Hello again everyone! This week was all about adding in Dawksin’s Hunters Charge ability.
While relatively straight-forward there were a few hiccups that were a tad unexpected. The idea of the ability is that Dawksin quickly passes through enemies dealing damage and adding shrapnel to anyone in the path.
We already had the base animation for the attack so step 1 was to add our anim notifies that tell Dawksin how to move.
These are little tags with data we can throw onto an animation, that say “Hey do something at this point in the animation!”
So for example:
So how do we break this down?
Ignore the long green bar, that's just the animation itself.
- Light Green: Prevent additional abilities from activating
- Gray: Add some flags on Dawksin.
- Ex: 1st one speeds up his rotation in case you want to change your aim.
- Ex: 2nd one locks your rotation so you can’t make Dawksin spin in place while moving.
- Darker Green? (I made too many things green) : Tells Dawksin to move
- Red: Damage windows. One for each blade.
- Blue (Beginning): Lets you change your rotation even if you’re locked onto a target.
- Blue (End): Ends the animation early if you’re trying to move.
We do put a lot of thought into how each ability feels, so all these notifies are there to make sure it feels good to use. This is also how melee attacks are built.
So if we dig into the movement notify, we can see a ton of options for how to make Dawksin move. In this case, we’re making him move 1000 units forward over the length of the notify which is like 0.13 seconds.
So now our move ends up looking like this:
But that’s not quite what a blink is-
ADDING IN THE BLINK
The blink needs Dawksin to disappear, which is no problem, we can make him do that.
(It would be pretty swell, if he came back though.)
Lets add his weapons to the mix, and make him re-appear. I think that’d be for the best.
With that, we have the basis for ability completed!
VISUAL FX
Here we can add some flair to communicate when Dawksin should be doing damage. In the anim notify windows above, we defined when Dawksin was doing damage with each blade.
That’s fine and all, but we need to – SEE - when he’s doing damage.
So here we can add weapon tracers, courtesy of Rod.
(Um… while that looks kinda cool, the tracers are not really showing the path of his weapons. Let's look into that.)
So it turns out there’s a bug in the stock effect attachment code from the engine.
Here the tracers are being attached to each weapon bone, which is great, however, the code looks at that and says “ah yes, lets attach it, AND let's take the location of the bone, and offset it permanently”
I can’t override the behavior since we’re using a binary install of the engine. So you know what that means.
Not my favorite thing to do. I typically avoid this as much as I can, but in this case, we attach a lot of effects, so this would affect a ton of particle systems.
A few hours later we now have our own attachment code with all the same bells and whistles. In addition, we can now specify our own custom offsets in case things don’t line up perfectly.
(Hey that looks right)
We’ll tie it all up with the VFX of his cape showing when the blink starts and ends, and some tracers to show the path he traveled.
So that’s most of the ability complete.
From here we start taking care of the edge cases. Anthony showed last week how we could have attacks that take into account when Dawksin stows his weapons, so I added a new variation for when his weapon is stowed.
And in the end we actually changed the attack animation from a 2 hand slash where Dawksin does a spin to instead have him slash his sword in a x pattern, we felt like it fit the attack better.
Anyways that’s all we had time for, see ya’ll next week!