October 23rd Update (Patreon)

While this week I had hoped to finish the ragdoll stuff on the enemies and then start getting the Ogre game ready, unfortunately things didn't go as planned.

Getting the ragdoll stuff working as I wanted it to pretty much took me all week. However, I'm fairly happy with the results, and throwing enemies around is in my opinion a lot of fun!

When I mentioned that I wanted to use ragdoll animation, people were concerned that the enemies would lose all the personality their various animations had. This is a could point, and a valid concern, but with the physical animation features that Unreal Engine made available in 4.13 (Experimentally I might add, had more then a few crashes getting it set up!), its easier to keep some of that personality.

Instead of making the enemies completely ragdoll when they are hit or knocked back, the will blend into a pose showing their dismay. This is a static pose, so while I still need to go into maya and create it, its MUCH easier then creating the host of animations I would otherwise need to! The pose I'm using now for both the troll and the goblin are just freeze frames, and I'd want to go back and remake them. They are however already looking fairly good.

The other thing that needed to be corrected was the ragdoll system not allowing you to hit enemies in the air, or throw them back and forth. This has been corrected as well(Took most of the work), so now I can throw enemies up into the air, hit them, throw them in a different direction

.I won't give a full text explanation of my process, unless people want it, but I will show the blueprints that lay out how everything works!Blueprint showing how the physical animation stuff is initially setup.

This is part of the begin play of the enemy:

Blueprint showing how the enemy is knocked back, its actually not a full ragdoll until it hits the ground. This also allows me to set how long an enemy will stay on the ground. I don't have animations in place for them to get up, but it has space for me to plug that in.

Blueprint showing how the enemy responds to getting hit.  Again, not a full ragdoll, this one is actually only ragdolling on the top half, with a little force applied to get them to flinch in the right direction.

The only time an enemy goes full ragdoll, is when they die. I have the mesh and capsule collider set up so they don't interact with each other. Future plans I will likely have the enemy mesh switch over to a dead ragdoll when they die, or they might just disappear shortly after death.

Here's the part of the BP that causes them to go full ragdoll:

I know this stuff isn't super exciting to a lot of you, so I'm going to focus this next week on the Ogre, and maybe getting an animation or two with the succubus done and in game. Maybe nothing permanent, or in context, but something new for you all to see!

As always I'd love to hear any comments, concerns or questions!