hi and good afternoon, i’m currently attempting to make some form of a action third person game with some rpg elements.
currently i’m still designing some of the core mechanics and i wonder how people would aproach the same solution used in starforge as how they did a full physics driven character?
on the other hand would be the melee, currently i’m able to melee the other player on a network by using collisions onto the actual weapon, now sometimes it’s a bit inacurrate when it comes dealing with the actual transformation of the animation, i wonder anyone have ideas around that one?.
i have seen people using raycasting for melee too in some simpler form. now what i’m trying to attempt is to be able to hit the actual character with the weapon and drive him back.
looking at your post, long time ago i tried searching about ik too lol, in the asset store i found something relating to it. and now that unity 4 came out i’m still messing with mecanim. well in my youtube i have a fps game in which currently is on a standstill since my other friend’s pc is borken. anyhow i’m making a third person action rpg like the legend of zelda or something like that lol with a bit of rpg elements. but not like a hige world. more like imagine playing a regular fps game that has matches of 10 people with modes like king of the hill and so on but in a fantasy and third person sort of way. well my friends call it fantasy to me it seems medieval still.
currently for doing mele damage i just cast a ray from the middle of the characters body and use the unity 4 animation curve to trigger when the animation should register a hit.
now the shield has collisions and can block. still i’m thinking how to get a better melee mecanics and how to implement things like procedural animations or some form to make a character to be based on phisics and forces. for example if i swing at you and you block my attack with your shield i should be some what get forced back or so.
Looks like mecanim has all you need to get started on IK and physics. I remember reading about how melee in rpg’s and mmorpg’s is faked, meaning that if one player throws a block, then a message is sent to the other player to find out if he is swinging a sword, and if so cancel the animation and play the recoil animation. This method keeps performance cost down.
If you have ever played WOW then you know that even a huge game like that has bugs, glitches and not to mention feature downgrades due to performance. When a enemy hits you and you run you still get hit from yards(game scale) away. This is because hitting and missing has to do with the enemies skill.
In short anything and everything can be done but will the game still run lol. Performance dictates what cool features we put in our games, and even though we developers have high grade systems most PC users out there are still rocking the old slow stuff. I still know some who use xp with 512 Mb cards lol.
IK Rigs are only available in Unity Pro, in my case I’m developing a toolkit and I want indie developers like me to use it.
I think the current physic simulation technology is not advanced enough for cinematic fighting. It’s possible to develop a realistic fighting system, yes, but it will always fake most reactions. The most advanced game I have seen is Toribash, and it is noticeable that there is a long way to go. We even need an AI to control biomechanics, something that the most advanced android still don’t posses.
so far i’m still having little issues when coding with mechanim, such as i’m able to get the animations going, animations curve for the animations and so on.
the main issues i haven’t been able to figure out is how to stop animations in mid play, check which animation is playing. i have seen the function called isintransition but that one seems to be for the checks if it’s changing a animation.
check out the overgrowth on google. I dont think its that easy even with mecanim. You need lots of mini animation clips. When you work with large animation libraries it gets more complex. Especialy its really very complex with melee combat. there lots of combinations. I hope you do it well. Good lucks.
yeah i started first with a simple basic combat similar to just using raycasting for a swing and being able to block it with a shield by putting a collider with it.
now i wonder if it’s possible to make it so when i get hit that certain area is dealt using physics then transitions back to animations.
so that’s why i keep bumping to see if i come across to some people who might have some experience to share and hopefully be able to create a good system for combat. if it turns out to be extensive maybe i can share it with the community so others are able to use some of the implementations. but first i’m trying to gather what i can.
i’m still getting used to mecanim at the moment lol
I trying to make something similar right now. Still so far no great progress
Anyway, melee damage system is not priority. Firstly, you should define and make mechanic for character movement. And depending on it, making of melee system no longer be a problem.
But physic based character movement system it’s the most complicated thing. Human organism is a very complicated system. So it’s not a surprising.
For now I even don’t know how it working in Starforge. Also, I not sure that all this idea is necessary. For example, in Starfore this make great inconvenience control. If system will be inconvenience, it’s bad.
By the way, making of your own IK system it’s not complicated task. Basicaly, it’s just several line of code with geometry formulas to find 3th position of triangle, and two angles, if we know two positions and one angle (Shoulder position, target position and angle to target).
Also free IK there is in Asset Store. Search “IK cartoon soldier” or somehthing like this.
ok so talking about ik, any good resourses on how this it coded? so far i started to use some of the animations that mecnamim provides, now i do see that the locomotion might not be fully suitable for unity 4 since it’s been used for unity 3.5 when the legacy animaition was out. so i’m guessing that there would be some conversion or a form of porting if i where to plan to use it in conjunction to unity 4 mecanim system. another one would be being able to transition from a animation to physics. for example let’s say your left arm got hit, how about let that part of the body be solve by phisics and once done transition back to the animation? now the task that i would find complicated is making it so that body part doesn’t animates. currently i started with doing the basic motions first prior to attemtping anything else
I’d like to mention that I find great virtue in deterministic systems like WoW has. Games are methods of interaction with a world and rules, especially at the subconscious level. Full realism, while cool, is difficult, heavy, and unpredictable. One reason SWTOR had terrible reception at launch was due to having their game mechanics based on animation clips; unnecessarily entangled and unreliable mechanics that made gameplay frustrating.
Now if it’s something like say, Kingdom Hearts, animations and combat states seem to coincide well, but the combat isn’t based on the animation. When initiating an attack action, the action itself handles all the gameplay mechanics. If the character is damaged, the action determines whether or not to stop performing the current action, and plays animations accordingly. (As opposed to the “got hit” animation playing automatically and interrupting the action entirely.)
Where physics and animations come into play in Kingdom Hearts is in determining whether the enemy does get hit or not, and this is at least reasonably predictable. All it really does is register some sort of “did hit the enemy” event whenever the weapon’s collider passes through the enemy’s.
