Motion Controller

Have you checked out this video?

I'm definitely not a networking guru, but I was able to get some characters running cross the network with UNet. I talk about how I did that in the video. Hopefully that gives you a place to start.

 

Thank you so much for the feedback. I often say that the sign of a good developer and asset is how fast they get back to you. Just for full disclosure I am an Electronic Engineer that specializes in networking. I have self-taught myself coding so it is not one of my strong suits.

After watching the video, it is a very interesting approach to take as far as networking the player and networking is something that can be debated over and over as far as the best way to do it. Right now, I am at my day job so I have not had a chance to look at the code but from a high level view it looks like your passing the animation state, position and rotation (you can correct me if I am wrong) from the client to the server to be pushed out to all the proxys. This sort of bypasses the reason to have authoritative server and may work good for a FPS, but could leave a MMO open to cheats and hacks. This is not to say anything about the extra traffic involved.

What I was thinking. You already have your input connector that ties in to the motion controller for player input. When not leverage that? In other words:


Use the Input Connector as a receiver. Making a new scrip we then send the player keyboard/mouse input to the server to be received by the ootii Input Connector since this data is sync the server would send it out to all the proxy toon including the players toon. In this way the player is not directly controlling their toon the server is. For the final nail we send the server transform and rotation just to adjust the player/proxy toons if needed. This would make the setup a true authoritative server setup.

The other reason I thought the input controller as the networking point is that we plan on getting your Sword and Shield Motion Pack and Archery Motion Pack very soon (prob as soon as we get this player networking figured out). The Gun one as soon as it comes out. The Bone controller very soon too. This would allow us to slide them in without any other changes. Tonight, we will prob pick up the Mesh Merge but that has nothing to do with anything else (we just like the work you do). LOL

If you as the developer thinks it is better to go your way I am open ears and I am willing to try it. You controller is sooo much better than what we were using, I am willing to bend over backwards.

Now I have played with uNet (When it came out) and uLink and from what I saw it depended on a lot of background RPC calls to do the heavy lifting in the backend. This may have changed. Now SpatalOS uses a little different setup to send data over the network. First all network variables have to be setup in the schema files outside of unity3d with the value types of (bool, uint32, unit64, int32, int64, sint32, sint64, fixed32, fixed64, sfixed32, sfixed64, float, double, string, bytes, EntityId). Then when you build your project with SpatalOs it opens these variables up to Unity3d.

From that point the variables act like events apon data change, so if nothing has changed then the only network stuff that is sent back and forth is the heart beat to make sure the connection to the player is still alive. The reason for using SpatalOs is:

1 – Zone less, I can make the world huge and avoid the unity3d floating point issue.

2 – 1 Build. When I was using uNet and uLink I had to build a server, and a build for each OS I want to support with the client. SpatalOs one build it does the server (linux), PC and Mac all at once.

3 – True cloud setup. On the backend I can set workers and split them up how I want to split the load handing off the data and owner ship between workers as needed without the player seeing anything, so I can truly make a scalable game.

I will stop this is not a sales pitch for SpatalOs just showing a few of the reasons I am sooooo motivated to use it.

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The big issue we are having with just networking the input controller is where you start using the Keycodes. We counted 13+- places in your example that they are being passed but yet when we put print statements in we only saw a few of them being used then we did not have the jump, climb etc hooked up at the time. Are all of them needed? How would you suggest grabbing the inputs from a different scrip and passing them into your input connector controller? Was going to try to use the input anykey to grab the keys but the use of anykeys are very limited.

The other issue we are having is the player rotation on the player client is slowly not in sync with what is on the server. That will have to be something we hunt down because I am not sure if it is an issue with the Motion Controller, the UMA toon and or SpatalOS. It starts out fine but after a few you can tell they are off because when the player runs the angle is different, the server corrects it by jumping the player where it should be causing a jerk only when running in a straight line. It is as if something just on the players client is rotating the player that is not getting set on the server. From what we see on the server vs the client the rotation transform looks fine even tho you can see the toon is off.


On a side note:

We do our game development different, and we are live streaming all the work we do on the game. Right now, on Twtich we have around 1,400 followers and every night at least 10 viewers every night. Normally we leave a copy of our game live and let our followers play around in the game and then do a push live each night with the new stuff we have been developing. We had to take the game off line due to switching from unreal to unity3d and then also switching to SpatalOS. Networking the controller is about the last thing we need to get done to get the game back up and live for our players (they been foaming at the mouth to get bank in the game).

If some time you are feeling froggy it would be a privilege and an honor to have you on the stream as a guest. We have had a few developers on in the past as guest and our viewers/followers loved it. Gives you a chance to meet some other developers and/or players and show off your asset.

 

That's what I was thinking about in the beginning too. Then someone had mentioned the position and rotation can get off because of different clock speeds on the computers as many of my motions use Time.deltaTime vs. Time.fixedTime and FixedUpdate().

That said, I like your point about the "final nail". That may be enough to ensure the position and rotation are correct.

I haven't gone down this road, but I think you could create a "Networked Input Source" that wraps your network logic. Then, its just a matter of using that with the MC and other assets. It's pretty much the approach I take with NPCs.

One thing that might help is that the AC has a list of state values I store over time (position, rotation, velocity, etc). I think I keep 20 frames worth by default. I was originally thinking that this might help with mirroring exact movement across the network, but I never used it. You may find it helpful.

As you go down this road, if there's things I can add to the AC or MC to make like easier I'm happy to. Unfortunately, I just don't know enough about networking to understand the pitfalls of the different approaches.


SpatalOS sounds pretty interesting. I'll have to check it out.

Your live streaming of development is pretty cool too. If you want to email tim@ootii.com a link, I'd love to take a look. I can't say I'm super interesting to talk to, but it could be fun to try.

 

You always want to pull the position and rotation from the server to make sure that is not off, but if an animation is a little off unless you have two players right next to each other no one would see it.

Sad part is I have the networking part down. The issue is your system is a passive system where your code calls in and ask "Unity3d has this key been pressed?" and sending from the network side it is more like "The user just pressed this key do something!". That and the input example code has getkeydown, getkeyup, getkey in int, keycode, and string forms that gets a little confusing. I am sure it is a matter of getting my head around it and then it will be simple.

SpatalOS is very new to the market but what they are doing all I can say is WOW. Best of all it is free to develop on. The only down side is they do not list a price. Normally this would send me running the other direction. But after having a meeting with them, they are very willing to work with developers to achieve there dreams and have moved me to their side.

As far as the stream goes we are a VERY informal bunch 80% to 90% are other developers and we talk about everything from the floating point issue that unity3d has, best ways to reduce draw calls to what MMs smell like if they are put under your arm. Our numbers where in the 30 to 40 and I expect them to go a lot higher than that once we get things moving. The stream can be found https://go.twitch.tv/tectuma check it out anytime. Just let me know it is you and I will message ya. I will also send you a email with the rest of the links.

OK time for me to head home...

 

Cool. Just followed it.

Got it. With my input solution (Easy Input) I cache the values from Unity's Input Manager to make it faster. You could do something like that with the data from the network. Meaning your cache of input is blank until you get an event. Then you set the flag internally.

In the end, when I do a call like InputSource.IsJustPressed("Jump") it could just request data from the cache that was created earlier.

 

Coincidentally I've also been having problems trying to get MC to work with SpatialOS. I've been trying to come up with a solution to deal with the fact that their movement inputs are meant more to be value serialization and event messages being sent over the network compared to MC where it's polling for key values during update loops and I think sending keypresses and caching it server side might help with that.

The other problem I was trying to solve was that I'm using the Camera Controller and both it and MC are expecting transforms for the anchor and camera rig to exist to work properly (I'm relying on it for WalkRunPivot with rotate to camera orientation) but the problem is that I have MC and Actor Controller server-side while I want the user's camera to be client-side. Would I have to instantiate a Camera Rig server-side and a stand-in Actor Controller client-side since they are both each expecting a full transform and checking for a GameObject attached? I was hoping I wouldn't need to keep track of position and rotation of two entities on both server and client just to get it working but I can't think of another way to go about it.

Trying to get this working with networking limitations has been the only sticking point. Otherwise, It's been a joy working with MC and all the motion packs though

 

Cool. I'm thinking that in this case, the keypress would be sent to the client where the "Network Input Source" would catch it. On the next frame it would make that information available and release it at the end of the frame. So, even though the MC is polling using "IsJustPressed", the contents of that function is really looking at cached data from the server.

The way I do it for NPCs is that I have them use WalkRunStrafe insteasd of WalkRunPivot. This way there is no reliance on the camera.

I don't fully understand the approach you're taking. What I learned in UNet was that the "local" client would calculate the position and rotation (in this case, there's an AC, MC, and CC) and send it to the server. That info would then be sent to the "remote" clients. So, those remote PCs didn't need a camera as they just got the end result.

When you say "I have MC and Actor Controller server-side" do you mean there's an independent character running on the server somewhere? Meaning the client just sends input up to the server and the server literally runs the MC/AC code. Then, the results are sent to the clients?

Thanks. I'm happy to change things if it will help (and doesn't require a full re-write).

 

Quite right. One of the "features" of SpatialOS is that they boast of a persistent "single server" where all players share the same large world. To do this they have the idea of an Entity which is the source of truth for state of your game objects that exists on the "server" and is load-balanced to various workers that do the processing. I wanted server-authoritative movement but having the MC process the movement client-side, sending the resultant Actor moves/rotates to the AC on the server that calculates collisions, etc. and having that transform being dictated back to the player was causing some janky behavior so now I'm trying out having both MC and AC on the server. (A planned feature for my game is that player characters persist in the game world while offline and a player-defined AI script takes over for character tasks which the AI behavior for MC is just perfect! But that's neither here nor there...)

I'll play around with WalkRunStrafe to see how it behaves but I just love the adventure game feel of WalkRunPivot, which I think fits perfectly with a large, persistent world to explore.

Also, I really appreciate the quick feedback, man. I'll be looking forward to your future stuff on the store!

 

YES,it was worked.But i found a new problem,how to set actionalias?in BasicWalkRunFocus is only RunActionAlias to set.
now,when i pressed "wasd" BasicWalkRunFocus worked,it is right.
but if i want to like unity demo angrybot,just move mouse cursor only ,my character will face the mouse cursor. only too.
how to set it?

 

That's pretty cool.

I'm wondering if the server should have a fake camera per player. Obviously it won't have a real camera that renders anything, but my camera rigs won't care. You would just set the characters up with their own camera rigs and all the positioning and pivoting would happen as the player would expect.

That's pretty cool too.

 

Remember that the TestActivate() function is used to determine if a motion should start. The TestUpdate() function is used to determine if a motion that is active should continue.

In the TestActivate() and TestUpdate() functions, you can add checks to see if keys are pressed (or not pressed). This way you can prevent the motion from activating or stop it if you need to.

If you look in my BasicWalkRunStrafe.cs file and search for "_ActivationAlias" you'll see that I do something very similar when the _ActivationAlias has a value.

 

I feel like I am late to the party now... LOL and glad to see someone else using SpatialOS. I got the rotation issue I was having fixed last night. I changed where it sets the toon rotation to the lastupdate and poof it was fixed. The only thing I can think of is I was setting the rotation and something else was then setting it.

So this means I can now turn my focus back to the Motion Controller. Yea I ran into that cam issue that ItsKhanOw is talking about, but have not addressed it yet. The way I am prob going to handle it is have the cam work as normal on the client but when it gets to the point of rotating the player pass that data to the server and have the server rotate the player. I know easier said than done, I will know more when I dive in to that code.

FYI - once I am happy with how I have the controller hooked up to SpatialOS, I would not mind sharing with everyone. Maybe someone can build on it and make it even better. Heck if Tryz likes it he can even add them.

On a authoritative server setup you NEVER want to pull the location and rotation from the client. I know there is a lot of examples out there in unity3d doing this but it is bad. Lets say player X grabs your game and you are setting the location and rotation on the client. All player X would have to do is make a hack to set the X, Y, Z then that gets pushed to the server and poof the player is anywhere they want.

The mind set on authoritative servers should all ways be, client provides basic data the server does all the thinking and heavy lifting.

 

In the Sword & Shield Pack, when I am using the FOA type of attack, what is it testing against to test for a hit? My enemy is fairly large. (It's actually this Gelatinous Cube https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/3d/characters/creatures/gelatinous-cube-sphere-pack-pbr-68817).

It seems that when I attack certain sides of the cube, it doesn't register a hit. I increased the size of the body shape in the Actor Controller, but I'm not sure if that is what it uses to register if you hit the enemy.

 

I found BasicWalkRunStrafe.cs has two input key control the motion together.
One controls motion's character move part by "wsad" key,
One controls motion's character other part(for example character rotation) by _ActivationAlias key,
if i just want to keep motion's other part,and disable motion's move part,how can i disable the "wasd" key?

for example BasicWalkRunFocus.cs contains two motion(character rotation and character movement),how can i keep character rotation worked,and character movement disable(make "wasd" key useless);.

sorry,for my countless question,but it was very important for me.

 

For FOA attack types, the body shapes don't matter. However, we do need colliders on the enemy.

The way a test for hit works is that we call to the CombatManager.QueryCombatTarget() function. This returns us a list of valid targets based on the attack style settings.

First it does an OverlapSphere. So, if the cube has a collider, that should catch it.

Then I grab the closest point from the attacker to the collider. If that distance is within the attack range, we continue.

Then I do the angle checks to make sure they match with the attack style. If there's a flaw, it's probably here.

As long as your collider is really the right size for the character, it should work.

If you want to email tim@ootii.com, maybe I can help more.

 

Thanks that helps. So I should add a collide (like a regular unity Box Collider)? I guess it should be a trigger collider? Maybe I could put some debug logs and see what collider the OverlapSphere is seeing when it does register a hit now.

 

Update Day
I've just finished pushing up an update to all the assets. When you update, please update them all or you'll get errors.

You can see the changes by looking on the Asset Store page and clicking the version number.

As always, I'm here if anyone needs help. Please email tim@ootii.com directly.

 

Correct. The FOA approach still hits against colliders. I don't believe they should be triggers.

 

In the new update I just put out, there are two motions:

Basic Idle Focus
Basic Walk Run Focus

I also added a TopDown demo:
\Assets\ootii\_Demos\MotionController\Scenes\demo_TopDown

The "idle" version will rotate the character to the mouse, but not move him. The "walk run" version will rotate the character and move him. With other motions, I've used this "idle" vs. "walk" approach and it works well.

If you're at a point where you don't want the character moving, you should deactivate the walking motion and the idle one will kick in.

Hopefully these two motions give you a good base to customize if you need to.

 

i had updated it,but is there some detail about your update's content?
i cant find any doc about it.

 

You can see the changes by looking on the Asset Store page and clicking the version number. I list all of the changes there.

 

i see,that's right.i just bought sword pack ,spell pack,and not bought motion controller yet,$65.00 is worth it,but i dont have enough money now.
so there is any solution for not update motion controller?

 

If you haven't bought the Motion Controller yet, how did you get the motions I built for you to work?

 

a friend give me to study,i think i am illegal.

 

i would kill the problem by myself and buy controller later,thx again,for your great help.

 

@Tryz

Hey Tryz - Is it possible to split motion packs into two animator states (Lower & Upper) Say for instance you have some spells that you would like to be able to cast while moving and some spells that you can only cast while not moving (ie using the full body)

 

@w409544041 @Tryz I also used the Motion Controller *cough* free *cough* However, I managed to buy it today after the update. Tried other controller assets, *cough* free as well *cough*, but this is the one for me. Although Motion Controller doesn't have as many features as other cheaper/expansive controllers, the flexibility makes up for its price.

Bought MC so, I don't feel ashamed to start nagging for support

 

Yes. You would do that by placing the motion (Basic Spell Casting for example) on both layers. However, there's a couple of issues you have to deal with:

1. How do you know which motion to call for each spell; the one on layer 1 or layer 2? Once you know that, you have to get that specific motion from the MC and activate it:
BasicSpellCasting lCastMotion = MotionController.GetMotion<BasicSpellCasting>(<layer index>, <spell index>);

2. Be prepared that Mixamo's animations were not built for Unity's animator layer masks. Since the masks simply remove spine rotations, the animations look HORRIBLE on the second layer. I'm sure you'll want to clean those up some how.

So, it's definitely possible. You just have to work out a couple of things to make it usable.

 

Unfortunately, I'm going to have to rethink how I offer support.

Spending time helping people who don't pay for my work isn't fair to me, my family, or customers who have paid.

 

@Tryz

Do you know of any animation pack that looks good when using layer masks

 

Not that are spell casting.

With the Shooter MP that I'm working on, I'm actually doing some FK/IK work to help with the layers issue. Once I'm done, I'll move that code over to the Spell Casting and Archery MPs too.

 

Support Process Changes

For those that like to ask support questions here (which I'm totally cool with), please email support@ootii.com your forum user name and Unity order ID for the MC and other assets. I'll start keeping track of those.

Going forward, I'll check that I have those before providing support.

 

Kubold's various weapon animation sets all share essentially the same basic stance (in terms of foot placement and spine rotation), so you can get away with some layer masking. The standard walk & idle poses in Movement Animset Pro don't share this stance; however, spine rotation used in the MAP crouching animations is as close to a perfect match as you'll find. Sword & Shield upper body looks pretty good with MAP crouching. Longsword matches as well, although the two-handed grip is a bit of an issue.

Longsword and Sword & Shield primarily differ in the arms, so you can get a lot of mileage out of blending or masking. Sword matches in terms of foot placement and spine rotation, but the pose is mirrored; you can mirror SAP animations to blend with the others, but any attacks will then be left handed.

Pistol looks like it also shares the same pose as Longsword and S&S, but I haven't done as much with it. I don't own his rifle packs, but they're supposed to be compatible with pistol, so I imagine you'd be able to use upper body or arm mask s to get the pistol arms/torso on rifle animations that don't have a pistol equivalent (such as the separate cover pack).

 

Y'know, it'd be real cool if Unity gave asset developers' accounts the ability to see which of their products a user has bought in the profile so you wouldn't have to do that all manually.

 

Has someone a AnimationController with Kubolds Sword and Schield ? I try now sice few days and the transitions looks all time bad i have no idea why

 

I've got one that extends the "Basic" motions setup.

Which transitions are you having trouble with?

 

Do you know of any magic packs where it fits?

 

from Mixamo Idle to the Sword and Shield Idle all time double pop of the animation when im switch =(

well i will buy on mondy the basic animations too i hope then will be better can i replace all animations then or has Kubol some missing animations and i need to mix with mixamo ? I saw the pack on the Beta Group i will try then the basic animations. I think Kubold dont have swimming animations right ? and for bow and spells i need to found good animations too have you a idea ?

 

There is absolutely no need to do this. Just use the Sword & Shield idle.

For Sword & Shield, you won't need to blend with any Mixamo animations. Unless you want in-place attack and hit reaction animations, as Kubold's pack has root motion step-and-attack or get-hit-and-stagger-back animations. The stance (in terms of foot placement and torso rotation) is kind of close enough... if you use a 0.25s transition time it will probably not look too bad.

Movement Animset Pro won't replace all of the default Motion Controller animations, but it covers all of the Walk/Run and Idle animations quite well. It has jumping animations, but in my experience that seems to be one motion where the code and animations really need to be in perfect harmony.

He doesn't have swimming animations, but that doesn't really matter. Just keep using the Mixamo ones until you happen to find something better. Animation Bandit has the Heroic Swimming pack (which I don't own) that looks pretty good.

For bow animations, check out Archer Animset Pro from Kubold's friend Riko. You won't be able to simply replace everything 1:1 with ootii's Archery MP, as there's no equivalent of "overdraw" and the shoot/reload animations sequence a bit differently. I've started working on it, but I've put it aside while I try and finish up all of the stuff for Kubold's melee packs first.

 

Mixamo's magic pack actually matches Kubold's various combat stances quite well. Torso rotation looks about the same, with Kubold's being slightly hunched in the upper spine and Mixamo's being straighter. Foot placement is very close, with Mixamo's being slightly narrower.

Only other spellcasting animations I've seen are the ones from Mister Necturus. Most of them start from a similar "battle ready" stance, although some do step into a more neutral pose before performing most of the casting motions. Main issue is that they're clearly not mocapped, so they look very stiff next to any of Kubold's or Mixamo's animations.

 

Hows the work going on the shooter pack? Any more delicious videos?

 

Hello i am testing the performance of my game and i found this:



This is causing my game to kind "crack" up sometimes. Does anyone know how to improve this?

 

The beta testers seem pretty happy so far. I've got some bugs to work through, some polish things, and I've decided to add pistol animations too. I should have a new video on Monday or Tuesday.

 

Wow. I did some simple tests and I'm not seeing that here. However, it could be something unique to your scene. If you do a deep profile, it should take us to the exact spot.

If you find that it is consistent, email tim@ootii.com more info about your scene... what's he standing on, what motion is active, etc. This way we can pinpoint the issue.

 

Has someone running ootii with PuppetMaster ? And can tell his experience

 

A while back Partel had integrated the MC:

"Added the Final-IK Bridge, UMA2, Ootii’s Motion Controller v2 and others to “Plugins/RootMotion/PuppetMaster/_Integration” as unitypackages."

I'm not sure if it's still valid, but you can check his "_Integration" folder.

 

Come crawling faster... Obey your master...

 

well i have not buyed yet i will buy but i will sure what is works with ootii thats why im ask maybe someone has running and can tell before i buy =)

 

I remember seeing this too. I'll check again later and try to see if I can get more details.