Question, Suggestion, Request. Obi Rope + Game Creator 2

[Skcmmj]

I'm trying to combine Game Creator 2 with Obi Rope capabilities.

Game Creator 2 is an all around game engine used with unity to basically turn everything into visual scripting. Amazing Asset.
Obi Rope seems to be the best solution on the asset store for these tasks.

I've been looking to create two different actions

- Player able to jump towards a handing rope and grabbing it, swinging and possibly back and forth, then using the jump to dismount the rope.

- A grappling hook / whip action to grab onto surfaces and pull the player towards it. 

Right now I'm working with the first person with Game Creator 2.

You are a very intelligent individual to have created these assets, I've used your search feature and seen numerous requests for a 3D swinging, and 3d grappling hook. I know you believe the demo scene is a great starting point for purchasers of your asset. However, I'm not nearly intelligent as you with these scripting and game object setups. If you create a integration with Game Creator 2 and sold it as an asset, you would get a lot of purchases. The posts I've read seems a lot of people are purchasing your asset to accomplish these things. If you could help create these to work in Game Creator 2, I can pay or purchase multiple copies of your assets and gift them to several people. 

I know you're a very busy man and probably have other projects at hand. I've been toying around with the grappling hook scene and Game Creator 2 Player Prefab, some of the main issues I've come across are.

Game Creator 2 doesn't add a rigid body to the player until play mode, so trying to add the Obi Rigid body doesn't happen unless I add the component in play mode.

Im not sure if my player prefab has to be a child of the obi solver, as the cube is in the demo scene.

The way Game Creator 2 sets up the player prefab is in the screenshot. 

I've tried a few different things back and forth still having some issues, Not sure how I should set up these hierarchy of game objects. Anyway. Would love to see a integration with GC2 or Tutorial Video of combining these assets. Would Gladly Pay

[josemendez]

- Player able to jump towards a handing rope and grabbing it, swinging and possibly back and forth, then using the jump to dismount the rope.

You can use collision callbacks to determine whether there's a collision between the player and a rope particle, then attach the player there:
http://obi.virtualmethodstudio.com/manua...sions.html

- A grappling hook / whip action to grab onto surfaces and pull the player towards it. 

If you want the player to be immediately pulled towards the surface, just reduce the length of the rope as soon as it attaches. You can use ObiRopeCursor for this, (like in the RopeGrapplingHook demo scene, but reduce rope length immediately instead of waiting for user input).

You are a very intelligent individual to have created these assets, I've used your search feature and seen numerous requests for a 3D swinging, and 3d grappling hook. I know you believe the demo scene is a great starting point for purchasers of your asset.

Believe it or not, intelligence doesn't play a huge role in writing (or using) these. Perseverance and patience do, ask any game developer .

However, I'm not nearly intelligent as you with these scripting and game object setups.

Scripting and GameObjects are the bread and butter of making games in Unity. Even if you do use Game Creator (or PlayMaker, or Bolt, or any other visual scripting system) these are just wrappers over the basics. They can ease you into game programming, but at the end of the day you'll need to know and work with the exact same concepts regardless of what you use.

If you create a integration with Game Creator 2 and sold it as an asset, you would get a lot of purchases.

The same could be said about integration with a lot other assets. However this poses a few important problems:

- maintenance: every time Game Creator or <insert third party asset here> changes something in its API or alters the way it works, we'd need to adapt our system to work with it. To be honest, the same can be said about Unity itself: trust me there's not been a single Unity release where we haven't had to hotfix stuff because it broke in newer versions or made something incompatible with previous versions. Keeping up with Unity is difficult enough.

- logistics: sometimes it's not possible for Obi to adapt to a certain third party asset, and it's the third party asset that needs to adapt to Obi. Keeping in touch with its creators requires they are willing to invest time and effort in getting both assets to play nice with each other, which is often not the case.

- stagnation: as a result of having to chase what's essentially moving goalposts, development on the actual physics engine and its features would likely stagnate. Hiring more developers to compensate would likely be an option, but:

- pricing: extra work -> hire people -> increase asset price to cover the cost. Increasing the price would make it so less people can afford to purchase the asset, even if few of them are interested in the Game Creator / Bolt / Playmaker integration.

We've tried similar stuff in the past and it didn't work out as well as one might expect. I've come to the conclusion that focusing on the engine itself and keeping it as simple as possible (no bloat) is the best approach. A lot of the functionality requires using HPCS since its target audience are intermediate and advanced developers looking for a high-performance, highly flexible system, so sticking to a pure C# API is the simplest and most flexible approach, and definitely the one that makes most sense.

Game Creator 2 doesn't add a rigid body to the player until play mode, so trying to add the Obi Rigid body doesn't happen unless I add the component in play mode.

I'm not sure why this is a problem, you can add a ObiRigidbody component (or any other Unity component) at runtime just fine. Could you explain further?

Im not sure if my player prefab has to be a child of the obi solver, as the cube is in the demo scene.

Not necessarily, only your rope has to. Solvers act in the same way Canvases for UI do: they become responsible of managing all ropes inside their hierarchy.

In the demo scene the player is a child of the solver for convenience, but it all depends on how you want to set up and organize your hierarchy. Take for instance the Crane sample scene: the cube that is attached to the crane's rope ("Load" GameObject) is not a child of the crane, or the solver.

A concept you need to understand well is vector spaces: specifically, world space and local space. These are important regardless of what system/assets you use to create the game, even if you're not using Obi.

kind regards,

[Skcmmj]

Thank you for the in depth response. Makes perfect sense to focus one objective, all the other assets always change and update and would indeed be a rat race. 

I'm a one man team, I mostly make games for iOS, I've currently got 20 games on the iOS store, all done using game creator and other assets. ( https://apps.apple.com/us/developer/ench...i-pad-apps ) Serving Ads through Google Admob. I've programmed maybe 3-5%? It's always the integration of assets that I run into, I've gotten pretty decent at looking at scripts, it's the in-depth issues I have a really hard time with. In this case, the issue might be with Game Creator 2 Character Controller. I hoping to get a few people's minds together and see if we can figure this out.

Mostly running into an issue getting the player to be attached to the rope and have him just shining. I feel like that's a starting point. 

I was able to add the Obi Collider at runtime. 

When you say "Attach" the player through collisions, what would be some routes you'd take? Considering GC2 is using a character controller?

I also understand the pricing to make it affordable to the masses, however one side job with no upkeep to get it working. Could gift you GC2 and you could take a better look. Name your price of course one time job. 

Really appreciate your in-depth responses.

[josemendez]

I'm a one man team, I mostly make games for iOS, I've currently got 20 games on the iOS store, all done using game creator and other assets. ( https://apps.apple.com/us/developer/ench...i-pad-apps ) Serving Ads through Google Admob. I've programmed maybe 3-5%? It's always the integration of assets that I run into, I've gotten pretty decent at looking at scripts, it's the in-depth issues I have a really hard time with. In this case, the issue might be with Game Creator 2 Character Controller. I hoping to get a few people's minds together and see if we can figure this out.

Programming is a fundamental skill when it comes to making games of any kind. When bringing multiple assets together into a project, it's certain they won't work well with one another out of the box. Getting them to work in unison often requires writing "glue" code, the reason being simple: assets are made by separate studios and often don't even know of each other's existence, let alone design decisions, data structures, APIs, etc.

The same can be said for artwork: mixing multiple art assets together, there's a very high chance their styles won't match each other and the game may end up looking like a collage.

At the end of the day an integral part of making games is making sure all individual bits fit together. Even though it may seem complex/daunting, it's a lot less work than writing all systems and resources from scratch yourself.

I was able to add the Obi Collider at runtime. When you say "Attach" the player through collisions, what would be some routes you'd take? Considering GC2 is using a character controller?

There's a few ways to do this, but all require writing a fair amount of C#. First step is determining where along the rope the character is colliding, this is done trough collision callbacks: http://obi.virtualmethodstudio.com/manua...sions.html

Once you know the particle/element along the rope that the character should be attached to, you have a few options:
- You can create a dynamic attachment at runtime: http://obi.virtualmethodstudio.com/manua...ments.html
- You can create a pin constraint: http://obi.virtualmethodstudio.com/manua...aints.html
- You can just set the position of the character to match a given element in the rope: http://obi.virtualmethodstudio.com/manua...ropes.html

I also understand the pricing to make it affordable to the masses, however one side job with no upkeep to get it working. Could gift you GC2 and you could take a better look. Name your price of course one time job.

We are already involved in two third party projects (in addition to maintaining Obi and supporting users) so sadly there's not much time left for us to take on more workload. I can point you to Unity's job forum, there you might find developers looking for a gig that may be able to help you out: https://forum.unity.com/forums/commercia...eeking.48/

kind regards,

[Skcmmj]

Thank you! Appreciate all the information. Greatly helps!