Third Person Controller - Third Person, AI, Multiplayer, Mobile Framework

I was speaking more about how his left hand isn't lined up with the grip, I'm not so worried about the fingers. Every time I have to tweak the muscles in the avatar its seemed more like a guessing game. I'll probably have to spend 2-3 hours today just trying to line his hand up with the grip even though I already spent 2-3 last night trying to line it up unsuccessfully. I was trying to teak his head to tilt a little so it wouldnt go through the mesh of the weapon but I couldnt even get is head to move after saving the changes I made in the muscle configuration.

I know this really isn't a TPC problem but hoping people may have some pointers for going about doing this a faster way.

 

I don't think the actual hand position was affected by this rig problem but lets wait until you have the fixed animation files so we can narrow down the cause. It's tough to tell from that screenshot - where is your character's left hand? It looks like you are trying to use the rocket launcher animation, correct? Is your weapon the exact same size as the rocket launcher? In terms of the head, the head is controlled by IK after the game starts. You can configure how much IK affects the head by adjusting the LookAtHeadWeight on the CharacterIK component.

 

Don't mean to mention other assets here, but maybe this will help DeanMarquette. It's from FinalIK showing how to get the left hand in the proper place. Not sure if there is any useful info or technique in this vid or if it requires FinalIK. See around 2:52 in the video -

And/or maybe pose the hand when you run the game, copy the values, stop the game and paste the values?

I haven't messed with this stuff yet but picking up tips here and there for when I do.

 

@MIK3K - I think that suggestion would work, although it does require FinalIK and it will take some code to integrate the Third Person Controller with FinalIK.

In the current version the hands are positioned with Unity's IK implementation. It looks like I need to add the ability to specify an offset for the aim animation. I think @DeanMarquette's weapon is bigger then the rocket launcher so that's why the hands are positioned incorrectly. In order to solve this you'll either need to use a different animation or IK.

 

I will have the new animation files with the corrected fingers out today, sorry this took longer than expected. The finger issue was a problem with my mesh/rig and not related to the hand placement issue. I fixed the fingers by making sure my finger bones had a roll rotation of zero and now need to reimport each animation. I thought it might have something to do with Doug being in the "A" position instead of the "T" position but since mecanim forces the "T" position that was fine, Ethan is also in the "A" position.

Having to look into this more led me to understand mecanim/retargeting a bit better, maybe this can help someone. After testing different rig/mesh setups with Doug and viewing animations (not just mine) on several models including Ethan, we learned that any animation will appear slightly different on each model. This is then corrected by adjusting the muscle settings on each specific model rig. I just didn't have a very good understanding of those muscle settings before, and now they make more sense. Using the sliders beside each muscle you can see the full range for your character's movement, and if say the extreme values allow the arm to go through the chest, limiting those values will portray your character more realistically when animated.

For example, right now I am testing the assault rifle idle and noticed that Ethan holds his right arm closer in than Doug causing his right hand to almost collide with his chest. To fix this, I edited Ethan's muscle settings on his right arm to limit his range of motion, making it so he couldn't twist his arm to such an extreme position.

Before:


After:


For the actual hand placement, Justin is right that would have to be a different animation or IK to adjust for the weapon wielded (varying sizes/grip locations).

Hope this helps someone

 

My rocket launcher was much bigger. I had changed it to an assault rifle because I'm about done with my game and needed to move on. I'll go back and see if resizing helps since I'm now at the point of just tweaking minor details and testing. I'll probably post a link to my game on the TPC forum and have a web demo by the end of the week.

This will be my first game using TPC and I glad I was able to successfully transfer it from another third person camera I was using. I’ll be working on my next project right away using TPC again. It should be finished by the end of July since I’m pretty familiar with TPC now. My biggest obstacle will be diving into BD and trying to get some good zombie AI out of it. I’m hoping to just use the soldier AI in the TPC sample and use the “fist” weapon and just change the attack animation. It probably won’t be that simple though but I’ll see.

Thanks again for the help.

 

That's awesome that you were able to get something finished so quickly! Definitely post a link when you're done. Behavior trees do have a small learning curve but the results are worth it. Gamasutra has a good overview article on behavior trees, and if you haven't seen it this topic goes step by step in how the Third Person Controller tree was created.

 

Hi S, are you going to add enemies using these weapons in the sample scene as well?

 

@DeanMarquette Right now we are just focused on getting the scene out with Naomi, but we will add enemies to the adventure scene in a later update. The weapons and animations can be added to any character or AI though.

 

I wish I could shoot behind cover, like in GOW

 

Added to the feature request list Once we get done with this adventure update we should be able to iterate pretty quickly adding new features.

 

is it be possible to generate a player with uma and drop it into the tps character kit at runtime?

 

I haven't used UMA but can take a look at it when we start on more integrations. The Character Builder doesn't do anything that isn't possible to do at runtime so I can't see a reason why it wouldn't be possible. If you want to get a head start on this take a look at the CharacterBuilder.BuildCharacter method - that method sets up all of the various components.

 

One tricky thing to note about using UMA is that I guess Unity wants the Animator to be set up in the editor and not at runtime. So with a main feature of UMA being that characters can be created at runtime, it can take a little finessing to get the Animator / Controller working with a fresh UMA.

I'm not at all an expert on this, but I've noticed a lot of people bumping their heads into this one as they start to implement UMA.

 

Thanks for the heads up. So you aren't able to just add the Animator component and link the Animator Controller to a UMA character?

 

I don't know exactly what the problem is, but it's something like the controller attempting to access the animator before the UMA is completed, so the animator shuts down. And I don't think you can add an avatar at runtime, which is ultimately the main sticking point for building a character dynamically from code.

A hacky workaround to get the UMA running - which illustrates the problem - is where you take a normal character, like Ethan, that is working with the controller, add the UMA scripts to Ethan and generate the UMA on top of him, redirect the controller to the UMA, and then destroy Ethan. That will switch the animator over (though you will be using the avatar for Ethan). As seen in this video.

As an experienced coder, you should be able to figure out how to do it in a less hacky way by looking at the UMACrowd script, which is included in UMA. There is a callback that tells you when the UMA has finished generating. I'm not sure how the rest of the magic happens, but I think what I've described here will help illumine your way.

 

Wish to clarify a couple things before purchasing so I understand better what I'm actually getting...

- Is there direction+rotation speed coded into the controller? Or is direction speed /character rotation relying on the animation to move it forward? Like Unity's Standard 3rdPersonController, there's no coded movement speed, the character moves because the animation has movement inside it already.

- Can I use this package for non-humanoid characters/skeletons/bones/meshes? Or is this the same deal with Unity's Standard 3rdPC where you swap out the mesh and the mecanim is built relying and assuming that you have a humanoid character and the required animation clips?

Thanks hope it's understandable what I'm asking lol.

 

In the current version all of the movement is done with root motion so it uses the delta position provided by the animation. This is similar to Unity's Standard Third Person Controller. The No Root Motion demo from
this post does not use the animation delta position and instead uses a speed variable which you can set from the inspector. This will be in the next version (which will be when we are out of beta and release the adventure scene).

In the past you could use a non-humaniod character as long as you disabled IK but as the asset matured it started to rely on a humanoid character more and more. This is mostly to automatically setup the components and dramatically reduces the amount of work that you have to do when initially creating the character. In the future we may add the ability to have it work with a non-humanoid character but so far it seems like everybody is using it for humanoids.

 

I was going to publish my first game created with TPC this weekend however, its >50mb so I was unable to get it on android which is what I was building it for. This is a first for me as all my other games have been <50mb but this one is like 70mb even after going back a compressing everything really small just to see if I could get it under 50mb. I found some old tutorial that might help me so hopefully I can get this published tonight but after reading a lot of reviews and howto's this splitting the apk thing is looking kind of hard to do. Anyway, until I figure this out here's a short video of my first game using TPC

 

@DeanMarquette your video does not exist, im interested to see how is your game with this framework

 

@DeanMarquette take a look a this. It can be done in unity.

http://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/android-OBBsupport.html

 

I updated with the correct link, it should be there now.

 

It is so hard to wait for the adventure.
Please asset store, give it to me

 

I looked over this document last night when trying to publish but was unable to figure at how to upload to .obb file. Google says, "Each time you upload an APK using the Google Play Developer Console, you have the option to add one or two expansion files to the APK." I've uploaded several apk's in the past but never got an option to add expansion files and couldn't find an option last night. I was unable to find a location to upload the .obb in my developer console. I must be missing a step somewhere between the build and the apk upload. There must be a script I need to add to my project I guess to tell google this apk comes with a .obb file or something. I'll look further into it tonight, if all else fells I'll have to hire some help <-- at least I'll only have to do this once.

 

Wow im loving the video gameplay of DeanMarquette's Game.Very nice looking forward to see what others might come up with this asset does the multiplayer support work?I reimported the third person controller in a fresh new project and looked at the Network Doug prefab and i scrolled through the inspector and came across Missing (Mono Script) there's 8 scripts missing i loaded the demo scene but nothing seems to work. The mouse cursor dissapear's and i'm stuck looking at doug far away cant move him or anything i have to hit Esc to get the mouse cursor back and then click stop.Finally one last question i'm still fairly new to unity and game development and you noted in the scene that the The Third person Controller Source code must be extracted for this scene to work, i'm not exactly sure what you mean by this.Enable_multiplayer symbol must be enabled.See the RigidbodyCharacterController inspector to toggle .

 

@DeanMarquette -

Awesome! You're the first that I know of to release a game using the framework - congrats and looking good!

@Cascadex -

The networking scene works but there are a couple of extra steps to get it going due to an existing Unity networking bug. First make sure you the source and then as you saw you'll need to add the Enable_Multiplayer compiler definition. You can do this by clicking on the RigidbodyCharacterController and hitting the "Add Multiplayer Symbol"



Once you do these two steps the scene will work but you'll start to hit the "Failed to invoke RPC" bug. There's some more documentation about this on this page.

 

Thanks, keep in mind this is a mobile game so the graphics and other things have been scaled down tremendously. I to look forward to seeing what others come up with for especially for PC versions. I'll also update the video if I can publish tonight to include what the "create" button does and add some aftereffects stuff for my official trailer.

"Source code" - http://www.opsive.com/assets/ThirdPersonController/documentation.php?id=50

 

I'm not sure exactly which folder in the Third Person Controller drop list that i'm sopose to uncheck as there is more then 1 scripts folder in the drop list ive tried 3 different times reimporting each time seeing which Scripts folder is sopose to be removed each resulting in compile errors this time i removed this please see pictures below for details

[/IMG]
This is what i unchecked befor importing the third person controller

I get this error CS2406: The type or namespace name 'NetworkEventManager' could not be found.Are you missing a using directive or an assembly reference?

 

At that stage getting the error is ok. After you do that you can then import the source code and you shouldn't get any more errors.

 

Thankyou very much you've been very helpful and informative i got it to work what about pvp?How would 1 go about adding PvP to this framework?Right now i only know the basics of your Third person controller but can tell its very well written and professionally thought through and done right.

 

Before you really get into networking I recommend that you go through Unity's networking documentation just so you have a high level overview with what is going on. Networking is a complex subject so having a good overview will really help. If you create two instances of the network sample scene you can have two players going against each other. I don't think Unity has done a Unity Learn video yet on networking but the networking dev did a talk at Unite last year:

I appreciate it!

 

Well, while you're working on getting the next update ready, there are a few things I'd like to ask about, mainly about items. I've already suggested some things, but there's also other stuff that's occurred to me:

- Why are melee weapons limited to simple raycasts aimed in a direction? This seems fairly unrealistic, and for some games, makes no sense, especially for various weapon types and animations. It would be ideal for model hitboxes to be used instead for some melee weapons, which is more accurate, especially since raycasts lack 'thickness'.

- Considering items are ScriptableObjects, how would you suggest implementing stuff like upgrading weapons or weapon mods, and other things along those lines? Especially things that outright modify item behaviour?

- Is there any way to get a character to automatically fire their weapon, while also disabling the player's ability to fire manually? (For example, a dive-roll attack where the character shoots during the dive.)

- From the way the items work, it does make sense for most games, but what if the player can use dozens of possible weapons (especially in RPGs)? Assuming that the inventory is still limited to a set number, however, and weapons can be switched out, you'd think having all of those weapons active in memory at once would be incredibly wasteful.

 

You're right - the MeleeWeapon component is much more limited when compared to something like the ShootableWeapon component. I don't have a good reason for that other then the fact that we developed the shooter scene first so that got the most focus. The melee weapon component is an area that we plan on improving - this adventure scene will contain a lot of melee weapons so it should start developing that area more.

The Item class derives from MonoBehaviour, but the Item uses an ItemType and that class is derived from ScriptableObject. As you've seen, there isn't a built in upgrade system yet but what you could do is add a new upgrade type to the inventory. When the Item goes to fire you could check to see what type of upgrade that Item has and fire accordingly. I have had this on my list so when I get to it my implementation may be completely different but that's how I would start.

If you take a look at the Roll ability you'll see that it overrides the CanInteractItem() method. This method prevents the item from firing during that ability. Currently there is no override to have it systematically fire, but you could add it to ItemHandler.TryUseItem. One of the first checks is to determine if the Item can be fired, and what you can do is just create a new method which does not do this check.

In the current version the Item/Inventory system works well for what it is, but it hasn't changed too much since we originally launched. One of the main areas that I plan on focusing on for version 1.1 is improving this area.

 

for the melee weapon it would be solved by using sphereCast which is a raycast with a radius, more accurate than a collider event. it wont use much ressources if you cast it only one frame when the weapon is use

for the items loaded on player, im not sure its a good idea to not preload them, yes it take some memory, but you will load same memory each time you equip a weapon and have a bigger drop of fps because of instanciate the weapon each time.

@opsive also would it be possible to consider Jetpacks between all the request you had? same as the game "Giant citizen Kabuto"

for the inventory, i hope you can make a deep integration of Jorissh inventory system as it can cover 99% of all designs people think about, it would save you much more time to polish other features, same for a quest system (pixelCrusher). these kind of things are time consuming and all that time could be spent in other features

 

Situations like these are always a balance and in this case the best solution might be to add the API so you can load the items on demand versus all at once. This will then allow the designer to make their own decision in terms of if the tradeoff is worth it.

That's an easy way to handle it, I just made the change so it'll be in the next version.

Jetpacks would be a fun ability I wrote it down, but it will probably take awhile before we can get to it. I will be making a video which shows how to create your own abilities after we get out of beta and this would be a pretty easy ability to add: just disable the gravity and apply a trust to the rigidbody.

Inventory Pro is definitely on my list. The trouble with offloading everything to Inventory Pro is that the base inventory class also needs to include at least the basic functionality so the rest of the classes are aware of what the inventory can do. For example, dual wielding. The ItemHandler needs to be aware that the character can use two items at once. This may be a feature of Inventory Pro but the base Inventory class will also need to be aware of it.

It will be much easier to integrate the Dialogue System as the base functionality doesn't change if the character is in a quest or a dialogue.

 

Yeah, a SphereCast would probably work better for the vast majority of melee weapon use cases, even when doing sweeps along a weapon during an animation each frame.

And as for loading in weapons, I'm not really concerned about any temporary framerate drop, as I don't plan on my game allowing inventory changes during gameplay, but instead between missions or in a menu. Haven't bought Inventory Pro myself, but it certainly looks like a fairly robust, since I want to have a separate 'storage' of items, including weapons of the same type but with different stats (eg. two pistols that have the same base stats but different qualities and weapon mods that affect stats).

Also, I've noticed that with my character made from scratch, gunshots seem to be hitting spots somewhat below the crosshair, which is strange. Any idea why that'd be the case?

 

The crosshairs image and the actual fire location aren't linked. In addition to setting the actual crosshairs GUI item, you need to set the Crosshairs Location on the CameraController. This is a normalized position from the bottom left.

 

Ah, that fixed it.

By the way, when I tried to put weapons from the TPS demo in the hands of a new character, these odd things happened:

- The left hand IK is somewhat messed up, going through the weapon and the right hand.
- Full-auto firing doesn't work.
- The UI doesn't seem to know that the player even has ammunition, nor does the weapon even seem to run out.
- The character never stops aiming after firing.

I know the TPS demo works as it should, and the variables in the new char are similar to Doug's, which makes this even stranger.

 

Published and then quickly unpublished. I had to take it down because I forget to re-enable auto reload. Obviously I don’t have a reload button lol! I should have tested again that one last time. Other than that the game turned out pretty good, I’m proud of it and will post on the Opsive forum tomorrow after republishing. One thing though, mobile controls kind of suck in general, I find it imperative to have an auto aim feature. This definitely needs to be a main priority for the next update. It will give mobile the same fast action game play as the web version.

 

This sounds like it is related to this post. I'll send you the new set of animation files that will be in the next version

I am starting to get pretty good at identifying what the more-common problems are but unfortunately I haven't had anybody mention any of these. Can you tell me how to reproduce it (or PM me a repro scene) and I should be able to tell what is wrong pretty quickly.

Yeah, mobile controls are pretty basic. In version 1.1 we'll go through and improve on them - first step is to get this adventure scene out

 

It does seem to help. The result don't seem to be perfect with some 'proper' t-posed rigs, I think, though.

Well, those two issues aren't happening with another new character, but now there's a bizarre drag occurring when it comes to movement, even in the air. Again, no idea what's causing it.

 

Related to Sarah's post, in order for it to be perfect I think that you'll have to either adjust the muscle settings or create new animations specifically for animations. As a test we tried the animations from Unity's Standard Assets package and Kubold and there was also a slight difference between each character's pose with the animation.

Have you tried adjusting the Dampening and Air Dampening value on the RigidbodyCharacterController?

 

Actually, that's not the problem. What I mean by 'drag' is that the movement is slow, jittery, and feels like its constantly pushing against something. Even jumping and falling is very slow, and jumping power is dramatically decreased.

 

Is this a scene that you can send to me so I can see if I can reproduce it on my end?

 

Actually, it's not so much a scene that's the problem, but rather a prefab, as a single character has the same problem across multiple scenes. I'm sending you a package with a 'lagging' character now.

 

It looks like the jittering relates to IK. If you disable the CharacterIK component everything works without a problem. I looked into it some more and the reason that you are having this problem is because of an assumption that I made: the hips would always be parented to the skeleton. With your character Beta:Hips is not parented by BetaHighResMeshes so the IK doesn't get the correct skeleton position. I am looking into a workaround but for now the easiest way to fix this jittering is to just move Beta:Hips to be a child of BetaHighResMeshes:



Edit: I have a proper fix for this case and I am sending you a new CharacterIK component via PM.

 

Works perfectly, thanks a ton. Nice to know I'm still catching out these sorts of bugs

Since I don't quite know when the Adventure update is gonna be out, I'm gonna focus on tinkering with new abilities, and maybe see if I can extend shootable weapons to be able to use charged shots and melee attacks after that. Oh, yeah, being able to charge a weapon would be a nice quick addition as well (both the manual button-hold method and the automatic "charge when not firing" method).

Hope I'm not being too overbearing with all these suggestions and help requests, lol.

 

Great to hear! Yeah thanks for sending these to me. Hopefully the frequency is getting less and less

It'll be in July. We have about half of the new abilities done and the rest are relatively easy. We are just finishing up the polishing touches on a ladder climb and that was a pain to get working smoothly. We really, really like the results though and I'll post a video of it working shortly. In terms of those weapon additions, they all sound like good additions and I have had them all on my list. You've probably seen me say this already but version 1.1 will be more focused on these type of features.

Not at all and I appreciate you mentioning them. You're making it a better asset for everybody.

 

No problem, then.

Also, according to the documentation, new abilities should be added to RigidbodyCharacterController component inspector automatically just via deriving from the base Ability class, but that's not happening for some reason, in my case.

 

As long as your ability is not in the "Opsive.ThirdPersonController.Abilities" namespace it'll show up automatically. The one exception to this is if your new ability isn't in a namespace at all and that can be fixed by opening RigidbodyCharacterControllerInspector.cs and change:

Code (csharp):

1.  
2. if (typeof(Ability).IsAssignableFrom(assemblyTypes[j]) && !assemblyTypes[j].Namespace.Equals("Opsive.ThirdPersonController.Abilities")) {
3.  

to:

Code (csharp):

1.  
2. if (typeof(Ability).IsAssignableFrom(assemblyTypes[j]) && (assemblyTypes[j].Namespace == null || !assemblyTypes[j].Namespace.Equals("Opsive.ThirdPersonController.Abilities"))) {
3.