Wands

Fixed a bug where NPCs could equip shields when using staves.

Added Max Charge values to all the staves in the data table, will probably need to balance it later.

Added the missing frost ground spell VFX

Fixed a bug where non staves and wands would get an event to charge a particle effect

Wands are now working fully!

Spent a couple hours curating new animations for the staves and wands what we have isnt great.

Started tracking down why staves are not working properly for NPCs, They would cast the spell but none of the effects would show up even though the player was taking damage.

Added an interface event for SetStaffCooldownStatus_OnInterface to the BTGS_Interface

Added a variable for StaffCooldownActive to the combat status component. Not sure I love having it there we will be passing data between the character, the staff, the combat status component and the melee component because thats weirdly enough were staves fire from not sure why we programmed it that way frankly, system is complex… seems like a lot of failure points.

Added an interface for GetStaffCoolDownStatus_OnInterface to the BTGS_Interface

Added a check in the melee component attack conditions to check to see if the staff attack is on cooldown

Added an additional check to the setting AI behavior service to make the AI strafe if the staff attack is on cooldown.

Added an interface event to the I_Weapon interface for StartStaffCooldown this is to help us deal with a race condition due to async loading

Fixed a bug where Randomly selected weapons werent getting a valid charge.

Moved the calculation for whether or not a staff spell could be charged we were previously removing charge from the staff at the end of the execution line.

Fixed a bug where the staff charge would continue dropping below 0

Added a variable to the base object to keep track of whether or not a weapon is out of charge.

Added an interface event GetIsWeaponOutOfCharge

Updated the previously existing Weapon out charge interface to be called Set Weapon Out Of Charge for better clarity

Fixed a bug where NPCs could pick a staff or wand that hand no charge as their active weapon

Created a new interface event GetItemCurrentCharge_OnInterface

Added a new tagged dialogue type for when weapons break so the NPCs can bark something if their weapon breaks.

Added a new tagged dialogue type for when weapons run out of charge so NPCs can bark something if their staff runs out of charge.

Added a temp sound in for when weapons break like a snapping metal kind of sound, need to replace with a proper metasound but sound so good already, cant believe I didnt think about that sound effect before now.

Added a temp sound effect for when a staff runs out of charge, need to replace with a proper meta sound.

Fixed a bug where the reevaluate weapon function would get stuck in an infinite loop if the weapon they should sheathe gets destroyed mid sheath.

Fixed a bug where the reevaluate weapon function would fail to sheath the shield if the main hand weapon broke during sheathing.

Now that our weapon switching is working pretty consistently, I’ve plugged the reevaluate weapon function back into weapon broken event. Now if an NPC weapon breaks they will immediately reevaluate their weapon.

Modified the formula for weapon range calculations inside of the Setting AI behavior service. It was calculating differently than the values used inside the actual character causing distance based bugs.

Fixed a bug where NPCs would never put away their shield if their weapon broke.

Fixed a bug where NPCs would destroy the ref to their fist weapon when switching from magic.

Fixing the hand to hand combat.

Ran the combat overnight to check for bugs, none were noticed until spell number 3748 was cast, when the fireball got stuck to the npc hand again, gonna put some check in later down the combat execution path to make sure that if there is a spell and we arent in magic combat mode it gets destroyed.

Fixed a bug where npcs could select broken weapons from their inventory to fight with, causing them to never switch to hand to hand combat.

Apparently our hand to hand combat has been broken for over a year and I never noticed because none of our npcs for the Arena tutorial or alpha are were designed to fight with fists, they can properly switch to fists now.

The animations for fist combat werent properly named or assigned to the data table for the left or right fist, they both had all the hand to hand combat anims. Causing bugs in hit detection. Fixed it.

The code for actually throwing a Left punchwas never actually programmed in we were only ever checking for if the left hand weapon was a shield for shield bashing, I added in some checks to see if the left hand weapon was a fist if it is we have a 50 percent chance of using the left fist instead of the right one.

Fixed a bug where the fist objects would be destroyed when reevaluating weapons when no others were available.

Fixed a bug when fist references wouldnt be set when switching from Magic to hand to hand.

Fixed a execution flow issue in evaluating the chance to throw a left punch in the melee component.

Finally fixed the issue of NPC attacking when they were no where near the player in two ways, first the code for actually defining the range based in weapon length sometimes had invalid refs to the weapon, and second I added a check to see how far away the NPC is from the player and if they arent within that distance they return negative on their can attack check. We were previously only using that range to tell the npc where to run during combat, but there was nothing stoping them from still attacking if they got to an invalid location until now. This does sometimes result in the NPC just standing there if they cant get to the player, but thats better than them attacking aimlessly, in practice it just looks like the npc is waiting in the player to make their next move which is a cool side effect.

Fixed a bug where the magic casting animations went on way to long even after a spell was done firing.

Added a new socket for the hand to hand weapons because none of the existing sockets worked well, modified the logic of the weapon attach to hand function to use this new socket.

Hand to hand weapons working just like the rest!

NPC can now taunt the player if they cant reach them including playing a sound and an animation! Basically if the NPC cant reach they player they will say something like come on strike me coward!! Fucking awesome addition that only took a few minutes.

BUGS BUGS BUGS

Took all day, but i finally solved the…hopefully actually this time. Where npcs would sometimes have spells or arrows stuck to their hands after switching to a different combat style. Really difficult bug to track down due to it being so inconsistent.

Adjusted the magic regeneration rate for npcs it was way too high.

Fixed the bug where npcs would spawn more weapons on top of existing weapons.

NPC combat can now switch between magic, two handed weapons, archery, and multiple types of one handed weapons.

Turns out the stuff I did yesterday works great unless the NPC has a shield, so its a bit of back to the drawing board for that system.

Previously we were sequentially calling the draw events for the main and off hand weapon with just minor variable changes this was kind of dumb in retrospect, I’ve created a new event inside the Combat status component to allow us to just pass the proper weapon variables.

I’ve created a new interface event inside the BTGS Interface called SetWeaponDrawnStatus_OnInterface, it makes more sense and should simplify the code and solve some bugs to store the Actual drawn state of the weapon inside of it instead of inside the combat status component.

We already had an interface event for GetWeaponDrawnStatus_OnInterface, but were never using it so taht’s been fixed as well.

Pretty large rewrite of the combat systems conditions stretching from AI tasks to animation blueprint changes to base object changes. The System now works with shields and main hand weapons again and is much more consistent. Still some issues with switching into weapons that are already used on a slot for instance if an axe is holstered on the NPCs hip and they try to spawn a short sword it will spawn on top of the axe, should be bale to fix that soon though.

Weapon Switching Fully working!!

Fixed a small bug with the placement of the VR player hands.

Added some debug commands for camera rotation

Fixed the material on the Quiver, it was somehow still set to a default lit material.

Took all fucking day, but we finally have consistent switching between the 3 possible combat styles. Melee, Marksman, and Magic!

The character overhaul continues.

Added a new function to the BTGS_Interface called GetSkillOfItem because a check we do frequently is to get the item info break the struct and then compare its skill to a given skill for flow control, this simplifies that code.

Removed references to the Cell state manager from the BP AI Parent, it was used by the old saving and loading system, dont need it for the new one.

Removed a bunch of old weapon attachment code from the combat status component

Fixed a pretty large bug in the weapon switching where NPCs would continue to use their previous weapons animations.

Added some booleans for hip holster occupied and back holster occupied to help us with NPC weapon switching during combat the idea being that if they need to reevaluate their weapon they wont spawn one in an already occupied holster.

Fixed an animation bug where NPCs would briefly play animations for the attack of their previously equipped weapon, separate from the above bug.

Weapon switching between ranged and melee is working pretty consistently.

Fixed the bug where NPCs couldnt switch to magic casting from melee weapons.

Many small bug fixes mostly not listed here.

The character overhaul begins!!!

Pretty much every line here will be in reference to the BP AI Parent unless otherwise stated

Removed the references to the debug faction component

Removed the references to the old HUD

Removed Level Streaming Check function, we don’t use world partition anymore so we dont need it anymore.

Collapsed a section of the graph dealing with facial animations to a new function called SetupNPCHeadAnim for the sake of readability

Removed the references to the Physical Animation Component, we disabled it a bit ago because of performance concerns.

Removed the Set Physical Animation Graph.

Added an event called UpdateQuiverMesh to allow us to change the quiver mesh, right now only one quiver mesh is ever used, theoretically if an NPC changed arrows during combat we would need this.

Added a Has Ammo Boolean variable to the BTGS_InventoryComponent we already have a function for this, but it requires us to search through the entire inventory which is costly so this is more of a cached value.

Added an item validation check and IsMarksman check into the choose best weapon function for better event graph readability.

Moved the Choose Best Arrow function to after choose best weapon no reason to run a loop to check for arrows if we arent even choosing a bow.

Added an item validation check to the ChooseBestShield function.

Finally Removed the entire patrol system, it wasnt really doing much as there was never a reference to a patrol blueprint. We dont do patrolling AI, Synapse AI will take over all those functions anyway.

Fixed a bug in combat execution that a previous optimization broke. Basically we were calling the interface event for begin attack on the wrong component.

Removed the player valid check timer it wasn’t doing much anymore and we have much better player proximity optimization now anyway.

Removed refs and setup function for the original stats widget

Moved the Weapon range calculations into a new event for better readability and an eventual plan to move it to a different component.

Removed Ref to the Physical animation component inside of the Resource component

Removed Ref to the Physical animation component inside of the Taking Damage component

Added an interface event called GetIsStunned_OnInterface to the BTGS Interface so we can pass that value around instead of relying on a hard ref to the melee component.

Added an interface event called GetIsMidDraw_OnInterface to the BTGS Interface so we can pass that value around instead of relying on a hard ref to the combat status component.

Got the the old temp non combat AI Integrated into the main behavior tree

Added an interface event called ToggleHealthWidget_OnInterface to the BTGS Interface so we turn the health UI on and off via a Service on the behavior tree.

Completely removed the old AI activation system, we now handle whether or not the NPC is in combat between the behavior tree and the AI controller.

Many many other changes inside the BP Ai Parent… the code is so much cleaner and more efficient.

Further testing of the individual combat systems in preparation for the Character overhaul

Found some missing VFX in the magic effects data table gonna pass that over to Jackie on Monday.

Replaced some references to the movement status component inside of the T_SetMovementSpeed with the interface event UpdateMovementSpeed.

Cleaned up the code inside of T_SetEnemyAsFocus

Removed references to the input buffer component and movement status component inside of the Ranged Component

Fixed a bug in the archery combat where the NPC Arrow would never be destroyed if they sheathed their weapon

Replaced the old GetStatsComponent function with the new one inside of the T_CheckNeedToHeal, this was sometimes causing a crash in both the engine and game.

Found a pretty large bug, that I’m not quite sure how to fix yet. If an NPC loses sight of the player and returns to their location they can never reactivate their AI even if looking right at the player.

Removed some old animation references from T_SendOffAttack.

Created a new Interface event called EventAttackOnInterface to allow us to call for an attack without an explicit reference to the melee component.

Reduced size of T_SendOffAttack from 35 mb and 1200 references down to 2.1mb and 165 references, by removing references to the melee component.

Cleaned up the code in the task T_DrawArrow.

Removed a ref to the Magic component from the S_MageStrafe service.

More bug fixes in the magic system.

Added in a check to make sure that channel spells cant activate if the player is too far away.

The individual spell types (Channel, Rune, Ground, Sky, Self, Projectile) all seem to be working so I finally tied all the code in to allow the NPCs to switch between all types of spells available to them including some random variation with weighted bools. Might want to eventually make this tied to skill level or something.

Wrote a nice new function that can determine and fill out if we have certain kinds of spells like rune or ground spells as a sort of early out for when we are determining what type of spell to cast.

Added an early out for what school of magic to cast a spell from.

Realized NPCs could never cast resotration spells other than Restoring health. Added a new branch to the T_DetermineMagicSpell to allow them to cast other spells in restoration school.

Cleaned up the code inside of T_DetermineMagicSpell using some new events to clean up the spaghetti.

Removed all of the old spell selection code inside of T_DetermineMagicSpell, previously it was designed around the idea of having certain types of mages that could cast a type of spell instead of having universal characters that could cast anything based on their skills and spell inventory.

Fixed a massive bug in the strafing movement code where NPCs would jitter back and forth while a spell was loading.

Ground and Sky spell conversion to Rune Style casting

Cleaned up the massive amount of spaghetti code in the BP Ability Parent.

Created a new actor called BP_PhysicalPlacementSpell for us to spawn just like the Physical Rune objects.

Added a new event to the BTGS_MagicInterafce called SetupPhysicalPlacementSpell_OnInterface which we are using to actually set up all the required stuff for the new physical placement spell actor.

Converted all the of NPC Ground and Sky spell Casting to using the new BP_PhysicalPlacementSpell took several hours but well worth it much cleaner and compartmentalized code!

Several more hours of testing and bug fixing the new Placement spell actor.

Bug fixes in the magic system.

Fixed the collision profile on the rune overlap volumes. Previously they collided with weapons, which while funny, is unintended behavior.

Fixed a order of operation issue where runes would sometimes not count as being destroyed and would not update the current number of spawned runes.

Removed references to the Input Buffer component from the Taking Damage component, the eventual goal is still to get rid of the taking damage component.

Implemented the Event Stop Magic Charge on interface event on the BP AI Parent to fix the bug where an interruption would put the NPC in a loop where they couldnt cast spells.

Put a check in the task T_ChargeSpell to make sure we arent trying to charge a spell if we already have an active one.

Another day, another shit storm of Niagara related crashes. Absolute dog shit system.

Duplicated the BTGSFunctionLibrary and named it BTGSMagicFunctionLibrary so we could rip out all of the magic functions from it to better isolate the systems form each other for less dependencies. The regular function library has a lot of dependencies related to the base object that we dont need for anything magic related.

Created a new event inside the BTGSInterface called ResetMeleeAttackOnInterface this is so we can reset melee attacks without a hard ref to the melee component inside of the BP AI Controller.

Implemented the new event inside the AI Parent so that we can now reset the melee attack without the hard ref inside the AI controller.

Created a new event inside the BTGSInterface called AIRollBackwards_OnInterface so we can force the NPC to roll backwards when they are using a bow without hard references.

Reduced the size of the Magic component from 35mb down to 2.3mb. Also reduced its number of references from over 1200 down to 165.

Removed references to the Input buffer component and melee component from the combat status component.

Created a new event inside the BTGSInterface called EndNPCBlocking_OnInterface this is so i could get rid of the hard ref inside of the combat status component.

Removed a reference to the resource component from the equipment component. The plan is still to get rid of the resource component all together at some point.

Found that all of our spell effects VFX files are not set properly passing that off to Megan to be fixed.

Found that all the colors for our destruction projectile spells aren’t nearly noticeable enough Jackie previously set all the colors on the smoke on them but not the flames leading them to all look the same. She is gonna fix those now.

Created a new interface event called UpdateCurrentNumberOfGroundSpells_OnInterface, this is to help us track and control how many ground spells the character can cast.

Created a new interface event called UpdateCurrentNumberOfSkySpells_OnInterface, this is to help us track and control how many sky spells the character can cast.

Added new variables to the BTGS Stats component for max and current number of active sky and ground spells.

Added a pure function to the BTGS Stats component to return whether or not we can cast a ground spell.

Added a pure function to the BTGS Stats component to return whether or not we can cast a sky spell.

Started debugging the issues where the NPC could cast multiple Ground spells even with our new variables and functions. The issue seems to stem from the way we originally designed ground spells to work they were and are channel spells meaning that the npc is supposed to not be able to do anything else until that spell is done, but they act more like projectile spells now in that they cast the spell and then its damage tick is handled inside the same BP_AbilityParent because these are AOE effects. I think we need to convert these to basically be handled the same way as we do rune spells. We spawn the ground spell at a location and then let that newly spawned object handle the damage tick and the updating of the total number of current active ground spells. I can’t really foresee an issue with this method so far. Ill need to continue working on it tomorrow.

More work on the Magic system.

Set up my OBS to be able to record streams of development stuff

Discovered that we are missing some animation notifies on the rune spells which is part of the reason they arent working.

Got rune spell casting working again for NPCs.

Players cant seem to out run the rune spells so I put in a slight delay of .5 seconds when the rune spawns to actually turn on its collision. Not a great solution but works well enough for now.

Remove some Input buffer code from the BP_ABility_Parent that was causing the npc to not be able to cast more than 1 rune spell

Added a couple variables to the stats component to track the current and max number of runes for a given character.

Added an interface event UpdateCurrentNumberOfRunes_OnInterface so we can actually keep track of the number of runes an NPC has cast and stop them from casting too many.

Added a new function to the stats component to return whether or not we can cast a new rune spell just returns true or false.

Added a new function inside the spell inventory component to return an array of Destruction rune spells.

Changed the functionality of that new function so that it actually can take in any spell type instead of just rune spells.

Added the UpdateCurrentNumberOFRunes_OnInterface event to the BP_AIParent

Fixed backwards logic in the calculation of current number of runes

Fixed a bug where the npc would stop casting spells if their rune expired

Put in a check to determine what type of damage is being done to the npc so we can disable hit animation om magic hits, we might add different hit effects for magic later, but right now they just sometimes break magic combat

The NPC can now switch properly between rune and projectile spells.

New Site Setup!

Decided to finally start putting my work logs on a dedicated blog instead of just a windows notepad. Spent a couple hours setting up this new website.

Moved some of the booleans for the execution flow that helps us determine if an async load for the spells was still in progress in an attempt to fix some issues related to first time loads of VFX on spells.

Fixed a bug where some spells would never charge successfully due to an async loading issue… noticing a pattern here.

Removed a delay that was causing magic effects to sometimes not destroy on impact, we previously needed a delay due to the nature of the original design of the system. We no longer need that due to the redesign months ago but that delay was never removed.

Added a new event to the BP_Ability_Parent called PreloadMagicEEffectVFX this solves the issue spell impact effects sometimes not spawning fast enough, there is still an async load inside the actual magic effect just in case they still dont load in time.

Took an hour to track down a weird issue were sometimes the NPC would never get out of their spell charge state, turns out we had a few animations that werent updated in the spells data table. Not sure what happened there but some of them had 17 animations and some of them had 20.

With the help of Jackie I fixed a weird offset issue with our shock hit effect that was causing the hit effect to spawn in the wrong location. We also made the effect larger to better match some of the other effects.

Watched the NPC fire spells at the player for a good 20 minutes without any significant failures, SICK!

Loaded up the NPC with all the damage X projectile spells and watched them fire at the player for like 30 minutes. Everything is mostly fine, the only real issue is sometimes heavier VFX files still dont load in time. So clearly we need to load them earlier in the chain or something, need a better way to cache them still.

Work Log 9/4/2025

Fixed a bug in the NPC magic casting that would have them failing to cast a spell due to async loading

Added in a check to make sure the NPC doesn't play a spell anim montage while already playing another.

Added in a Boolean called SpellLoading to the MagicComponent to help us with execution flow when NPC attempts to cast spells.

Fixed a bug in T_GetHealingSpell task where it would never finish execution

Fixed a bug where noise events were always coming from the player inside of magic effect components even if it was a spell the NPC had cast. This was causing the NPC to evaluate noises even if they were the one making them.

Fixed a bug where NPCs were completely ignoring spell cooldowns. Spell cooldowns were only being calculated for the player on the magic effect component, but the player doesn't even use the magic component.

Changed the try to heal code so that if the NPC is in combat they will try to heal if their health is below a random float between .5 and .8, if they aren't in combat they will always try to heal to 100 percent.

Fixed a bug where NPC spell actors would never be destroyed.

Fixed a bug that would prevent NPCs from being able to cast projectile spells due to async loading

Added in a new check in the cooldown system that multiplies the cooldown time with a value based on the skill of the NPC with that school of magic, basically if an NPC is really good with destruction that can cast more fireballs faster.

Fixed a bug of projectile spells not detaching from the NPC hand sometimes.

NPC spells now have their accuracy effected by their skill in the selected magic school of the spell.

Work Log 9/3/2025

Removed a weird phantom reference to the combat status component from the Melee component.

Removed all the references to the equipment component from the melee component.

Created a new interface event for UpdateMovementSpeed previously this was handled inside the movement status component, it still technically is for now but its activated through the npc via the interface event now instead of a hard ref.

Removed all the references to the Movement Status component from the melee component

Removed all the refs to the UBPP library in the base object

Optimized the tri count of the SKM_Manny Tester hand that was referenced inside the base object

Further reduced the Base object down to 33.8mb

Fixed the bug of the health bar widget never updating.. kind of, its the same damn bug we've had for a but with things not being flagged as rendered by the engine.

Removed all of the old combat testers from the BP_AI_Parent.

Created a new Interface "BTGS_NPC_HUD_Interface" so we can update NPC hud values without direct casting.

Fixed a bug where a recovered arrow would never despawn.

Fixed a Null reference bug in the new blocking code

Changed the name of the AttemptHeal_OnInterface event to AttemptToHealViaItem_OnInterface for better clarity. Also fixed a bug in it that was causing a null ref on a destroy actor command because we were using a ref to the spawned potion, but if the npc didn't have any potions that value would always be invalid, we now check first to see if the array of potions is valid.

Renamed the AI Task T_AttemptHeal to T_AttemptHealViaItem for better clarity.

Moved the CalculateLuckChance function from the BP_AI_Parent to theStats component

Replaced all references of the old CalculateLuckChance function inside the NPCs to the new stats CalculateLuckChance

Added a new calculation to the decorator in the AI tree called D_Should_Attempt_To_Heal, we now have a random check based on the npc intelligence and luck instead of just a random bool.

Added a new check to the task T_AttemptToHealViaItem. We now check the NPCs luck and Alchemy skill level to determine if they can attempt to heal via a potion.

Added a new check to the task T_GetHealingSpell. We now check the NPCs luck and Restoration skill level to determine if they can attempt to heal via a spell.

Fixed several bugs in the Task T_GetHealingSpell where the task would never end.

Fixed a bug in the function library where spells weren't properly found in the data table.

We have two events called SendMagicSpell one in the magic component and one inside the bp_ability parent so i renamed the one inside the magic component to SendMagicSpellInMagicComp

Started Tracking down why the npcs sometimes cant heal, gonna have to tackle this tomorrow.

Work Log 9/2/2025

Demoed how to do a level block out for Megan for her class.

Started work on cleaning up new player blocking code, haven't touched it since I got it working

Found a bug where the players overlap check timer was never being turned off could have killed performance later

Created an Enum for block proxies so we can use it inside the new function i created inside the BTGS_interface for toggling the collision for the block proxies on the BP_AI_Parent.

Reduced the size of the base object from 162mb to 51mb by removing old hard references due to the NPC blocking code rewrite.

Removed the base objects dependency on the combat status component

Created a new interface event to pass the status of if an NPC has drawn their weapon. We were previously calling for the Combat status component whenever we needed this, but that was messy at best and buggy at worst. This new event should allow cleaner checking and help solve some of our combat bugs notably the one where npcs can attack even if they have no weapon in their hand.

Removed the old exposed transforms that were added to the NPCs during the new block system development

Removed the dependency of the narrative base npc to the lyra anim bp.

Further reduced size of base object to 37 mb by removing hard refs inside of the melee component which itself saw a reduction from over 30 mb down to 6mb

Replaced all of the checks for weapon drawn inside of the melee component with the new interface event GetWeaponDrawnStatus.

Removed all of the references to the combat status component inside of the melee component.

Work Log 9/1/2025

Jackie found a bug in the arrow outline system. If you drop an arrow the outline stays there, so i fixed that.

Upon further inspection it looks like the same issue exists if you a drop bow the arrow outline stays, fixed that too.

Spent 3 fucking hours on figuring out why if you recovered an arrow from the world it couldn't be reused it would just sit there in the air after being fired. Turns out that you have to manually deactivate the projectile component after an impact, just reactivating doesn't work which seems like an engine bug to me.

Moved the arrow variable resets to a separate function inside the arrow component instead of a bunch of sets inside the base object

Fixed the metal sound that was playing when an arrow hit stuff instead of a wooden one.

Work Log 8/29/2025

I’m back from a well needed vacation. Still Feeling pretty exhausted though frankly.

Added time dilation back to fired arrows, this worked at some point, but was never programmed properly.

Set the arrow time dilation chance to be relative to the players block skill

Moved the sound spawning and destroying for the time dilation effect to the player character in a unified function instead of it being scattered throughout different components

Fixed the arrow ricochet bounce angle it was far too low previously

Added a max number of bounces that an arrow is allowed to have currently set at 4

Added a check to check if a fired arrow is hitting another weapon that is NOT a shield if it is we should try to ricochet it if its a shield we should follow normal angle calculations for arrow ricochet or sticking.

Added the ability for players to have a chance to recover fired arrows from the world

Added an outline to where arrows go so the player can better understand where to put notch arrows on the bow. This should solve all the problems early testers have had in trying the archery system.