Adventure Creator - Make 3D adventure games (DEMO, VIDEO, WEBSITE)

Is there currently a way of creating an overall game-timer/clock and firing off actions at specified times?

 

Sure thing. Re, the first: when the Player was told to walk to a Marker they were already standing on top of, the engine wasn't first checking for this fact before running the pathfinding algorithm. Now it does a simple proximity check and skips the pathfinding if the Player is close enough.

And yes: Asset-based is Inventory ActionList. Inventory ActionList is a poor choice of name, in hindsight, as their usefulness goes beyond Inventory interactions, but it's too late to change class names!

That's right. Order won't get updated if an already-running list is reset, though.

Are you referring to Inventory ActionLists? I see the annoyance, but I'm not sure this can be changed. Will check, though.

Yowzah. Well, it's impressive, I'll give you that. We'll see how Unity's own development of 3D GUIs go, might make it just a tad easier to pull something like that off

Yes, so long as you don't change scene after beginning the timer. You can set a timer on a Cutscene, and if you use the Pause action on a Cutscene that's set to Run In Background, it'll act like a timer rather than a gameplay-pauser.

 

Awesome Chris, 1.24 fixed all problems that I had with the camera and scrolling and tracking the player. Marvelous!

One bug I noticed in the subtitles GUI is that if I have the sizes of the labels set to manual but I disable the speaker name label, it ignores the size settings and just conforms the subtitle line label to the bounding box of the string it contains. Same if I set the speaker name label to a different (blank) label type.

Oh and I think the Face Object / Turn To Face doesn't work anymore with the topdown setting? Might just be me.

I second the suggestion for a dedicated forum, this plugin offers so many possibilities that it is almost a waste to pile them into one thread. I'd love to see what people are making with it (and share my creations too), and have dedicated threads to specific things, like bug reporting and such. On one hand I understand that it can be overwhelming to keep track of, but on the other I think it might actually make it easier to seperate questions from any other 'noise' so to speak.

 

Sorry... not sure if I'm following. So I set up a new variable and then create a cutscene that runs in the background and then..

1. Inc the var
2. Pause
3. Have the cutscene re-run itself

Is that the gist, or did I misunderstand completely!

Also, how would you poll for certain values (would you check vars in the same cutscene or another?)

Is it possible to show variable values in menu labels?

Finally, what if you did want to make this more global to all scenes? Would the cutscene have to be added to every scene or something like that? Bottom line is that I'm trying to create an in-game clock that runs in realtime.

Thanks!

 

Okay, answering my own questions... but have a few others.

That works, and you don't have to manually re-run the cutscene. I'm not sure I understand exactly why, but it works.

Seemed like this could all be done in the same cutscene, but would be curious if it would be better implemented elsewhere. Or this that even an option?

Sorry, figured this out... just forgot that you could change the label to a "Variable" mode.

Okay, here is where things got tricky. I wanted to have a game-clock in the menu that does a nice readout (like 12:00:00PM). I tried doing a bit of a lengthy cutscene to check the vars to do the 12-hour formatting, but it got pretty messy.

Do you have any suggestions? My next thought it to try and use Playmaker or write something up from scratch, but I'd add love to add this to the feature request list!

 

Oddly enough I was just making something like that in PM a few days ago. It would work fine as far as making a displayed clock, but I don't know the power user features of PM enough to know if you can hook back into AC variables. If you can't it's kind of pointless to do this in Playmaker unless you can think of some way to sync up the logic of both them without just sharing the variable.

Well I mean I guess you could run timers in AC and PM and PM's would be a bit confederate, but that method would worry me as far as reliability.

 

I think something would have to be custom-scripted, unless there's more to the current PM implementation than I can find. Like you mentioned, I think the issue is that PM does not currently have any actions that affect AC.

If Chris isn't game for this feature, I might see if I can remember enough to write some C#. I'll definitely share if I manage it.

 

You should be able to script up a clock in PM, then grab the value(s) needed within the AC action.

 

Thanks for your help!

That would work, but I am not sure I see PM support in AC beyond an action that calls a PM FSM event. Is there a way to send a value back from PM, and some way to set a VAR based on that read value?

 

Sorry I should have been more thorough in my answer! I guess it's not as simple as I made it sound, hehe. To set an AC int variable from PlayMaker:

In PlayMaker, find the GameObject with the tag "PersistentEngine", preferably by referencing the string 'persistentEngine' from the Tags class. Then get the RuntimeVariables component on that GameObject. Call a method on that named SetValue. Send it 3 values, the first is the order of your variable based on the order in your list, starting with 0 (i.e. 2nd item in the list is 1, not 2). The second is the value you want to set it to. The third is the enum AC.SetVarMethod.SetValue. Sorry I don't really know PM too well so I'm not sure how you get an enum exactly.

But in C# it would look like this:

Code (csharp):

1. // get reference to RuntimeVariables. don't do this in an Update loop
2. RuntimeVariables runtimeVariables = GameObject.FindWithTag(Tags.persistentEngine).GetComponent<RuntimeVariables>();
3. // set the 3rd variable in my variables list, which is an integer, to 12
4. runtimeVariables.SetValue(2, 12, AC.SetVarMethod.SetValue);

 

Thank you. That is extremely helpful!

 

I really hope you don't mind Chris, but I've setup a self moderating board for Adventure Creator here;

https://moot.it/adventurecreator <<< VISIT HERE

Doesn't require any maintenance on your part, but we honestly just need a better way to grab information, help each other and properly search for AC related questions.

I hope you guys use it, wasn't any effort at all to setup the forum. Note The additional categories are to the right.

Cheers!

 

Hi Chris!

I'm in the middle of planning my own project, but Ive forgotten to check on something.

Does Adventure Creator support branching Story Telling?

-Sean

 

Hey thanks, I really like this forum software. Nice and minimal. And thank you for not creating 20 boards

 

Hey! The 2D demo has some bugs... there's no bird over the bench (but if you move the cursor you can interact with a hollow parrot) and there's no way to use the items from the inventory!!

 

Thank you for the awesome asset! I have been listening to your tutorials, and reading the pdf. Is the unity navigation feature for unity pro only?

 

no, not at all, you can bake a navmesh in Unity Free as well. You can easily access it in Window -> Navigation -> Bake

 

Hi, I have a problem trying to 'character animate' the NPC Brain. I give the order and after the play, it changes from 'play custom' method to 'change parameter value'
please help
thank you

 

This is an excellent tool! I've already started posting there and I hope more people migrate

 

Hi again, As about my previous problem, I fixed by reloading the package.

 

chris !
since version 1.23 you added : TurnOnAC and TurnOffAC
but i use playmaker how i can TurnOnAC and TurnOffAC ?
in playmaker have action name is: send mesage
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-C-6O10CNo
it use to call function in script , but i don't know how to do it with your script!
you can tell me on , off AC with playmaker ?

 

Thanks, I will look into both.

Well, saves me the decision! Thanks, I'll check it out.

Hi Sean,

Yes indeed! AC was inspired by Telltale's Walking Dead, after all. It really just takes smart use of Variables, which determine which "branch" your player goes down.

Thank you! I don't know HOW I missed the bird hotspot bug, but it has been fixed now (as has the online webplayer demo).

As for the inventory, however, be aware that inventory is handled differently in the 2D Demo as it is for the 3D one - you first click the Hotspot, then the appropriate inventory. It's not a 2D-specific feature, just showing off the different interaction methods that AC supports.

The TurnOnAC and TurnOffAC functions are within the StateHandler script, which is part of the PersistentEngine prefab, and generated by the GameEngine object when the game runs (it shouldn't be in the scene when editing, basically).

I don't know if PlayMaker is able to send a message to a prefab that isn't in the scene before runtime, but if you want, I can update the GameEngine object to also have these functions.

 

Chris et all,

I have an idea for a security camera that sweeps a hall, can i make a trigger a child object of the camera so it will follow the animation of the camera, the trigger would represent the fov of the camera and would trigger an event if the character entered into the "fov". Also as a feature request, it would be nice to convert a mesh object into a trigger by adding maybe an AC script to it... if this already exists sorry, I just haven't noticed it in the docs...

 

Hi,

I have a problem with MenuActionList. If I add "Camera: Switch"-action and drag and drop my GameCamera2D to "New Camera"-field it shows it there but if I run the game the field gets cleared (and the action won't work). I checked the generated "Action 0" in the list and it actually says "Type mismatch" in Linked Camera-field. Is this a bug or am I doing something wrong?

Thanks for a great kit!

Cheers!

 

Dige, did you duplicate your ActionList based on another one?

 

Hi I'm not sure if this has been asked before but I was wondering if you can use your own first person controller such as: UFPS on the asset store.
I also was wondering if you can do a adventure hidden object game such as: the hidden object games you might find in www.gamehouse.com


P.S. Thanx in advance it still is an awesome package even if you can't do the things I asked.

 

Hey people. Whenever I click a hotspot in game, for a split second, the label jumps to where my mouse position (not in game) is. Any idea how to fix this? Thanks!

 

Just check your 'Hotsot' menu properties in Menu Manager and in 'Position' property change 'Appear At Cursor And Freeze' to, for instance, 'Follow Cursor'.
I guess, it'll solve your problem.

 

Hi Chris!

First of all, thanks for your great support! (and sorry for this wall of text but as newbie i'd rather collect everything first)

1. About my AC update problems...
reinstalling everything didn't help (even removing unitys entries in the registry), eventually i found a registry entry of the game_prototype... deleting it solved the problem... so it seems the games objectData got corrupted somehow.... (and the settings_manager froze when trying to read it.)

2. GUI/Interaction

i guess a fullthrottle style interface would be done via some kind of tile based approach? (lots of manually set buttons with a cut up texture?)

to describe what i'm trying to do, think about an interface like apples OSX... when you get closer to the buttons on the bottom they
start to scale, and move... they react to the current mouseposition.-> i would like to create a non-static interface with predefined keyframe animations on 3d objects (think of sprites/planes close and in front of the camera)...

-> so when i click on one of the 3d interface buttons (hotspots?) an animation is played, the interaction mode and mouse icon change to "use","lookat" or whatever (like i'm able to setup inside the "interaction" menu-editor). -> in essence i'd love to have some kind of "set Player/Cursor Interaction" action... Is something like that already possible?


2.1
when i think about it, it would be great to have the possibility to add animated textures/clips and (especially) animated cursors inside the managers aswell (unless its already possible and i've missed it?)


3. Verb GUI
to be honest i tried to create a verb based interface using the menu manager (and for the most part it worked), but i had problems leaving the interaction mode once selected... (right mouse button cycled... -> so i changed the CycleCursers() call to currentcursor=-1 or something like that, which solved this issue (but i would like to cancel the interaction mode when i click (left) on the ground and not on a hotspot...? (it felt pretty unintuitive to cancel with the right button before the character is willing to move again) (its possibly a user error but i tried a _lot_)

4. about your recently added mecanim support:
is this also meant to be used with 2d sprites? and if yes, -> does this mean the workflow stays the same, but i'd have to implement my own "which animation plays at which angle" function? (any docs or tutorials planned about this?) because in a perfect world my plan would be to control 2 sprite animations/clips per direction (an additional rim lighting layer) and mix both in a custom? sprite shader.. could something like that be created with help of the new mecanim support? (or maybe even out-of-the-box support for this feature (not unusual in modern adventures?) )


5. 2D character lightmap
most 2d adventure engines offer some kind of "lightmap feature" which only affects (and gets multiplied with) the character (to adjust the brightness of the character on different set locations)... i'm doing a mixed (2dsprite char on 3Dgeometry) game so this is probably not useable in my case, but i think most of the "full 2d" guys would love it


6. NPCs need rigidbodys?
i've also noticed a warning msg about a NPC needing a rigidbody.. it's not unusual (in other engines) to use scene objects as characters(when they are static) is there a reason why this shouldn't be done? (animation/dialog problems maybe?)


7. Dialog
I must admit i'm not the biggest fan of the current dialog system (but i kind of understand why its designed that way)... i think its fairly
easy to loose track of all those seperated dialog actionlists... a possible solution would be a kind of dialog ubernode with the ability to run actions after each line of dialog... atm its probably ok for adventures with limited dialog but if you think of 20000 lines and therefor probably more than 20000 scripts...

a rearranging of the created gameobjects could also help a bit -> the dialog decision could be the parent of all linked choices (actions).. it would be way easier to identify and navigate the dialog trees this way.. maybe those dialog trees could be children of their NPCs and hotspots?


8. character walk sounds
Is there a possibility to change the walking/run sounds during gameplay? (this would be pretty important in my opinion)

Thanks again for your great asset!

 

Thanks!!!

 

And 1.25 is out! More of a small-feature update this time, but hopefully some useful things are in there:

• Added: 3D Characters now work in Top Down 2D mode - attach the Animation/Animator as a child of the GameObject
• Added: Character: Change rendering Action - use to lock a Character's sorting order, scale and sprite direction
• Added: Ability for Asset-based Actions to reference GameObjects by ConstantID number
• Added: Ability for Asset-based Actions to work with Characters, provided Characters have a ConstantID number
• Added: "Active cursor effect" option for Inventory cursor - use to replace inventory icon with an "active" one over Hotspots
• Added "Pause until finish" option for Engine: Run ActionList
• Added: "Auto-play lone option" setting to Conversations
• Added: Assigned value to Variable: Set Action label
• Added: Menu Transition type - "None"
• Added: TurnOnAC and TurnOffAC functions to Kickstarter as well - find in GameEngine prefab
• Fixed: Certain Action labels not updating until expanded
• Fixed: Variable data now visible during gameplay in RuntimeVariables Inspector
• Fixed: Bird's Hotspot being active when inappropriate in 2D Demo
• Fixed: Being able to skip speech if it's been displayed for less than half a second
• Fixed: Being able to make the lunch fall multiple times in the 2D Demo
• Fixed: Character issues with restarting scene using Engine: End game Action

That should work just fine - you can attach a AC_Trigger to any Collider object set to Is Trigger? and it'll work. The standard "box" Trigger prefab is just a convenience.

This should be fixed in the latest update, which forces Menu- and Inventory ActionLists to refer to scene objects by their Constant ID number (attach a ConstantID or Remember script to a scene object to create an ID).

First person controller - not really, bu have you tried using the standard First-Person script that AC comes with?

Hidden Object - I've heard that other people have successfully made such games with AC, and I don't imagine why not. You can use Actions to both make scene objects invisible, and disable "Label" elements from Menus (which would list each item you have to find).

I can't really recreate this problem, so I don't know what's causing this. Let's just hope this doesn't happen again!

AC doesn't support 3D or animated GUIs like this, but if you have very specific needs you may want to look into some custom coding. The PlayerInteraction and PlayerCursor scripts are where you'll want to look.

Unity doesn't make it so easy to do this, actually. I'm hoping they bring out an update that would make this much easier to implement.

Sorry, not sure what you're asking for here.

Mecanim is intended 3D characters only. However, the recent update brings in support for Mecanim and Legacy characters to work in Top-Down 2D mode, and this would be the first step for what you're asking for. To get Mecanim and Legacy characters into a Top-Down 2D game, you need to set your Animation/Animator component as a child of the Character gameobject and assign it in your Character inspector - much like how the "Sprite child" is set for 2D characters. With the Animator component as a child object, it then becomes possible to "isolate" character direction to whichever way we want. My suggestion: have a play with the new update, then let me know how it goes and what you may need to take things further.

I know the effect you mean, and I agree it would be pretty neat. Not sure how much of this is down to general use of Unity, however.

Rigidbodys are "needed" because AC assumes Characters will be walking about. You may get an error message if one isn't present, but so long as they're static it should still all work.

I'd be interested to hear an elaboration of the "dialog ubernode" you mentioned. Are you referring to conversations, specifically? I see the advantage of (if I get you correctly) making Dialogue Options children of their Conversation, though I think that might cause prefab problems.

Not currently, but it's on my to-do list.

 

This is awesome, Chris! Thanks so much for continuing to improve this

 

Ugh I truly hate to ask this but...

...seeing just how much you've been updating Chris (rather remarkable I must offer! ), do the docs and/or tutorials in some way support these changes/additions/fixes? How best to learn about them?

Thanks man!

-Steven

 

I have a short question…can I use "Smooth Moves" Animations with Adventure Creator? Has anybody here combined both yet?

 

The manual is always updated with each release I've noticed, quite awesome! I did all the tutorials not long ago. Actually all the early ones are still very valid, since they cover the basics. The one thing to watch out for is to NOT replace the Demo Menu manager with an empty one!! It took me quite some time to figure out why hotspots, inventory and subtitles didnt show. My advice is to do all the tutorials up to the one about first person controls. After that read in the manual or look for a specific tutorial if you need to know more.

 

Perfect and good tip thank you Goran!

-Steven

 

Thanks guys!

Not officially, but recent releases have made it possible to "plug in" your own animation engine. Each engine (Legacy, 2DToolkit, etc) is contained in a separate script inside AdventureCreator -> Scripts -> Animation, and these are referenced by name from the AnimEngine enum in the Enums script (in Scripts -> Static).

I don't know if you're a coder or not, but to incorporate something like SmoothMoves, you'd create a new script called AnimEngine_SmoothMoves (actually, better off duplicating either AnimEngine_SpritesUnity or AnimEngine_Sprites2DToolkit and working from there). Then to load it into AC, just add SmoothMoves to the AnimEngine enum in Enums.cs.

 

Hello all, Newbie here. I am trying to make a game with only three scenes but these scenes are rather big. I want to have the person be able to move between these scenes and keep their inventory and other various items intact. Is there something special I need to be doing for this? I have yet to find an good example of switching scenes while keeping objects even in unity so I have no idea what I should be doing.

I guess I have the option of creating all three scenes at once and teleport the player between them but I think that would be the easy way out and not very resource friendly. I also don't want to mess up the save/load functionality already in here.

Please help or at least point me in the right direction.

Thanks.

I found a few links and read some more of the manual. It looks like the inventory and settings and variables tabs are scene independent so they won't change when the scene changes? Guess I will find out.

Still, would be nice if there was some sort of scene changing tutorial but then again, maybe I am over thinking this as usual.

 

Thank you for your quick response..!
Sadly Im no coder, but knowing now that its possible i will give it a try. Thanks again…!

 

This sort of question was asked a few times, and i find the explanation given by MaaS very profound:

 

Thank you Chris! Awesome as always I really liked those:

I see what you did with the Change rendering Action hehe thanks

But more important... is the ability to chain asset actions with scene gameobjects (if they have an ID).

Some time ago, I tried doing some actionlist prefabs, so I started extending the Inv-actionlist, but It didn't have the full power of runtime actionlists and I couldn't use scene objects on actions. What I wanted to achieve was a help-prefab of scene edition, so finally I made an unity editor, creating runtime actionlists and gameobjects as needed.

One thing I missed when I did all this was the ability for actual actions to be able to look for the used gameobject used and target gameobject (char, gameobject, etc) the same way it's done with the "Is player" look up on some actions. I know it's not the same as the player that has a tag... but maybe the actionlist should have the go used, verb and target handles to avoid having to look for them on the actions.

Use Key on Door -> Object used = Key, Target = Door, Verb = Use

With those params I can have an action that "Plays anim open_door" on object "Target", and prefab it for every door.

 

Hi there!
First of all, let me apologize for my english, it's not my native language... ahem.

Here's my problem: I'm using the "first person" movement method AND the "Choose hotspot then interaction" interaction method. Whenever I click on a hotspot the interaction menu appears but the cursor remains locked in the center of the screen.
I know that I can manually unlock the cursor, and that solves the issue; but I was hoping for a way to make the game automatically unlock the cursor whenever I'm interacting with a hotspot, npc, etc... and then go back to the first person camera (with the cursor locked in the center) during gameplay.

Can it be done? I'm not a programmer, so my attempt at trying to figure it out myself was pretty much unsuccessful.

 

Hiya Chris, would be awesome if you could add this to your main post... Looks like it's starting to gain traction

Unofficial forums for Adventure Creator https://moot.it/adventurecreator <<< VISIT HERE

Cheers!

 

Food for thought, thanks.

This is likely a bug - I will investigate it.

Done, sorry for the delay with that.

 

any chance this could be integrated with UMA

 

Anyone else getting this error on a mecanim NPC since the update?

UnassignedReferenceException: The variable spriteChild of 'NPC' has not been assigned.
You probably need to assign the spriteChild variable of the NPC script in the inspector.
UnityEngine.Component.GetComponent[Animator] () (at C:/BuildAgent/work/d3d49558e4d408f4/artifacts/EditorGenerated/UnityEngineComponent.cs:187)
AnimEngine_Mecanim.PlayIdle () (at Assets/AdventureCreator/Scripts/Animation/AnimEngine_Mecanim.cs:397)
AC.Char.AnimUpdate () (at Assets/AdventureCreator/Scripts/Character/Char.cs:323)
AC.Char.FixedUpdate () (at Assets/AdventureCreator/Scripts/Character/Char.cs:196)
AC.NPC.FixedUpdate () (at Assets/AdventureCreator/Scripts/Character/NPC.cs:59)

Thought I might just have a messed up install or something but now it's doing it in a fresh project.

edit: Seem like a straight up bug in AC? I can't get mecanim npc's to work in any 1.25 project, whether updated or fresh project. Also stops the scene from running at all. :/

 

Couple random 2D questions...

How does one switch the 2D demo to direct control mode and prohibit the player from walking in certain areas? Collision cubes don't work.

Noticed that when you start playback of a scene AC resets the main camera's "Clear Flags." Is this necessary for some reason? Was trying to use a skybox backdrop with a separate camera set to render it (since the top-down view won't been looking in the correct place).

In some cases I have overlapping hotspots. If they share the same "Y" positioning I get a shaky-cursor on the overlap areas... so I have been moving the Y coordinates for the purposes of ordering. Just want to make sure this won't cause any issues. Seems to be working.

Finally, something seems off in the pathfinding of the 2D demo... I am able to get the character to walk through the bench (where I'm not seeing any navmesh segments). I can do it by first clicking on the sky in the very center. Then I click again around the distant tree. Can't figure out why that's happening, but I'm having similar inconsistencies in my own scenes.

Thanks!

 

Does anyone have any idea why I have this problem now?

It had been working already but now it stop always at the start and I can not figure out what is my mistake.

Maybe you can help me ?

Thanks vidi

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UXlW0ABWJv0

 

Might be Unity's "Error Pause" mode (it's a button at the top of the Console). If it's on it will pause as soon as there is an error. You can either un-click the button, or better yet - fix the error.

Hope that helps!

 

Well, what is the error ?

if i know how i fix it, i would not ask here