Handling character movement via SS

#1

Hello,
I’m currently doing character/camera movement (running, sprinting, jumping, shooting, entering/exiting/driving various vehicles, camera controls) via BP. It’s getting a bit unwieldy for my liking. My game is heavily locomotion based, and dis/connecting lines all the time is getting tiresome.

I’m very new to skookum, but I have lots of experience with C-based scripting.

I will have to constantly iterate on locomotion and camera controls. Diffing BP is a lost cause, and C++ is a bit slow. I think skookum is a viable, if not ideal, option, because I can diff and it’s super fast.

Was curious if anyone familiar with doing camera and player controls in both BP and sk could vouch for one or the other. Or maybe, if there are any downsides to doing this stuff in sk.

Thanks in advance!

#2

It’s probably easiest to answer with some examples of what your code might look like.

Here are some examples of locomotion from the invader’s demo:
movement - horizontal axis data passed from BP to :sk:
firing - handling a simple firing state
guided missile logic - physics based movement

I don’t have any examples of a camera controller, but at the end of the day this is just some more vector math, some physics-based or translation based locomotion and some knowledge of where things might be in screen and world spaces.

I’d personally never want to write a player or camera implementation in BP, it would be a google maps nightmare about the size of the continental US (all the zooming and complexity from visual programming). It’s straightforward to do in C++ but iteration times are painful. :sk: can do it all with a few hooks into and out of BP (you can’t get player input straight from :sk:).

You can do it all in :sk: but it’s generally at its best for stage management and higher-level things such as illustrated above. Specifically I think :sk: can get messy compared to C++ if you start doing a ton of calculations. For example I used :sk: to write a grid layout system once and while my iteration was fast, I eventually moved all of the nitty gritty math to C++, it was a little cleaner to me - but that’s a personal preference.

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#3

Really appreciate the info/reply. Sorry for not supplying some actual code. I decided not to because it would’ve been a bunch of fullscreen screenshots, and they’d likely lag up this thread and would be difficult to parse.

" :sk: can do it all with a few hooks into and out of BP (you can’t get player input straight from :sk:)" this is really helpful. Thanks!

I’ll have a good look at the invaders demo.
Thank you again for your time, error454.