Balive

@Catacomber Yes, what you suggested is very easy to do in Ork by itself. It sounds like there would be a way to let TPC just access a formula in Ork that checks for the current values of said statistic; ie; mana, energy, whatever.

Balive

Quick question. Once TPC is integrated with Ork; does this mean something like ICE Creature Control, which adapts into TPC, would work in Ork? I'm just trying to figure out a better way to handle AI also within the Ork Framework.

Wood

@Catacomber Best wishes for the ORKsive project.

Personally, I have settled upon using Invector's Third Person Controller Template, so I will not be making suggestions for your project, other than, it is a good idea when any quality asset is integrated with ORK.

Keldryn

@Catacomber:

Am also interested in 3B because I like chaining combo attacks, which I haven't used yet but want to. Use costs associated with an ability is a little bit important. Because you might have a way to reduce or increase those by using an item or some other way. Not sure if you can do this in ORK but I would like to.

Also how does all this work on mobile?

I don't think that anything I'm doing should change how it works on mobile. You'll have to test that for me. ;-)

One idea I have for making the use costs work with the 3B setup would be to split the ability in two: one that has all of the Use Costs but doesn't apply any other effects to the target or user, and one that applies all of the effects but doesn't have any Use Costs set on it.

So when you press the button to attack, the [Use Cost] ability would get activated, and then if the attack hits, the [Effects] ability would get activated. This would all be taken care of by the customized MeleeWeapon or ShootableWeapon component on the character's active hand. The AbilityShortcut class does have a CanUse() function, which should check all of the Requirements on the ability, so I can check that before activating the ability via script.

@Balive:

Yes, what you suggested is very easy to do in Ork by itself. It sounds like there would be a way to let TPC just access a formula in Ork that checks for the current values of said statistic; ie; mana, energy, whatever.

I've got a CombatantController class at the core of this that manages access to the ORK Combatant and its essential functionality. So it's already got properties and methods for getting the combatant's Health, Stamina, and Mana status values (you can change these to whatever you want).

Quick question. Once TPC is integrated with Ork; does this mean something like ICE Creature Control, which adapts into TPC, would work in Ork? I'm just trying to figure out a better way to handle AI also within the Ork Framework.

It should. The 3A scenario is at least necessary for the AI characters if you're using the BattleAI; for the 3B scenario, I'm just redirecting how TPC handles the damage over to ORK so that we can use ORK's formulas and enhanced functionality (such as applying status effects, which happens as part of the calcuation, so that works).

I'm not yet certain how accommodating the 3B scenario is if you want to use Battle Events on your melee and ranged weapon attacks. The MeleeWeapon component does have settings for: playing a sound when you attack (optional delay), applying impact force to the target, displaying a particle effect at the hit location, and playing an impact sound on the hit location. It also has an optional "Damage Event" (not an ORK Event) field that you can send to the object that was damaged.

So I'm thinking that for 3B, weapon-based attacks will be mostly handled via customized versions of the relevant TPC components. They'll use ORK for calculating damage and effects, but they won't use Battle Events. Weapon durability would need to be handled via the MeleeWeapon component anyway, as you'd likely want it to be applied when your weapon hits an object that is not a Combatant (such as a wall).

This wouldn't effect spells or abilities that aren't hooking into TPC's combat system.

How does this sound?

I'm aiming to have a preview release of this ready for all of you to try out within in a week or so. This is not a promise; simply a statement of intent. ;-)

Keldryn

Actually, one last question tonight: do you plan to use ORK's BattleAI to handle enemy AI, or do you intend on using ICE Creature Control, Behavior Designer, Node Canvas, or the like?

If nobody is really planning to do much with the BattleAI then I won't make it a priority right now beyond being able to conduct simple tests with it.

Balive

Probably use ICE or something similar. Will Companion AI work with this?

abiasi

Looking forward for that integration!

We are currently developing a game using TPC for character control/movement and ORK for everything else. Weapon damage is calculated in ORK based on stats. This describes your scenario 3A but since we will have many ranged weapons we do need an approach like scenario 3B where pistols can use raycasts and other ranged weapons like rocket launchers and grenades can spawn prefabs.

We also need to have a HUD with the currently equipped weapon and the amount of bullets left, plus a way to quickly reload and switch between weapons, all of that is quite nicely handled by TPC but we don't currently know how to do it with ORK.

Battle AI support would be nice to have everything in the least amount of plugins but we also have Behaviour Designer.

gamingislove

Keldryn said: I don't suppose there is a way of applying an ability's use costs without calculating the target effects is there?

Sure there is :)

You need to get the active level of the ability (e.g. using the GetActiveLevel function of the AbilityShortcut) and use the UseCost function. You can also prevent that using the ability consumes the use costs by using the Use function of the active level and setting the doUseCosts parameter to false.

Keldryn

Thanks, @gamingislove!

My progress updates in this thread tend to be very wordy, so let's make this one more visual:




Here comes Evil Doug. Quick, shoot him, shoot him! (and let ORK calculate the damage)




He's getting closer, shoot him again!




He's right in my face anyway, so I'll pull out the sword and finish him off. (ORK calculates the damage and determines that the combatant has died; TPC's Die ability then plays the animation and enables the ragdoll physics)




Whew, Event Interactions still work. What's in this chest?





Ooh, a bunch of weapons. I'll just use my mouse to drag this Katana to my own inventory..




Sweet. Now I can use this katana -- with all of the correct two-handed animations.




A very important detail that you can't see in a screen shot: the game pauses when the menu is open, so the bad guys aren't still walking around.





Now I'm going to switch weapons using my menu screen.




Back to my original sword and its one-handed animations!

Keldryn

Just noticed that the floating damage notifications don't match the console text. I'll look into that. :-)

EDIT: it's nothing, the update notifications are still set to "count to" so the screenshot caught it before it reached 27.

The screenshots are all from the example project that will be included; it's a critical piece of this integration as well. I could write a very long tutorial explaining everything that needs to be set up a certain way in the ORK project and why (and I'll get to it at some point, but I'm easily at 100+ hours developing this already). So treat the included sample project as a template and starting point for your own projects using this.

The sample project uses the assets from the TPC demos (which won't be included but will work once you import the TPC package), a few Unity Standard Assets, and a collection of models and graphic files available under the CC0 (public domain) and CC-BY-SA 3.0 licenses.

Phase One will be the real time integration. Turn-based requires a very different approach and it will be much easier to do as a separate "module" with its own ORKProject file.

Balive

Looking awesome so far Keldryn! So hyped! It would be great timing if TPC would go on sale this week! :-P

Keldryn

Quick update: It's coming along nicely, but I've had to set it aside for most of the past week due to other commitments. I'll be getting back to it within the next couple of days and working towards getting a "Phase One" preview out for you guys.

Everybody who is interested in trying it out, please PM me your contact info so I can provide you a link to the files when it is ready. There are a few TPC classes which I've had to copy-paste a few methods and then change a line or two, so I'm not just going to put those files out there for just anyone. Some of that will be unnecessary later on as Justin re-works a few of those files for easier subclassing. And some of it will probably be fine to release, but he'll need to give everything based on his work a good look before I do so.

Oh, and I pretty much combined 3A and 3B into a single scenario. Weapons won't use Damage Dealers, but they will check for Damage Zones in their hit detection and use those to apply damage. So you can still use Damage Zones for environmental hazards (which could use Damage Dealers). NPCs can use weapons to attack from an event step, and I've now got my first event step that waits until it receives a callback event from another TPC component before progressing to the next node in the Game/Battle Event. So no more "Do Action -> Check Field -> Wait 0.1s -> Check Field - Wait 0.1s ..." loops.

Catacomber

Really excited about this. I'll be happy to test this on mobile when you get there.

Keldryn

The first preview release of the "Phase One" integration is now available!

In this release, all melee and ranged weapons (hitscan and projectile) use TPC's animations and hit detection but use ORK for calculating damage and effects. I have focused most of my effort on the player character up to this point, so the AI characters still only use a sword and basic Battle AI settings.

EDIT: I should note that ammunition is not yet integrated with ORK. So all of the ranged weapons in the example have their ammo set to infinite.

PM me if you would like to receive a copy of this release.

Catacomber

Trying it. : )