How to start with a Simple physics based melee system?

I have no found good ways to go about making good melee system on both unreal and unity. So I wanted to check here if anyone could give a good answer or point me to a good video. I'm trying to parrot Dark Messiah's combat when I say physic based combat, because I can't get over how much fun it is. I guess another good example is dying light's melee combat, but that's a bit of a far stretch of what I am really looking for. Either way I'm just trying to make a combat system like Dark Messiah in a new engine. Or at least a very rough prototype of one.

 

idk actually if im supposed to post here then i posted in the answers section but idk how that works either

 

I looked up Dark Messiah. The combat seems to just be your standard hitbox-based stuff, but a lot of the attacks apply physics impulses to affected enemies. That's probably all there is to it - just AddForce with ForceMode.Impulse in Unity would do the trick when you hit an enemy. Lots of ragdolling too

 

The thing is I don't know where to start to begin adding melee into the game, im usually an unreal engine person. So i dont know a lot about unity programming. I also have some ideas to make it a bit different from dark messiah. But i want just the melee combat in the game first.

 

thats good that its not too complicated

 

I'd start first with using either a short range

Physics.BoxCast

or CapsuleCast. Hook that up to a simple input such as

Input.GetKeyDown(KeyCode.Space)

and see if you can get it to properly detect enemies in range of your character. Then you can apply whatever damage effects/knockbacks/etc.

Then when you have that working you could try introducing animations. When you have an appropriate attack animation, pick a suitable frame in the animation to be the "hit" frame, and add an Animation Event there: https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/script-AnimationWindowEvent.html

Then start doing your boxcast from before in response to that animation event instead of the basic input from before.

 

I would start with good implemented physic based 3rd (or 1st) person character controller and then build ontop of this the melee combat system.A good controller alone costs a lot of time for development. In my opinion it makes not much sense to develop the melee combat system without a working character controller. Most of the melee attacks are based on the controller, the used animations, animations states and the camera movement. At a second step i would add additionally behaviors for different (physical) attacks and physical reactions for the corresponding AI game opponents (that uses this controller too)