ChimpLogik

I am encountering a blocking bug where the Shortcut ability HUD stops working when I try to mouse-click on it to select an ability, but if I use the keyboard shortcuts it still works.
I am having a hard time finding proper repro-steps since I am not sure what the best way to debug UI would be.

GeneralK

@ChimpLogik have you tried hitting pause during play mode in editor and looking at the shortcut in inspector? Maybe that could at least show you the outlines of all the UI aren't overlapping and you can see that nothing is disabled like the button somehow.

You said it stops working, so it works at the beginning of battle?

Do you have drag enabled like can you drag in a different ability / item after it stops working?

ChimpLogik

I just tried your suggestion @GeneralK and matter of fact in one instance, when I was testing your suggestion, I encountered the issue and Paused the game. Both the Shortcut slots and contents were enabled but as mentioned, other than that I didn't know exactly where to look to debug it :(

Btw, the shortcut work at the beginning and the drag/drop is disabled within the Shortcut HUD.

gamingislove

My first guess would be that some other UI is blocking the click on the shortcuts.
E.g. when you pause the play when this happens, check the UI layers if some other thing on a higher layer is displayed above the shortcut HUD and eats the click (or even something in the shortcut HUD is above the slots).

ChimpLogik

I checked but I didn't see any other UI :(

Unfortunately I am having hard time finding repro steps to this bug but the more I think about it, the more I am thinking it might be ability related rather than UI related.

I'll get back on this once I have more info, in the meantime thank you for the support :)

GeneralK

If it were a Condition somewhere blocking the ability, your control map key shouldn't work either though. It's hard to make sense of why the control map key still works if it's an ability issue.

Unless perhaps the ability is like assigned to the Shortcut of the combatant or class shortcut , and that specific combatant/class is no longer able to use the ability, but because it's a group ability it's still available via control map key. Not sure if it works like that as I don't really use group abilities.

Do you change the UI via schematic or script on the UI prefab (like some special animation), or is it basically static from the time it was working at the start, to when it breaks?
If you have nothing that could change the UI and accidently cause this, and there are no outlines in Pause mode of another UI near it that could possibly block the click(background UI?), and it works at the beginning, it doesn't seem like a UI issue either.

When it breaks can you still click other UI elements? Like you can still click a menu icon or click a character to select it or anything else clickable in your battle?

Curious what happens if you drag a different ability from another shortcut or a menu if you have one, to the broken shortcut after it breaks. I think all you need to do temporarily is enable dragging in the shortcut UI prefab. But if another ability breaks when dragged there, and the broken one works fine in another slot, that tells you it's the slot probably.

ChimpLogik

My best guess so far is that some of the schematics from my abilities don't always finish properly and interfere with the following abilities and ultimately the game regular flow.

I need to give players the option to interrupt abilities (which I do through Global Machine Schematics), but few abilities have schematics with loops, which have been extremely challenging to interrupt (correctly) and to debug.

For example yesterday I had a bug where I used one ability A from the Shortcut and nothing happened (leading me to thing UI was the culprit) but when I used a different ability B, the game played ability A instead.
I've spent that last few days trying to narrow this down but still fumbling in the dark :(

Acissathar

How is your battle system set up, is it real time or something like traditional MMO combat with cast times, or is it turned based?

I don't think I have an answer to your plight, but maybe depending on your system there might be a way to redesign how abilities are done?

For example, something I experimented with was having traditional turn based but abilities having cast times. The "ability" the player selected was just a basic ability that added a hidden status effect to signify casting that spell. When the player had one of these status effects, the turn based formula used a different value to calculate their turn order, so that when their turn next came around, they were ready to cast it.

At the start of their turn, I checked for these status effects, and if found, "instantly" used the given ability.

However, I wanted to provide the means to interrupt, so some attacks in their battle animation would check the target for these status effects and if found, remove it.

This "interrupted" the cast because at the start of the character's next turn we wouldn't find the status effect and proceed as normal, but on ORK's end, we weren't actually messing with any queued actions or the like, just normal status removal so there weren't any hiccups that I ran into in that regard.

If you're doing real time, maybe something similar could be done but casting blocks control as well and shows a HUD with a tick machine then when the limit is reached, you instantly use the ability rather than a battle action with loops and manually checking for interruption?

I haven't messed with real time in ORK much, so this is just kind of a shot in the dark as I don't entirely know how the concept of turns or time works with it.

But just an idea that may or may not help haha

ChimpLogik

@Acissathar I am doing a real time, but re-purposing status effects is a very creative solution to this issue and definitely something I didn't think about.

Thank you for the tip, I will look into this!

gamingislove

Regarding schematics blocking this - the _Makinom game object lists the running schematics in it's inspector, so you could check if something from an action is still running and blocking this.