Author: Jonah McConnell

We've all seen videos in which an image or model slides into view, with a simple sound of concrete sliding along played over the top for comedic effect. In short, this is the best way to describe the experience of beginning to move something. The sight of a T-posing character sliding along the ground is familiar to just about anyone in Game Dev. It can almost be described as the infancy of a moving object in a game (ok I might be exaggerating a bit but the point still stands).

This was something that I initially faced with the player when trying to get the animation system to work. However, when implementing the enemies, I'm encountering the (notably comedic) issue again. This is because our animation blueprint bases its animations on the movement of the character. However, since we are using an AI controller rather than a player input, it seems that the animations aren't playing correctly. Both meshes use the same model and skeleton, so the animation blueprint can remain the same for both.

To fix this issue, I plan to ensure that the enemies set the same data in their character movement component to allow the animation blueprint to continue functioning in the same way. I'll also look to make sure that any overly specific casting happening in the animation blueprint is avoided to keep any issues from cropping up due to casting to something the enemy doesn't derive from. To make sure these changes are correctly implemented, I will have to continue researching the behavior tree and blackboards Unreal provides.