bundle
Weapon System
Easy Weapons System
UFPS
The point is, is there a simple or standard solution to integrate them?
For instance, suppose you have:
a zombie model with a “throw vomit” animation
an “acid vomit” vfx
a vomit sound fx
a target human model with a “hit” animation
How to integrate them so that when the human comes close to the zombie, the “throw vomit” animation reaches a specific point the acid vomit vfx comes out of the zombie’s mouth, the sound is activated, the vfx hits the human target and it then starts a “get hit” animation?
The same goes to weapons’ projectiles, magic spells, turret missiles etc.
There seems to be many approaches and I’d like to hear from you what you think is the best one.
No replies probably cause your question is too broad and subjective. You should have at least said what you have tried and why do you think they don’t seem to be the best out of various ways?
You could just use animation events or state machine behaviors for the particles, sounds etc.
You’ll need to write monobehaviors for that.
For example, in zombie animation clip, you add animation event at the point where zombie deals damage. In your monobehavior you receive said event, perform collision query, and if you find a player nearby, you deal damage to it. Also, you either spawn or enable/disable particle systems when needed. By scripts. Which will have to be written by you.
It is not particularly difficult, if you don’t want to do this yourself, pay someone to do it for you.
If you’re not very much into coding yet, you can try taking something like Playmaker - which you can start using right away - and maybe even add a simple combat example for Playmaker, like AI Bot to help you get started with animating characters, giving them attacks (with visual and sound FX), calculating damage, and so on.
I’m unfamiliar with UFPS, but isn’t that also a framework to enable you to set up characters and attacks without much coding?
EDIT: Another thing you could try, if you’re looking for a tool to help build a game, is Node Canvas, which is in the current Madness sale. It provides state management like Playmaker, it helps with dialogue, and it also has behavior trees. But if you’re really new to all of this, Node Canvas might be a bit much.
I “Enabled()”/bumped the post because things get buried pretty fast on ‘General Discussions’.
@neginfinity Really, the task is not that difficult and could be done ad hoc, but when you have 120+ characters you try to maximize workflow. Maybe if I said that it would make the question’s intention clearer.
@Ostwind For instance, Trigger Pro is very useful for the detection part of this cycle, but it has its own scripts to pass along information to the hit target. So does Weapon System and some to those VFXs packages, they have their own scripts.
If I could find a good enough integrated workflow I would adapt the different assets’ scripts to this chosen “standard”.
So, my question is, what are your experiences with regards to solving an “attack cycle”. Is there a practical/typical workflow or is it an “hack it yourself” approach?
Regards,
Rod
@hopeful Coding isn’t a problem. An efficient workflow is. Thanks for the advices and kind help anyway.
I’m not sure if the overlap between the group of people who buys and uses dozens of assets for a single project and the group of people who knows good and efficient coding practices is big enough to have established some kind of “standard approach”. In fact I would be surprised if such a thing existed. I can’t help you either because I neither use that many assets nor do I have significant experience in making games. I’m not even sure you’re saving yourself time by trying to weave together soooo many different things from third parties. I’d focus on integrating the things that save you the most time first and then go down the list and try to assess if any given asset can easily be integrated with what you already have, or if doing it from scratch makes more sense. But that’s just my 2 cents and I might be wrong.
Once again, you can write monobehaviors and editor extensions for that.
If your characters are humanoids, then using HumanBone data type and animators functions, you can write an extension that will be able to configure any humanoid character in one click.
I wrote something like that once. Made a script that, when applied to humanoid character would setup ragdoll, bounding boxes, attach ai controller (including sensors), configured approximated hitboxes then put a weapon into character’s hand. So, one click and you have game-ready combatant.
You could do the same. It isn’t difficult.
Either way FIRST you’ll need to decide on your combat/ai framework, and come up with skeleton setup for a single character. Then you can write automation tool that would configure the other 120 characters for you automatically.
I like your code formatting - the old fixed column layout makes me smile.
EDIT: Also - honestly now that is a great way to help promote your work - by building out a set of really good looking tutorials. It’s very smart, for one thing you’re actually helping people, for another thing you’re showing off your assets, and finally you’re also handling customer support all at the same time. Great idea!
Thanks! When I first learned Unity, I did tutorials from http://www.walkerboystudio.com/wbstudio/ and one of the first things the voice over said was about making code easier to read w/ columns like that.
