[RELEASED] CAT Game Builder:The easier, faster way to make games in Unity

I unfortunately just confirmed that uMMORPG has a Quest class that is not in a namespace. This is conflicting with CAT's Quest class which is in the TrickyFast.Quests namespace. I would bring this issue up with the uMMORPG developers as it's not something wrong with CAT and there isn't much we can do about it.

 

Hi,

This looks fantastic - very professional and well thought out. I see that CAT has been around about a year but I guess it only hit my radar with your recent RPG add-on. I'm looking forward to getting started with it soon.

In either my reading or video watching, I remember something about a multiplayer add-on. Can you comment on this? Is it something the team is working on, on the road map, etc?

Other than yourselves, has anyone integrated other assets or created additional add-ons? I don't have anything particular in mind, I just saw in your documentation that as an option and was curious about how it went.

Thanks,

DZ

 

can we still do breeding with this asset?

 

Thanks!

For networking, yes, that is in progress. I would expect an alpha/beta (not sure what to call it yet) in the next few weeks. That will probably involve it working with most or all systems in the base CAT release, but not all systems in CAT RPG. We will then work to fix issues with multiplayer in CAT RPG. The initial version also uses Mirror, but it's built in such a way that we could stub in other networking implementations. FYI, this will just be part of the base CAT release, however, you will need to download the Mirror integration separately (for free) since otherwise it would break backwards compatibility with Unity 2018.3 and lower (Mirror's minimum Unity version is 2018.4).

I don't believe anyone else has created additional addons yet. That is very much encouraged though if anyone wants to! We do have a minimal Spine integration which I keep meaning to release. Our plan is to build addons / integrations based on our needs (we built CAT RPG due to working on an RPG for a client, same with Spine). Though sometimes we'll just do them if they seem interesting like Multiplayer or if there's a lot of interest (Multiplayer also fits this).

 

Breeding? I'm not sure I follow.

 

This i believe

 

Oh ok.. There's not any specific systems to do this, but it shouldn't be that hard to do without that. As long as the number of traits that are passed on to children is relatively low, it should be pretty easy. It's not clear in that video whether there are any traits at all, so if there aren't any, that's even easier. Just have a "breed" state that gets triggered when two animals are near each other and whatever other trigger (it seemed like the player needed to have some item in the video), and then have that spawn another animal in the child state where it uses a smaller model. Then the child after some time moves into the adult state and switches to the normal model. Traits could be stored as values and processed / passed along in the parent's breeding state by taking an average of them or something (depending on how you set them up). That would be relatively simple.

 

Good news everyone!

I've just submitted CAT Game Builder v1.90 to the Asset Store for review. This version includes beta multiplayer support! This is a huge new feature. It requires downloading the Mirror integration from here.

In addition to multiplayer support, there's a ton of fixes and new features in this version. I almost called it 2.0, but I'm saving that for the next big release which will include a new wizard system to make it even easier and faster to build games!

I've also released some CAT integrations that we've done including Cinemachine and Spine. They're available on github.

Full release notes:

 

@sirgolan ,

Hoping 2.0 will also coincide with Wizards for the RPG Module, so to speak.

 

That is the plan!

 

Could you please add the build for 2018.4 instead of 2018.2, as 2018.4 is LTS.

 

Created new project. I imported CAT, CAT RPG, mirror and cat mirror integration and I have some import errors

 

Good idea.. We'll look into doing that next release.

 

Oh! It looks like you have two copies of Mirror. I included Mirror in the CAT Mirror Integration already just so that if they updated something in a backwards incompatible way it wouldn't break stuff for us. But you can delete either the one you have in Assets/Mirror or in Assets/CATMirrorMultiplayer/ThirdParty/Mirror. That should fix the issues.

 

@sirgolan Does the save system use Player Prefs? I'm interested in trying this out, but I need a save system that works with Player Prefs. Also, has this been tested on AoT compiled platforms? I've had issues with other assets that don't work on AoT systems.

 

Hi!

The save system uses json files by default. Can I ask why you need to use Player Prefs? Typically using it for saving game state data is discouraged. CAT does have the ability to work with Player Prefs though. Just not with the save system. It could be possible to write an implementation of it that uses Player Prefs, but I wouldn't recommend it.

We haven't seen any issues with AoT. Check out the webgl examples for instance.

 

It's the easiest way to get it working on the Nintendo platform. Anything else would require a lot of custom code and I don't know if it would even work at all.

ORK has an option to save using Player Prefs and it works perfectly. So, I'm not sure why that would be such a bad idea.

 

Interesting.. I'll reach out to some contacts at Unity and see what they suggest since I'm not an expert on Switch.

It'd definitely work and actually just thinking about it, it would probably be pretty trivial to implement (CAT's save system is modular, so you can just create a new storage method and use that instead of the default). I've just always heard that Player Prefs shouldn't be used for save game data. It's especially bad on Windows since it saves to the registry.

 

Dialogue System by Pixel crushers also works with Player Prefs and it's a very popular and widely used system.

 

I'm interested in giving CAT with RPG Builder a try, but those webgl demo apps are really primitive and don't do well to sell the system. After watching the RPG Builder video I wonder how any of it was done with this system or that it will take a lot more effort than I would have thought. Do you have a demo available to try that looks like the RPG Builder video?

 

Which video do you mean? The more recent tutorials are using some art assets off the Asset Store. I could put out a demo of that, but I don't think it would work in WebGL, so it would have to be a download for PC. There is a WebGL version of the demo that comes with CAT RPG. That one has a PC download available as well since it's a little bit bulky for WebGL. You can check it out here.

The WebGL demos I sent you before are from the base version of CAT. The RPG demo in there doesn't use anything out of CAT RPG since it predates it by some time. They are pretty basic games, but they are mostly there to show off various features of CAT rather than to have state of the art visuals.

We're also working on a new feature which we are calling Game Builders which are basically wizards for creating common things in CAT and CAT RPG. That does make building things a lot simpler, especially when you are using CAT RPG. CAT RPG is definitely a more complex set of tools, but it's also very powerful. I will say the Game Builders really help. I didn't have them when making the latest RPG videos (because I wanted to stick to the latest CAT release and not new unreleased code), and I definitely missed them even though they're still pretty early in development.

I can't say when those will be available, but we are going full speed on them and some other usability improvements right now. I still think that CAT is very easy to use. We're just constantly trying to raise the bar on that, and Game Builders are the next step.

 

That demo looks the video I saw. However, I am having a hard time playing it and there are some big bugs. I can't figure out how to interact with any of the NPCs. I've tried clicking and pressing various keys, but nothing works. Also, the guards act strange. When the blue guards said I shall not pass, I escaped, but then they started fighting each other. A little later, the pink guards starting fighting each other too.

 

You should be able to interact by clicking on NPCs if they have an indicator above their head. I do think the interaction distance is set a bit low, so you need to get pretty close to them. That's just a setting in CAT though. I've never seen the guards fight each other. I'll take a look at that. Obviously that shouldn't happen.

 

Ok.. Strange! I was just able to reproduce the bug where the guards attack each other after a few tries. I just did a bit of digging and found the issue. We will get that fixed up asap.

 

CAT Game Builder and CAT RPG Builder are both on sale now for 50% off during Cyber Week! If you've been waiting to buy, you probably won't find a better deal for some time!

 

Looks awesome! but can I ask if CAT can talk easily with other scripts and if I can use it conjunction with other system easily eg Easy Save , Text Mesh Pro etc..

I couldn't find anything in the documentation .

Thanks!!

 

Hi!

You would have to write any connecting code, but yes, we built CAT with the idea that it should be easy to integrate into other systems or write new CATs. There is a section in the documentation on integrating with other systems you can check out. There's also a section on writing new CATs.

We have integrations with some other assets including Cinemachine, Spine, and Mirror. We add others when we have time or need and also have a Git repository where we keep them. Everyone is encouraged to add to that or release their own integrations.

Thanks,

Mike

 

Is this still under active developement?

 

Very much so....

 

It sure is! We're currently working on a big release that should be out in the very near future.

 

still happens i just got the assets today

 

Hmm.. That seems to have slipped through the cracks. I'm bumping the priority on it. I believe it's just a configuration issue with the demo scene as opposed to an actual bug.

 

There is new asset - uMMORPG Components Edition from vis2k. Is it possible to integrate CAT and CAT RPG with uMMORPG Components Edition?

 

I'm not sure. I know the main uMMORPG asset has a C# class named "Quest" which isn't protected by a namespace, which makes it incompatible with CAT's Quest (which is protected by a namespace). uMMORPG developers would have to fix that if they've kept that class in the Components Edition.

 

why would you mix the two?

 

There's definitely a lot of overlap, especially with the new multiplayer addon for CAT, so I'm not sure really. Though the multiplayer addon isn't 100% compatible with all of CAT RPG yet. I think it's mostly there, but there's a couple of systems that don't totally support it yet.

 

We're proud to release the latest version of CAT-- 2.0! This includes some rather large features that we've been working on for some time now. One of them is a node based view. This is completely optional, but also totally functional with all CATs, Quests, and in CAT RPG, Dialogues.



You can bring up the graph (in Unity 2018+) via the CAT -> Graph... menu item. You'll need to select a State Machine, Quest, or Dialogue for it to be enabled.

We also introduce the idea of Game Builders, which are wizards for quickly building the most common things in CAT. There are a few for base CAT and a ton for CAT RPG. They make it very simple and efficient to get started or quickly prototype something by drastically reducing the number of clicks as well as setting up all the dependencies and walking you through what needs to be configured.

Here's an example of the Game State Builder which quickly creates title screens and main menus:


http://dev.mv3d.com/~mike/trickyfast/MakeGameButton.gif (if the above gif doesn't show, click here to view it)

We anticipate adding more Game Builders in the future as well.

Here's the complete list of features and fixes:

 

In addition to CAT 2.0, we also released CAT RPG 1.30. This includes the Game Builders mentioned above along with node based Dialogue views and a bunch of fixes and features.

Full list:

 

We just put CAT and CAT RPG on sale! Check it out! Not sure when we'll do this again, so if you're on the fence, now is a good time to buy!

 

It will be good to make CAT shooter addon

 

Funny, I've been playing a lot of Destiny 2 lately and was thinking the same thing.

 

I'm really interested in how flexible and performant CAT RPG builder is after seeing that you'll add Mirror support. Currently I use ORK Framework mainly because I'm just too lazy to code Editor GUI for things like abilities, combatants, inventories, skill trees etc. But I end up doing most things by hand and just using the API to access it as a database, and replicating it via MLAPI Networking.

I really just want a stack-based combat flow for making games with complicated passive skills, abilities that require custom tags on them (Melee, Elemental, Sneak etc.), doesn't allocate much if any garbage and is easy to save/load and serialize for network libraries.

 

Mirror is 100% working with base CAT, but there are definitely some systems in CAT RPG that need better support for it. If you have particular systems you need, let me know and I'll see about prioritizing them. It sounds like maybe abilities is where you're focused. I don't think that one will be too difficult to do. We are currently considering some major changes to the faction system since it's somewhat confusing as is.

 

I'm not opposed to coding some things myself. Currently I run abilities client-sided then message the end status differences to the host. I'm using MLAPI at the moment but I know you mentioned it might not be too difficult to switch Mirror for something else?

Either way I'm really glad something like this exists. A stack-based "effect" chain is exactly what I need for RPGs!

 

I have discovered your product just now, I am wondering if I could achieve a couple of things:
- I need factions, to make NPCs fight each other.
- I need to drive NPC along a path, that could/should be generated at runtime.

For the second point, I watched your patrol tutorial, and maybe I could set it at runtime, but what about the first one?

In the meatine,
Thank you

 

Is this project dead? It's a shame there aren't any updates being made.

 

No. They released update in Nov 23, 2021 Version 2.01.

 

Issues when installing CAT 2.01
Hi, just wanted to have a look at the graph extension. But after installing CAT I got the following errors. Is there a problem with RPG Builder? I don't have this.
Using CAT with Unity 2021.2.4f1. Thanks.

 

I think, you need to write in their discord server
https://discord.gg/AQ3da9us