@willgoldstone I forgot to ask do you have any further updates on this regarding time scale, further features (I’m so hoping for climbing system like links) :).
I wonder if they’ll be using C# Animation jobs to accomplish the ragdoll-like nature of the BOTW styled controller.
Any idea on this, @willgoldstone ?
Tbh I have given up all hope on getting an update from unity on this matter, I have asked on twitter and here and no response.
Hey everyone, sorry I’ve not been active in this thread, I’ve got a bunch of projects on the go and honestly, just forgot to check in - I’ll check more regularly in future.
So we’re currently in firefighting mode after we hit a bunch of issues with the controller. We should be back on track by the end of next week, and hopefully able to start sharing a beta with you shortly after. The main challenge we’ve had has been migrating to a new team, training them on some of the details of Unity as we weren’t able to work on this with our internal team this time around. We’re back on track now and I’m seeing promising results.
@limaoscar sorry but I didn’t see a tweet from you, apologies if I missed it!
Regarding the more detailed questions around ragdoll and climbing - honest answer is definitely not in the first instance. We want to get a bunch more procedural stuff into the character using animation jobs, but I need to make sure we have the right design for how to do that, and I want to make sure we ship a solid running, jumping and strafing character to you first, along with a new first person controller too. So the answer isn’t that we’ll never do climbing, its just not high (pun intended) on the list at present.
Thanks for your questions, so the plan is to introduce a character that runs, jumps and strafes right away, and get your feedback. Then we’ll add combat to the strafe mode, and then start looking at IK and additional actions like those you listed - but I want to set expectations that if you are expecting us to deliver a detailed character that suits your game, please keep in mind that we’re making a prototyping asset. Don’t get me wrong I’d love to get this asset to do everything I can, but presently we want to ship one thing at a time and make sure its right. We apologise for missing the 18.2 deadline, and I promise the team i’m working with on this are pushing to get things ready ASAP.
Thanks so much for your patience!
Thank you for your very clear and transparent response Will!
Yes of course it’s not your job creating a character controller that fits every need for us game developers! I honestly didnt think you’d consider including climbing animations in the new standard asset, but just added that as a suggestion It’s great to hear some updates on this project to know it didnt run out in the sand and that you’re listening to our inputs while developing this! I think most of us would be amazed to get to work with this new character with the updated movement and the new “AAA” camera you’ve talked about in this thread! If im not mistaken, I think I heard you say something about working closely with the people that’s working with the new input manager. How has that collaboration worked out? Will the new standard assets work great together with the new inputs?
I figured you’ve all been busy with the Berlin Keynote (I think I recogniced you on stage!), amazing work with the 2018.2! It would be cool to see some cool gifs of the animations, a little “what to expect” but I understand if you dont want to reveal too much yet!
To summarize, happy to see this project is still alive and cant wait to start implementing this into new projects!!
@Vallsten Hey so yep we’re still making this thing with both input systems in mind - the old and new. It’s likely the first time you get your hands on it, it’ll be with the old system, but we’ve made it pluggable and mappable with scriptable objects, and I am quite liking the UX we have for it, I think you will too. As for new system, it’s been under redevelopment and we haven’t pulled latest for a couple of weeks, we’ve been focused on getting animation to a better state so we can get it out to share with you.
Yeah I did the ‘pre-note’ and our roadmap talk at Berlin, was fun, but now we’re back to business! Expect to hear more after next week, thanks again for the patience everyone!
makes vague whining beggy noises for the low level controller
Thanks for your honest reply. That means a lot to help those of us looking forward to this have clearer expectations.
Regarding the “strafing” thing though…
I’m starting to worry that it might be sounding like we’re getting just another 3rd person (mouse-look & root-motion animation) shooter controller (like the one that already comes with Standard Assets…) Am I wrong for thinking this? – Or does this controller still plan to handle “responsive” physics-based movement (with animations taking a back-seat to actual gameplay), similar to the system in BOTW, SM64 (made over a decade ago), or Overgrowth (for a more modern example).
As BOTW’s approach lends itself to responsiveness very well (see the GDC on Overgrowth’s physics-based character controller and why this is great for responsiveness), I’m wondering if you guys are still going that “physics-based” route.
If it sounds too specific, imagine if the team (instead of defining a controller for a specific gameplay style) just added a nice procedural pose-matching layer right on top of a physics-based character-controller system (like the one from Overgrowth?) instead. That controller was made by just ONE guy – so imagine if he had an entire team at his disposal? – That animation/physics portion of the character controller alone would be enough to start nearly any 3rd person project I can think of (since it covers the basics of general physics and its interplay with general animation in a nice, logical, manner that one can easily extend.)
You can now do the kind of animation shown in that video below with C# Animation jobs, so maybe that isn’t such a bad direction for this to go?
Like many others here, I too am looking for something more “low-level” and “general-purpose” than a typical 3rd-person “shooter” controller can provide (even if it includes absolutely all the bells and whistles of the genre) because I’d have to customize them down to the barebones level to fit my project’s gameplay anyway. So I would just like to know if that whole “general purpose” thing has since gone out the window because of timeframes and deadlines (and now we are just regurgitating the Standard Assets controller) – or if the “general-purpose” and “low-level” BOTW approach is still underway in some form?
With just the basic movement from BOTW’s controller, it isn’t but a tiny “hop” (pun intended) to implement all the fancy back-flipping, runs and jumps, leaps and climbs of Overgrowth’s or SM64’s character controllers. However, with another “3rd person shooter” controller (with root-motion-contrived “physics” and basic linear rotations and translations for “movement” defined by the “mouselook”)… Well, that’d be a LOT bigger leap (not to mention a much more distant starting-point to work from) to do the same thing. With the physics-based animation controller, you could just implement mouselook and replace the movement physics on the XZ axis to implement your own linear controls (rather than going the other way around and implementing an entire physics-based animation system) and everything else in the system would still work as intended (such as secondary motions, etc.)
I would personally rather wait an entire YEAR (or two!) for a more “general” solution than to just be handed a system that doesn’t actually help me in some way with my specific goals. If I have to reprogram the entire physics and animation system (because it was tailored to fit a “shooter” when I’m not making anything remotely like a shooter), then I’m clearly not able to use the system you’ve provided to start working from. Unfortunately this clear inflexibility was my problem with the original controller from Standard Assets – and I’m worried history is just going to repeat itself with this…
@willgoldstone thanks for your response, i know it was a long shot asking for a climbing system, but if you don’t ask you wont get :).
Actually looking forward to this new asset.
Been doing that since I dunno, 3.5… It’s always been possible.
Animations in new 3p character will be build around playables or mecanim?
Lol, fair enough! – I wasn’t sure about that at first until I did some animation controller “hacking” to get my own system like this working with Humanoids, but I’d still like to see your approach and if it’s easier / more performant than what I’m using now.
I mainly just meant that there are aspects of this kind of system (when working within the limitations of Mecanim) that aren’t so straightforward (and seem impossible) without using a modified form of the Legacy system (and losing the humanoid functionality) or rolling your own solution entirely (with hacks) to maintain it. Without blendtree hacks, writing transforms directly, (or entirely rewriting the Legacy animation system while “hacking” Mecanim so that I can still use Mecanim’s humanoid stuff… <__< ;;; ), it can be daunting to play with things like realtime custom animation curves or setting the bones to react to player physics without setting up a ragdoll specifically for this first. This is something that I (and others) once thought was impossible ( especially with Mecanim standing over us with its large, brooding presence), but it isn’t – It’s just really painful to re-implement (from my own experience) an entirely custom animation system (that does mostly the same thing Mecanim does) for something others are already doing.
That said – I definitely still feel like this would be a very valuable thing to include inside of a 3d character controller, and I’m not really sure it would fit anywhere else. With C# Animation jobs, this kind of animation has actually become a lot more straightforward since it allows one to more-easily implement things like springs and pose-matching on the individual joints without worrying about fighting with Mecanim or Legacy anymore.
Seems like it’d be a great opportunity to show this off to potential users of said functionality by providing it in a working example / prototyping controller that actually uses it as a real-world tool and example simultaneously. Everyone who uses said controller would then know how to (properly) modify it if they ever wanted to change up its behavior. They’d have it right in front of them already.
@willgoldstone Yeah maybe i’m just a simple man, but i was hoping that we get a generic responsive and stable third person character controller assets, extended feature can be added later after the release as an update. Guess that’s not gonna happened anytime soon?
Hey all, will spend some time over the next two weeks clarifying everything and get you another decent full update and if not an early drop then a detailed description of what’s coming as the MVP of the project, part of what has slowed us down has been scope definition, and as that’s on me to fix - I apologise again for the delay to this. Also will be addressing the other questions above, just haven’t had time this weekend to jump on, not ignoring the discussion going on here, keep it coming, get back to you asap!
Any news regarding a release date yet ? is an early drop available ?
Im wondering how the work with the “AAA Adaptable Camera” is going and which games you’re looking at for inspiration. The camera is very important for third person games and the current standard asset camera controls is really sluggish and quite bad in many ways. It feels way too hard to modify the existing camera when building a new third person camera controller, at least for an amateur/semi intermediate coder. This feature would be amazing, and I hope it’s still planned for the release.
Not sure if you’ve tried it, but Cinemachine is a really great camera system that pretty much does anything you’d want it to do. If you combine it with Timeline Playables, it can do even cooler (gameplay-related) stuff that you probably wouldn’t ever expect.
I may be missing something here, but I can’t think of a single in-game camera feature Cinemachine can’t handle. If you look at some of the earlier demos of it (such as the one with the mouse in it opening a treasure chest), it does third-person cameras extremely well (and intuitively too!)
Oh, haven’t looked into that actually! Thanks for the reply, I’ll try it out!
Hi folks just checking in for another quick update. We now have a controller we’re feeling more confident with. We’re refining the cameras tomorrow, and we are also getting a lot better locomotion results and in better shape than when last I wrote you all. Current status -
- Third Person Character - walk run and toggle to sprint in and working, strafe mode also implemented
- First Person Controller - in and working, needs camera tweaks
- OCC (Open Character Controller) - this is our C# replacement for the PhysX Character Controller component. We are making a demo scene that shows how this works abstracted from animation using a capsule so that you can see how this works specifically with its Move and Grounded functionality. As part of the demo scene we’ll also provide a setup of the existing CharacterController component so that you may compare and contrast and hopefully understand how to migrate your existing stuff if you so wish.
Expect more news end of the week!