This is an extremely basic shooter NPC, with accordingly basic AI. All he does is aim at the cube, with no current shooting animation, pathfinding skills, or any other bells and whistles. The feedback I’m looking for is mostly in regards to the art side of things: modelling, rigging, and animation, but feel free to say what you will in regards to the programming.
W,A,S,D to move the target cube.
OR_AITestingGrounds.blend (1.34 MB)
Looks good so far, just lots of incomplete stuff you need to put in like walk/run animations which I see you’ve already got him in place for, it’s not amazing or anything but it’s pretty solid, the only major complaint I’d have is the A key moves right and the D key moves left, so that’s going to confuse a lot of people who are used to the WASD movement.
If you want to improve it you’re just going to have to keep piling in on the detail but honestly, I wouldn’t for a game, I’m sick of not being able to run stuff because developers didn’t think before they added stuff.
The WASD movement is not actually representative of the gameplay. It’s only meant to make the testing more dynamic. Also, I actually had walking animations and pathfinding on him before, but stripped them out in order to make the aiming mechanism more polished.
I’m not quite sure what you’re saying here. Are you not able to run stuff due to hardware limitations, or programming bugs?
The next main thing that I want to do is to allow for the character’s legs to change pose when the character is rotating. Sadly, I can’t find any way to get ‘worldRotation’ or any such thing.
Okay, so I gave the character an animation for shooting. The animation blends quite well with the aiming while the character is aiming straight, but constantly resets itself to straight when aiming up or down. I’m using the playAction command, which features a blend/add layer weight slot, but it doesn’t seem to be working. Anyone have any ideas?
OR_AITestingGrounds.blend (1.31 MB)
The controls now include the spacebar to shoot.
What I mean is, don’t stick a ton of polygons and fancy detail in without taking into account the low - medium end users who won’t have $1000 gaming PC’s 
Ah! That’s a problem that I’ve run into, if you intend to make that a looping animation what you need to do is animate it twice, otherwise it will snap back like that and look extremely weird, I ran into this problem myself when I was doing a run cycle.
Here’s a bit of reference to help you, basically you need to keyframe your animation back to the original point so that the timeline goes through everything smoothly because it can’t just automatically do it you have to tell the game engine everything so it doesn’t just snap back to the starting position.
If you’ve seen slow-mo firing sequences for example when their hand kicks back from the pistol recoil it always goes back to the original position so they can line up a shot again. From what I can see you don’t seem to have added enough frames on the way back so it goes back to position smoothly.
I dunno, geometry’s pretty cheap. You sure it’s not shaders and lighting that are doing that?
No, that’s not the problem. The aim animation is being overwritten by the fire animation, and the fire animation is animated level. So, when the gun fires, the gun returns to a level position during the fire sequence and snaps back into the aim position afterward. Also, I’ve never had trouble with looping animations. I just always start animating loops by keyframing the first pose and copying the keyframes to the last frame.
At any rate, I managed to fix the issue. It’s not the best solution, but stripping out the fire animation on the arm and leaving it on the forearm looks pretty close to what I wanted.
Oh okay, sorry my information didn’t help, that’s just from what I’ve experienced so far because that’s the only time I’ve seen that kind of snapping affect, I’ll be sure to keep that in mind though if I’m using multiple animations like you are.
No problem, I’d rather people post back with suggestions that may not work than not at all.
Big update to the first post’s attachment: I’ve now added footing animations. It’s certainly a big step in the right direction, but I still can’t get the shift animation to play at every turn.