[UPDATED] ICECreatureControl v1.4.0 - creature AI for enemies, animals, monsters, zombies ...

Figured out the teleporting sheep issue, I had accidentally toggled the "Adapt To Target Velocity" for the Wolf's RUN_ATTACK behavior, which combined with the 7 forward speed I had set, somehow multiplied the speed of the wolf, causing it to move so fast it looked like it was teleporting. lol

 

Spent the last couple days on and off with learning the new version of ICE and it is AMAZING. Well done Pit, there are so many options for creating so many different scenarios. At first I was having troubles with figuring out damage, but after stumbling through setting some of the wrong things I was able to figure out multiple ways to pass damage to creatures. I love the new weapon scripts - simply putting the melee script on a weapon for AI and sorting out the basic follow and attack until dead stuff seemed pretty straight forward! My test case enemies are now punching each other all over the place.

One question I have for Pit or anyone else using the asset who may know - how do we make the dead state work? I have it enabled on both creatures I'm working with. Animation is set. However, every time the mob dies it just vanishes instantly and re-spawns instead of playing the dead animation and then vanishing and re-spawning.

Thanks again for the massive update, really enjoy seeing things come to life with this asset and imagining the possibilities as we get deeper down the rabbit hole and figure out all the core strengths of ICE Creature Control. The asset is also very well organized and professionally written - its the type of asset that programmers at a more novice or beginner level can really learn some good stuff from as well. It's really quite amazing Pit is only asking $25 for such a robust, feature rich package.

 

Hi Jacky, the Apex integration is currently not implemented but I had announced that I'll do this job as soon as the update is online, therefore you can expect that one of the next minor updates will support APEX. And please don't worry, you have not to wait a long time ...

Have a great day!

Pit

 

This is an educated guess, yet in @TonanBora 's first live stream at around 39:15 (link), he enables Essentials > Default Behaviors > Dead and then increases Status > Basics > Removing Delay to prevent the Rhino from vanishing instantly.

 

Like @Akshara said:

Someone was taking notes.

 

A short information about 'Removing Delay'. The 'Removing Delay' defines the time until a killed creature will be removed from the scene. In the first versions of ICE, the default value was set to 20 seconds, but with the implementation of the Corpse feature, it was forgotten incessantly to set the value back to zero if a corpse object should be used instead of a ‘die’ animation. Thus both, the animation as well as the spawned corpse object was displayed at the same time. Now the default value is zero, which means that a killed creature will be immediately removed from the scene, but the benefit is, that you can use now both features successive. First you can play a 'die' animation and subsequent instantiate the corpse object. In this case the 'Removing Delay' defines the time how long the animation shall run before the killed creature will be replaced by the corpse object.

 

Hi TonanBora, thanks a lot ... that's really brillant!

btw. Your orbit settings are absolutly correct. I have tested the orbit movement. The misconduct which we see, based on an internal issue with the update speed of the orbit position. The dynamic position moves faster around the target than the creature can run, so the creature can't follow and is using a faulty position. I've fixed it directly.

Have a great day!

Pit

 

Hi Pit, I have a question about creating an idle state for a turn based type game.

I want the ability to kind of "pause" the game in a way that all creatures stop in their tracks at any given time and just play an idle animation and then continue whatever they were doing when I "unpause" the game.

I implemented the following solution with the previous version which required me to hack the ICE source code. Now that I upgraded to 1.3, and before I do that again, I was wondering if there is a better solution.

Basically I created an interactor with an idle behavior for all my creatures with the creature itself as the target and a priority of 0 (while all other priorities are higher). For that to work I had to modify the source code to allow a creature's own game object to be its target.

In my game code I would just set the priority for all these custom interactors to be 100 when I want to pause, which would make them stop and idle wherever they are, and 0 when I unpause which would continue their previous action.

Thanks for any suggestions.

 

Hi Matthias, please try this ...

Code (CSharp):

1.  
2. ICECreatureRegister _register = GetComponent<ICECreatureRegister>();
3.  
4. if( _register != null )                    
5.     _register.BreakAll = true;
6.  

... this will have the same effect like the BREAK button of the CreatureRegister. All creatures will directly stop their activities and run their IDLE behaviours. You can use BREAK also for certain register groups only.

Hope this will be helpful to you but please feel free to contact me whenver you have a question.

Have a great day!

Pit

 

Ahh perfect! This Removing Delay was the key missing step. I remember even seeing it working in the video when he enabled the dead behavior, but missed the Remove Delay. Thanks guys!

 

If anyone is interested, my team leader is about to stream a test build featuring ICE (pre 1.3.6), UMA (Unity Multi-user Avatar), A* pathfinding, and FinalIK (By RootMotion).
Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/watregames
She says it will be short.

 

Stream is now over, but we shall put the video up on our YouTube Channel.
Video Link:

 

WOW, that's an perfect example why I love my job!

 

Yay!!!

I said it would be short, but you know, it wasn't short because I kept chatting with the one guy in the chat channel. lol

This is with the old ICE. Wait until we start using the new one!

 

I'm trying to use a custom melee weapon in game but I cant get it work. The creature melee weapon script has identical values from the hatchet, has enough big collider, but the only working melee weapon ingame is the demo hatchet. Do I miss something, anyone can help?

 

@icetec - Can you please elaborate on the PUN compatibility / "multiplayer ready" features? How does this work? Are states synced via RPC's or are you just sending the position, rotation, and animation state to clients? Just wondering about how much data is being sent over the network and how much extra work needs to be done to get these working in multiplayer properly.

 

I shall get right on that.

 

GIM does not have a deer. Besides, far too expensive for a game that focuses on characters and story rather than animals. But they do look nice.

It is difficult to find animals that use mecanim, sadly.

 

The new version of ICE comes with the new ICEIntergration package, which can handle several 3rd party assets nearly out-of-the-box e.g UFPS, TPC, RFPSP, UnitZ etc. and PUN as well. The 'Multiplayer Ready' features based basically on two scripts : ICEWorldNetworkView and ICEWorldNetworkSpawner. The first one handles all sycn related issues and can be added to all ICE entities, while the second one handles the network spawning for the CreatureRegister ... there are further network components e.g. chat, connection handler etc. which you can use optional, but basically you'll need the ICEWorldNetworkView and the spawner ... ICEWorldNetworkView can handle the sychronization in several ways, by using ...

• PUN's transform and/or rigigbody view
  
• internal sycn functions
• several RPCs

So you can select which solution or combination is the best for you ... but please do not be so strict with me if something is not yet working perfectly. It is the first version of ICEIntegration and the latest development which was completed before the release, therefore, not all features of the integration package are already fully tested and optimized.

To using the PUN integration just import ICE and Photon, open the ICEIntegration menu and press 'Identify Supported Assets'. Now you can prepare your scene objects and the register. Add the ICEWorldNetworkView to all your desired entities and adapt the settings, add ICEWorldNetworkSpawner to the creature register and handle the connection (e.g by using the ICEWorldNetworkManager) ... save your scene and press play!

I hope this will be helpful to you but please feel free to contact me whenever you have further questions or runs into a problem with ICE.

Btw. dependent to the used assets, it could be that you will get an error after running 'Identify Supported Assets', but don't worry, you can fix it easily by removing ICE_CC from the Scripting Define Symbols in your Player Settings.

Have a great day!

Pit

 

Are you planning Ootii Motion Controller as well?

 

That's correct, all item objects can be used as melee weapons as well as tools and other moving objects can be used in the real world as an impact weapon. To use such items, tools or weapons, attach the desired weapon object to a certain bodypart of your creature (e.g. its hand etc.), define the Impact settings (damage, forces etc.), add a suitable collider and RigidBody (or ensure that at least one rigidbody will be involved in a potential collision). If this is done correctly, your creature will be able to use such an object to damage other objects, creature or your player.

I hope this will be helpful to you.

Have a great day!

Pit

 

Well imaginable but I currently have no experience with this controller and therefore can not make a reliable statement.

 

Bought this a month or two back , but was waiting on the update before trying to add it in and learn to use it . New to Unity but not new to programming...Since the Intellivision Master Computer to Apple IIE , Tandy , C64 and worked on a few Amiga PC commercial games...yeah been around , but haven't made anything since then
After seeing some excellent beautiful indie games , and some not so great games make some money...I figured might as well knock the dust off and start making games again! Since I have so many ideas and nobody has made quite what I want to play...

So far , the people in my map are wandering around , walking around each other and not thru , avoiding buildings and not being ghosts passing right thru them...so , as of now it is working out great

Keep having issues with adding my player to the ice register , it will either fall thru the world , or bounce along the surface of my map teleporting...no idea why , but I reload my project and do not add it in...made a creature still have to visually detect my player , begin chasing them and then start attacking...working perfectly so far...I haven't tried to make actual damage pass to the player/creatures yet...because I had my own health system set up using playmaker , with a GUI display before I added in ICE . Just wondering if not using my player in the creature registry , if that will cause any unforeseen issues in the future?

My questions though , which there are a few . There are so many options(slightly overwhelming , but not hard to get the basics working) and I am sure that ICE can do just about anything I would ever need it for...do not need exact written solutions...but would love some guidance

1., instead of just constantly roaming around , which works fine...but would love to add more "life" to my creatures... how would I go about actually making them stop every once in awhile and use their Idle or Leisure animations? I have watched the TonanBora posted video tutorials(which do help someone just starting) to get started and messed around with settings , but nothing comes to mind yet...

2., is it possible to have said creature , randomly , but not always chase down and hunt the player(or other creature)? Such as sometimes it sees you , but it would rather continue on its merry way , instead of attacking...or gets bored after a few attacks and leaves...

3., possibly the hardest one...I have a thrown object , sort of like a grenade or more like a "fear spell" I set up an interaction with the object itself and the "explosion" trigger collider to trigger Escape behavior and have my creatures run from the actual object before it goes off and avoid its after effects...or if caught inside it , try and Escape from it . I set the interaction to Escape , Priority 100 , Selection Range 30 and under the Escape Behavior I have it set to move type Escape and Escape Distance 45 . Sounded great , but absolutely nothing happens . Don't know if it is something I have to change in the objects or in the creature settings to get this to work . Tried looking at the bear/fire example for ideas , but for me they are all just stuck to the bear and turning the fire on and off did nothing to effect the scene .

Ok , enough questions...Excellent product so far and , even just getting the basics working and visual detection(which is an awesome thing to have) has saved me lots of time and effort . Well worth the paltry sum charged

 

Thats was very strange I bought Robert the Deer GIM from asset store a while back. Still have it.
It's still up on their own website: http://gim-gamesinmotion.com/animals/

 

Thanks for the reply, Pit. I tried this and what happens is the creature stops its motion but continues to play whatever travel animation it was on (walking in place), it does not switch to my idle behavior. Perhaps I have to mark the idle behavior in some particular way?

EDIT: Nevermind, it works. My default behaviors were no longer assigned after the update.

 

Strange. Anyway, we will use a different deer for the video. lol Unless you want to buy it for us.

Tonanbora is a member of my team, by the way. I have to take a little credit for his videos!

 

Tomorrow (1/23) at 8-9 PM EST, I will have a Twitch stream on setting up an ICE AI using mecanim, and controlling its animations with parameters.

I will setup an animal, and show you how to get it to interact with ICE's time of day system to detect what time it is, and perform a specific behavior based on the time of day.

 

TonanBora, I finally got to see your first stream. I really enjoyed it. I'm hoping I have time to watch the second tonight. I really appreciate you taking the time to create these. They are very informative.

I am also anxious for your flying (birds, butterflies, dragons?) examples, and, if possible, fish.

 

Sent an email to GIM asking where to get hold of

Got a Nice reply from gim@gim-gamesinmotion@com They had had some internal problems but assured med Robert and also Theodor the bear will be back in asset store at the latest some time in February. I am trying to get GIM interested in ICE creature as I am wholly convinced the combination would be perfect even for top notch vr when the hardware probably will be able to handle it in a couple of years.. (Robert looks just beautifill when he strolls into the sunset in HTC VIve already...)

 

That is nice. Support is always good to hear. However, doesn't change my mind. lol Again, if I was making a game where wolves or deer or bears were the main character, I would invest that much. But when you have to spread out money and poly's, it isn't worth it for our game. Even if I wanted to spend the money, he doesn't have enough animals to fill a game and having mismatched art content just bugs me. lol But..they are beautiful and I am sure well worth the money.

Tonanbora is planning to do something with another mecanim deer so that should work to show you the potential. He was working on it last night.

 

Teila, totally agree with your strategy. My own project is more to create a VR forest animal habitat experience. Just doing it as a hobby with no comercial goals or timelimits to meet. Highly apppreciating what you and TonanBora are doing.
Btw GIM is planning to expand on thir forest animal series. Already requested a doe to accompany Robert

 

I have already fiddled with Fish, and might, if I have time during the stream tonight, show off simple fish AI, and some rudimentary fish schooling (still needs to tweaking I think).

 

Please let me know some more details about your player e.g. Hierarchy Structure (incl. cam and child objects etc).

For each behaviour mode, you can define several rules, which will be selected randomly or sequentially at the runtime of the mode. By doing so your creature can use multiple animation, movements, and other behavioural features for each behaviour mode and will not loop all the time the same behaviour pattern e.g. Someone is waiting for his date: Behavior WAIT_FOR_DATE - look around, look at the clock, go some steps, look around, scratch the head, look at the watch, grab the bag, go some steps, pick up something from the ground, look around at the clock etc.

Yes, you can handle it by using the Advanced Target Selection Criteria and one or more conditions, so you can teach your creature for example to attack your player only if it is hungry or if you press a certain key or at a certain date/time and/or another condition is true or false. ICE provides you a large list of target and status values which can be used to define such conditions. And in addition to that, you can define also several alternate scenarios, which will be used if the primary selection criteria will not be valid. To define such conditions press the ADV button of the Target Selection Criteria and to use alternative scenarios, simply add and adapt further Interactor Rules. Each Interactor Rule can have an individual behaviour.

At first ensure that the Grenade Target can/will be selected by your creature (Active Targets will be green displayed in the inspector), for this a reference of your thrown object should be listed in the register, so the creature can detect and select it during the runtime (if the object is not available for your creature during the runtime the target section will be displayed in red). If you add e.g. the ICECreatureExplosion or another entity script to your object, it will handle its registration automatically.

I hope my answers will be helpful to you and if you want, you can contact me also via skype, so we can check and fix the issue with your player directly.

Have a great day!

Pit

 

Missed the last twitch stream?
You can watch it on YouTube here:

I think I will also start varying the times that I stream.
Every other stream, I think I will do around 3:00 PM EST in the after noon, so that those in other time zones, such as Pit, can have the option of participating in the stream.

 

Hello TonanBora, thank you for your streams - the new one is once again awesome and extremely helpful! 3:00 PM would be perfect, but do not neglect your work, otherwise I would have an extremely bad conscience ...

Have a great day and my best regards to your team!

Cheers, Pit

 

I want the NPC to move and work according to the schedule and condition. When the player approaches the NPC, they can talk. The conversation depends on the situation. Of course, the reaction to the player also changes. Does ICECreatureControl support this?

and is this mobile friendly?

 

Hi Cartoon-Mania, move and work according to a schedule and condition can be realize by using the Target Selection Criteria, which provides you a large number of different indicators to steering the behaviour. Also you can use these criteria to talking with your creature. Simply define the desired behaviours, one for each part of the dialog (question or answer), assign the desired audio clips (you can add several clips for each behaviour, so the creature can select several variations of its questions or answers by chance).

To start a conversation, simply call the first behavior e.g. when your player comes close to your creature. For this you can create a new interactor and set the desired conditions, as well as the desired behavior (e.g. DIALOG_A - which could be a greeting). To respond to your creature, define further Interactor Rules for each answer (e.g. DIALOG_AA, DIALOG_AB, DIALOG_AC) which will be triggered only when the current behavior is DIALOG_A and the player presses a particular key. Depending on the selected key, the corresponding behavior will be started and the dialog continued or canceled. You can expand this example as you like, simply by adding further Interactor rules and behaviors. And if you prefer a text output of the dialog (alternatively or in addition to the audio), you can handle this with a small script, which could use the active behaviour of your creature to select the corresponding text.

Here a small example script, which you could use ...

Code (CSharp):

1.  
2. using UnityEngine;
3. using UnityEngine.UI;
4. using System.Collections;
5. using System.Collections.Generic;
6.  
7. using ICE.Creatures;
8. using ICE.Creatures.Objects;
9.  
10. public class ICECreatureDialog : MonoBehaviour {
11.  
12.     private ICE.Creatures.ICECreatureControl m_Creature = null;
13.     private ICE.Creatures.ICECreatureControl m_AttachedCreature{
14.         get{ return m_Creature = ( m_Creature == null ? this.gameObject.GetComponent<ICE.Creatures.ICECreatureControl>() : m_Creature ); }
15.     }
16.  
17.     public Text m_DialogText = null;
18.     public List<string> m_DialogBehaviourKeys = new List<string>();
19.     public List<string> m_DialogBehaviourPhrases = new List<string>();
20.  
21.     private Dictionary<string, string> m_Dialog = new Dictionary<string, string>();
22.  
23.     void Start ()
24.     {
25.         for( int i = 0 ; i < m_DialogBehaviourKeys.Count ; i++ )
26.         {
27.             if( i < m_DialogBehaviourPhrases.Count )
28.                 m_Dialog.Add( m_DialogBehaviourKeys[i], m_DialogBehaviourPhrases[i] );
29.         }
30.     }
31.  
32.     private void OnEnable()
33.     {
34.         if( m_AttachedCreature != null )
35.             m_AttachedCreature.OnBehaviourModeChanged += OnBehaviourModeChanged;
36.     }
37.  
38.     private void OnDisable()
39.     {
40.         if( m_AttachedCreature != null )
41.             m_AttachedCreature.OnBehaviourModeChanged -= OnBehaviourModeChanged;
42.     }
43.  
44.     void OnBehaviourModeChanged( GameObject _sender, BehaviourModeObject _new_mode, BehaviourModeObject _last_mode )
45.     {
46.         if( _new_mode == null )
47.             return;
48.  
49.         string _text = "";
50.         if( m_Dialog.TryGetValue( _new_mode.Key , out _text ) )
51.             m_DialogText.text = _text;  
52.     }
53. }

http://icecreaturecontrol.com/files/scripts/ICECreatureDialog.unitypackage

btw. ICE works well on mobile devices, as long as the settings and options are adapted to the target device and not exaggerated.

I hope this will be helpful to you but please feel free to contact me if you have further questions.

Have a great day!

Pit

 

I have used ICE previously with UFPS, and it worked really well. Would it be possible for you to supply a list of steps to configure ICE 1.3.6 with RFPS and/or UFPS?

 

I would appreciate this as well

 

me too!!
I'm now deciding which solution would fit better Behavior Designer or ICE.
My first intention was to use ICE, but because i'm also using RFPS and Dialog System i have seen that Behavior Designer has a very good integration with all these assets, while i wrote a post on your Asset Store page which says:

And i know that he also was using RFPS.

What i'm also curious about is how to setup a flying creature?
Is there a tut or video somewhere?

 

I join the RFPS support wish gang

 

An rfps integrated demo scene would also be awesome

 

Hi guys, the integration steps for UFPS, RFPSP, UnitZ and TPC are nearly the same ....

1. Open your Player Settings and add ICE_UFPS or ICE_RFPSP or ICE_UNITZ or ICE_OPSIVE_TPC to the Scripting Define Symbols.

2. If you are using RFPSP or UnitZ open the ICE Intergration menu and press 'Adapt RFPSP Scripts' or rather 'Adapt UnitZ Scripts'. If you are using UFPS or TPC you can ignore this step.

3. Finally, add the ICEWorldDamageAdapter to your creatures (not required for RFPSP).

Now the integration is done and you can start to prepare your creature as desired e.g. equip it with a ICECreatureRangedWeapon or ICECreatureMeleeWeapon and enjoy the fight ...

Here you can find further information about the integration ...
http://www.icecreaturecontrol.com/files/ICEIntegration.pdf
... and here about the damage handling ...
http://www.icecreaturecontrol.com/files/ICEDamageHandling.pdf

Additional I would like to recommend TonanBora's brilliant videos about working with ICE. (Btw. At the end of this video the settings for flying and diving creatures are also shown).

Have a great day!

Pit

 

ICEWorldDamageAdapter is grayed out in the menu ?

 

Have you tried adding it manually to the creature via Add component?

 

Ah, this works. Thank you.

 

Have you clicked 'Adapt RFPSP Scripts', if so, you do not need an additional adapter and can start directly.

 

Hi All

Firstly a big Hi, i have owned this asset for a while but only recently started using it

Second a massive thanx to Pitt for the impressive new version, some really wow extra features.

Third a massive thanx to TonanBora for the extreamly helpful streams via youtube, really opened my eyes.

Lastly two questions:

- i have a barbarian (humanoid setup via the wizard, direct animations) which runs to the home fine, then walks again fine, each time it reaches the random target, the state correctly changes from walk to idle, but weirdly in the idle state he still moves forward into the center of the target ring, which looks like he is sliding on ice after movement, i have tried the ban option, but he still does this, odd.

- i have a devil that i have setup to attack the barbarian, he does so but with two issues, firstly the barbarian's hit animation doesnt seem to fire and secondly he stays in state attack, but only attacks when the barbarian is moving, when the barbarian goes to idle, he just stands next to him and doesnt attack until he starts walking again (i have activated/timer but not reached set so that he doesnt endlessly walk around the home location)

any thoughts appreciated
Rob

 

That's great, Thank you!
Now UFPS can kill creatures, and I creatures can kill creatures. However, the next question is how to run their impact animations? Would it be possible to provide this information? (receive damage and run the appropriate hit animation)