Using a new Player with an old UI?

[warpzone]

So I made my hero, made some changes to the UI, then made a new hero model, and turned that into a brand new player-driven character, and when all was said and done, my UI object in the top level of the hierarchy now has two HUD children on it, neither one of which works, even if I delete the other one.

I have NO idea how to recover from this.  I can't figure out where the GameManager or the player health is wired up to the HUD in the first place.  It's certainly not grabbing the HUD automatically at runtime.  (Or if it is, it's doing it poorly and then failing silently!)

And if changing my character once is this hard, changing it at runtime on some sort of character select screen must be IMPOSSIBLE!  I thought a Dark Souls Clone would at least be able to pick between male and female models, if not entire armor sets... this is just weird.

Invector ThirdpersonController!  Easy to set up.  Easy to break.  Darn near impossible to fix once you've broken it, because all the important stuff happens behind the scenes.

Guess I'll be digging into Someone Else's Code again.  I'll keep you all posted...

Edit: Shit.  I see what I did.  I needed to add a pause menu, and I didn't want to mess with your code, so I copied vHudController into a separate script.  Let's call it wzHudController.  For some reason this worked fine initially.  I didn't realize other gameobjects were referencing it since it still worked.

I'm guessing this has something to do with Unity internal stuff.  My solution broke because it never should have worked in the first place.

Replacing my wzHudController with a vHudController made everything magically start working again.  Guess I have no choice but to edit vHudController.  The only alternative is to edit vInput, vThirdPersonInput, etc.

[Invector]

Hey warps,

Let's understand your issue first, after modifying your HUD did you save your newHud into a prefab so you could use it again?
You can create a new character at any time, and the character creator window has a field to assign the hud prefab, which I'm guessing you didn't, that's why you have 2 hud's in your scene.

To switch characters you can simple enable/disable gameObjects, or drag and drop your character prefab into the scene and everything will automatically be assign at the start, it couldn't be easier then this.

And again dude, not a Dark Souls clone it's a Third Person Controller solution and not a game template solution.

[warpzone]

C'mon man.  Everyone who looks at this thing in its default state thinks of Dark Souls.

The demo scene that ships with it, vMeleeCombat_DemoScene, is structured like a Dark Souls clone out-of-the-box. It's true that with enough work, you can make any kind of 3rd person fighting game from it, but it's also true that the more different your game is from Dark Souls, the more work you have to put in to turn vMeleeCombat_DemoScene into your game. I'm still figuring out what is possible and how to change things without breaking it. When I say something that you don't like, I am revealing the gap between my understanding and your own.  What looks easy and obvious from your point of view, with your full understanding of your scripts and a paid animator on your staff to implement animation changes for you is a lot harder from my end, the indie developer with no resources or experience.

vMeleeCombat_DemoScene showcases one-on-one combat encounters in a freely-traversible 3D environment with a player-controlled follow camera. It's tough but fair to play with a controller (assuming you use the potions and equipment and everything,) and awkward as heck to play with a keyboard and mouse. It features slow, weighty attacks with an emphasis on blocking, timing, and nursing a stamina meter. The enemies are fundamentally the player's peers.  It has a dodgeroll that includes invincibility frames, but it's not a "get out of jail free" card. Your individual attacks are physical simulations of your fist or sword's actual physical movement through 3D space. Hitting more than one opponent in a single blow is possible, but rare and difficult to do consistently.  Enemy corpses persist after death.  Attacks that hit the wall bounce off, staggering your character and shooting sparks. For crying out loud, it even says "You have died" at the top of the screen after you die. Not the more traditional "Game Over," but "You have died." What's the one series you can think of that prominently puts the words "You have died" on the screen after the player dies?

If you don't like people comparing your product to Dark Souls, maybe try making it look and feel a little less like Dark Souls. I'm not talking about the graphics, I'm talking about the mechanics. This thing has Dark Souls's DNA all over it, front and center. Moving it away from those roots takes effort and skills.

[warpzone]

Let me emphasize that this video does not depict "all you can do" with Invector's thirdperson melee engine. It is, however, the least you can do with Invector's thirdperson melee engine. It's the proverbial Asset Flip, what Valve would call a Fake Game. It's Invector's system just plopped into a freebie map with a freebie pause menu, with some very light enemy spawning and forcefields added.  And the guy doing a first impressions video about it immediately thought of Dark Souls.

That's why I keep calling it a Dark Souls clone.  Because that's the game most gamers would think of the second they see it in action.

[Invector]

I'm not sure what you're trying to accomplish here warps... yes I already told you that we based some mechanics of the MeleeCombat on DS, I'm actually a huge fan of the series and yes we build a demo scene as one quick level example showing most of the stuff we developed - but that doens't mean that you would purchase the template, replace the model, hit the auto generate button of a terrain creator, put some models with bad collisions and publish as a 'game' without even changing the animations or audio. That's just a person being lazy.

The template offers a great range of customization if you're willing to at least try, you can develop a top down, isometric, 2.5D, etc... we will not teach you how to make games or how to be a game designer we design this 'thing' to help you achieve your vision as a game designer and if you don't like the combat you can simple pick the Basic Locomotion and create your own combat from there, that's why we put 3 versions available so you can choose what tool will help you better. 

Our "staff" consist of 2 people Jorge and I and we're coders and designers but we're definitely not animators otherwise we could replace some animations and change a few variables to create other types of demo scenes like hack'n slash or more action adventure based. The core of a 3rd person game are basically animations & mechanics combined, in which you can create very unique things if you're willing to put your hands into work.

And of course modifications will required effort and skills, the more effort you put into it, better the result will be, just like everything in life and here is a great example of that:

[Invector]

btw, did you solve your issue with the duplicated UI?

[uberwiggett]

The map was also Gaia with the free village exteriors, and one of the free community add ons is what runs the enemy marker. Certainly a quick do this this and this grab for cash. I've done only minor modifications to the template and gotten isometric hack and slash genre rather than dark souls, it's not hard and you don't need much effort or skills.

edit: and yes, every time you generate a new player controller with the wizard it will make a new HUD gameobject. You'll need to delete the HUD and Player controller objects from the game when you want to do this, and if you've made changes to it, save it as it's own prefab and just load that one each time as Invector has suggested above.

[warpzone]

Hercules is a great counterexample. I'm pretty sure some of the enemies are from the asset store, but the gameplay, effects and menus are all top-quality. It's a great work in progress and a shining example to learn from. Gagame has worked very hard to move the engine away from its default state, and it shows.

All I'm saying is, when you first install the Unitypackage, it's a Dark Souls clone. Just like when you first install Unreal Engine 3, it's what used to be called a Doom Clone until people started calling them First-Person Shooters in the 90s. You can make anything from Adventure Games to Sudoku out of Unreal Engine 3, and people have. But it's still a Doom Clone out of the box.

The only point I'm trying to make is, don't tell me I'm wrong to call it a DS clone when that's so clearly what it is. It has features no other thirdperson melee game but Dark Souls has, and it's lacking features almost every other thirdperson melee game on the market has.

[warpzone]

Apr 22, 2017 15:26:58 GMT Invector said:

btw, did you solve your issue with the duplicated UI?

Yeah.  I've since tried a couple other menus from the asset store, but they all break in one way or another.  Looks like I'm  gonna have to do it the hard way.  Thanks for asking.