Possession - Bug Fixes and Quality of Life

Jamari Williams - 2/23/2023

This week, I continued working on various aspects of player possession. I worked on small tweaks that will make the possession more user-friendly and created a good foundation to build from here.

After thinking about it and talking with my teammates, I decided that continuing with the BP_PossessBase would be the best option. From that, I created base events that each enemy and the player will derive from and implement themselves. 

The BP_SlimeController is responsible for player movement, player actions, and various inputs, and it will call each of these base events. 

With the base class working, I got the Ghoul’s attack working along with the animations. Will, who made the Ghoul, base the animation blueprint on an enum that gets set in the blueprint when certain actions occur. Instead of doing a separate conduit for AI and the Player, I just used the same enum, setting them where need be. 

I also made small adjustments to the possession itself. When the slime is in range, a sphere appears above the enemy you can possess, to let the player know they can possess. I also used a MoveTo node to put the slime on the head of the possessed enemy. The slime stays on the head as the player moves. 

https://docs.unrealengine.com/4.26/en-US/BlueprintAPI/Components/MoveComponentTo/ 

For the build submission, we also had to implement a few cheat codes. I created a debug camera that the player can possess when the U key is pressed. I also made it so the current FPS can be shown, the number of pawns in the scene, the tag for the current possessed player, and the collision can be shown. I also started working on the possession for the Lich enemy that Will made. It isn’t fully complete, but since I made a more modular base class, the player can at least possess the Lich, and the animations correspond correctly. I made it so that when you hold the possession button, the player jumps off of the enemy, and the enemy gets destroyed.    

One major issue that I’m having is that sometimes when the player possesses an enemy, the movement won’t work. It’s difficult to debug because the issue isn’t consistent. I’ve had this issue since last week, but it’s proving to be a fatal bug. For now, since I have the unpossession working, it’s a bug that can be ignored for now, but I will need to address it soon. 

This week was much more successful than the last. I’m glad that my teammates suggested a more modular way of programming. The way I was doing the animation blueprint was far more complicated than it could have been. Overall, I am happy with this week’s work.