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

I suggest Tonanbora's videos first. LOL

 

Hi Tethys, here is a small example of how to use matching footstep sounds to the respective ground floor. This feature works with terrains as well as with any other kind of textured surfaces, just add a new surface rule and the desired textures as well as suitable sounds and adapt the speed-curve according to the potential forward speeds of your creature.

The most tricky part here is to adapt the speed curve for setting the speed-dependent intervals. The default curve (D) represents the values for a bipedal creature with a maximum speed of 6 (run). The peak is at 3 (walk), because ground contacts during the walking with 2 legs are typically occurres in longer intervals than during consistent running.

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To adjust now this curve for a sprint, you can add another point with a higher speed, where the interval should be lower than during running, because the ground contacts during a sprint are more frequent than during a normal run.

I hope this will be helpful to you but please feel free to contact me if something doesn't work as expected ...

Have a great day!

Pit

 

Hi Demonoid74, ICE comes with some PlayMaker actions you can use to solve your issue. Please check ICEIntergrations/PlayMaker/Actions/ICECreatureStatus and ICECreatureSetStatus, this action scripts contains all required variables to handle the health and other status values of your creatures with PlayMaker.

I hope this will be helpful for you but please feel free to contact me whenever you have a question or if you run into a problem with ICE and in urgent cases you can contact me also via skype.

Have a great day!

Pit

 

Hi Andy, I have found and answered your private message but please check also the "TutorialGatherers" which comes with ICE. This tutorial should handle all relevant settings to pick up and drop items.

Btw. In cases I don't answer a request in time, it could be that I'm extremly busy but also that I have overlooked a request by mistake, so just remember me by email or contact me in Skype, which is really the best way, because since the most issues are related to small mistakes in the settings, I can take a look to the settings and correct it in realtime.

Have a great day!

Pit

 

Hi @icetec - Thanks for the detailed explanation. My setup is identical to what you have here but I get no sounds ( I used the bell curve). I set it up on my deer and wolf. Its on procedural terrain. Spent about an hour messing with it before I finally decided to ask. Seems like I have it set up correctly and the sound is working in the scene - can you(or anyone else) think of anything that would prevent this from working on a terrain if the setup looks right? Maybe I need to change something else not ICE related. I did try with 3 different shaders as well to make sure that wasn't the issue. I also tried using the Effect section as well to spawn a particle system and that is also not firing off, which makes me think something about the check is going wrong, possibly on my end. Thanks in advance!

 

Hello guys & girls!

Could anyone be so kind and tell me wich & where an in what script I can find the time handler? I mean ICE comes with it´s own Day/Night cycle so it has obviously some clock, but I have Tenkokku dynamic sky and would like to make a spawn criteria that spawn a monster on a certain time.. ?

 

I've got my NPC enemies more or less behaving as I want them to. Interactions hunt and attack the player just fine.

The problem I have is with the default behaviour - i.e. while the creature is roaming, before the attack interaction is engaged.

Although I have Motion Control set to NashMeshAgent the random position points that are being selected as new targets are often off mesh:

This means that I have to use Deadlock Prevention to keep the creature moving - this seems like an unnecessary overhead and doesn't look right anyway; my level is a network of rooms connected by corridors and the creatures invariably end up walking up to a wall and staring at it momentarily before the Deadlock Prevention kicks in and he moves on again.

Is there any way of forcing these random targets to be on mesh only?

Coding it myself I would just do:
// go to random spot on the navmesh
NavMesh.SamplePosition(transform.position + randomPos, out navHit, randomWanderDistance, NavMesh.AllAreas);

Is there a setting to turn this on that I'm not finding?

 

Im wondering this too.. my monster avades other monsters and trees.. but walk right thrue houses :S

 

Re-posting my question from the very top of page 38:

Hi Pit,

I'm new to ICE and trying to use it to create a "Flying" creature.

I'm looking in "Body Orientation"'s help notes and it mentions flying... but nothing I've done has achieved any kind of vertical speed. I've got the creature set as GLIDER and have settings for roll and pitch in the "Essentials" tab as well as "Behaviors" but I seem to be missing something.

How does one go about setting a creature to fly around the scene instead of walk? Is this in the documentation somewhere that I'm just missing? Thanks in advance for any assistance.

 

[1] Could someone explain how to call methods on a creature game object? I'm guessing it has to do with Group COMMANDS or possibly AnimationEvents but I can't see very much about it in the Docs and everything I tried failed to work.

My NPC has an Interactor with 3 acts:
RUN
ATTACK_RUN
ATTACK_STATIC

I want to call the method StartFiring() when ATTACK_RUN and ATTACK_STATIC are activated (ideally only just once on activation, not repeatedly while the Act is active)

and then call StopFiring() when RUN is active or back in during normal roaming behaviour (again ideally only called once not repeatedly, for efficiency)

[2] Then, going the other way, how do I call methods on the IceCreatureControl component? (I've found the API documentation but can't see any coding examples)

How would I, for example, programmatically change the Interactor TargetObject?

[3] Finally, when my NPC dies [I'm not using the ICE damage/health functionality I want to control this myself] I want to stop the NPC and play a death animation.
- do I just disable the IceCreatureComponent ( GetComponent<IceCreatureControl>().enable = false; )
and add a transition in my Mecanim Animator that transitions from any state to the death anim? i.e. SetBool("dead", true);

Or is there an IceCreature way of doing this? Would I use some code in my script to deal the creature a massive amount of damage to force it into a dead state? What would this code look like?

---
ps. this single forum thread is an absolute pain to search through. Please, please please set-up your own forum to properly manage queries. An asset of this complexity really requires it, I'd even say deserves it!
- you've said that you're happy to offer support on Skype or direct email, but if you had a proper forum you might find that you were asked far fewer questions - answering once would provide the answer for everyone. I'm sure you're asked the same questions over and over again...

 

Most of these are covered in the 100 pages long manual.

[1] To call mehtods on the creature object itself use EVENTS in the behavior section.
To call methods on the target use TARGET EVENTS in the interaction section.

[2] I havent really used the ICE api from code so im not really sure about this. Im sure with some creativity you can achieve this with just ICE. You can just set up different interactors (can be a specific gameobject, tag, name, or a the type of object) and give them all different priorities and activate them based on various conditions.
I think custom conditions are coming in the next update?

[3] Just enable the DEAD default behavior and do whatever animation you want there. If you want to make your animal dead just reduce its health to 0 from whatever script you are using for health/damage.

ps.
There is a search box next to the thread name on this forum, where you can search the topic for specific keywords. I believe that this wasnt there some time ago, thats when it really was a pain searching through 10+ pages.
Setting up and running his own forum would just take more of his time. I personally prefer unity forums, to registering on external forums. If most asset developers had their own forums it would be annoying having to register on all of them for an inquiry.

 

Questions 1 and 3 tell me you have to focus less on how YOU want to do it, and more on HOW to PROPERLY use the asset, which will in turn give you the results your looking for. 1-3 can be solved by following proper ICE setup and procedure. rasto61 beat me to #3 but that is correct.

1 - Use the Run part of the act to get in range of the enemy. Use the 2nd act to fire at the enemy using the Event section for that part and just adjust the range and other options to make sure the enemy is in the line of fire. You can set up an ICE weapon, set up the reference in the manager, and then call to the weapon functionality/method in the actual act. It's a little complex but once you wrap your head around it, it works and makes sense (eventually, once you have all the details). For the third act, set the distance and range once again so that perhaps they stop running but continue to fire because they have reached the proper range. Also you will need to remember to add the advanced options like is TargetActive or CreatureDead.... you could set it so that it can do all of that but not if his hunger level is below 50 lol. Pretty nice options that will let you go pretty deep there.

3 - You need to use the ICE health components if you want to leverage what ICE creatures can do. However, you can still use your own as well, you just need to facilitate the two talking to each other. You could, for example, have a damage handler that listens for damage and then sends the event both toe ICE and your own handler. We are merging RPG kit with ICE and had to do this since RPG kit had its own health and damage system.

Hope that helps. I'm only a novice programmer and while I can do #2 myself I don't want to explain it incorrectly so I'll let someone else catch that one.

 

Thanks @rasto61 There's a lot there to get me started. I'll look into EVENTS.

I did look at the manual but as you say, it is 100 pages long... and I couldn't find what I was looking for. (also for a while I was working in the v1.1 linked to on the asset store, without realising my mistake)

I'm still stuck on how I reduce my creature's health to zero, from an external script. Anyone got any code to share?

Personally I disagree about the unity forums (if you can call a single thread a forum). I had found the 'search this thread' functionality but the links it returns aren't always easy to follow - partly because conversations are intermingled and sometimes span more than one page, and because there's no logic to the posts and it can be difficult ot know which version of the asset a helpful reply or code snippet is going to work with.

All of the best support I've had from assets has come from dedicated forums., and imho (and with all due respect and without wanting to be rude!) I think maybe @icetec might do well to slow down the development a little (he's obviously a wonderfully talented guy with a lot of ideas on where to take his AI) but I've found myself chasing my tale a lot, keeping up with each development... I had the last version working really well then this new major update finally was released and changed everything, and I'm dreading another similar upheaval...

Heck, I'll even offer to host the forum myself, if it helps!

 

Thanks @Tethys Helpful too.

It may be as I feared, that ICE works great if you let it handle everything but isn't so good at integrating with other assets or custom scripts.

I'll persevere but may end up using BehaviorDesigner and the Movement Pack which seems to be easier to keep focused on doing just one thing, or even my own, slightly ropy custom AI pathfinding scripts.

 

ps. would still really appreciate an answer on why the Default Behaviour targets are off mesh... ;/

 

Just call the ApplyDamage method on the specific ice entity from your damage handling script.

Are you creating the targets? Or are you just having the creature move the destination (in the target move specification section)?
If your use case is some npcs moving around in a closed environment, wandering around and just having a simple interaction with the player, like shooting, then behavior designer might be better for you. I had similar needs and there were some issues with rotation towards the target in ICE.

 

We have done so but it does require a decent programmer. Integrating any assets or custom scripts with other assets is challenging, but you just have to keep plugging away.

 

Hello all:

I purchase Icecreaturecontrol 1.3.6 yesterday and have spent time going through manuals and videos (thanks to Tonan Bora for very useful videos. I tried the rhino example that Tonan provided using a set of legacy animations for the rhino (works very easily and nicely). So, I thought I would branch out and try animating a horse (free download from asset store) using generic animations with mechanim. I again followed Tonan's video and was able to construct all the parts of the animation that he discussed in the node editor and can see the animations working fine. I set the behaviors in the icecreature control to reference the variables specified in the node editor (like forward motion). I did not check apply root motion as Tonan suggests. However, after some hours my horse stands still and only shows the starting animation. It appears that the change in the values are not sent to the mechanim set of nodes from the icecreaturecontrol script. Bottom line: I followed the video by Tonan exactly to use mechanim, but my creature does not receive the root motion. If I can't figure this out I'll return to legacy animation, which work fine.

Thanks for your suggestions on how I might fix my problem.

JRB

 

Does the horse have mecanim animations? Many animals on the asset store do not and if it is free, I would guess it is legacy. Did you try switching it to generic?

 

Kind of a silly question, but I'm curious: is ICE suitable for making 2D games? Playing around with making a hunting game, and kinda feel like I want to go the 2D route for it, but I still want to use ICE to drive the animal AI.

 

Hey I'm using ICE with PUN for a multiplayer game which players can see and attack the same creatures. I searched for and found as much documentation for the Networking support with PUN as I could but I still can't seem to get it working.

It seems when I place the Network Spawner component onto my Creature Register and press play and join into a networked room, no creatures ever get spawned. Removing the Network Spawner and playing, creatures spawn normally.

I've added Ice Network View to my creatures and set up the parameters for them and tried many permutations of settings to try to get them to spawn with Ice Network Spawner but I've come to no luck which is what had led me to finally post in this VERY helpful thread. If anyone could help me out a little bit I would appreciate it. I've been stuck at this point for a good few days and its starting to make me wonder if I've glossed over something obvious someone else needs to point out to me. Thanks for reading and thanks for the help all of you contributors have provided so far. Especially grateful to Pit for this wonderful asset.

 

Wish I had the answer, but I am eager for a reply as well. I haven't used ICE in my multiplayer game yet but am looking to integrate it over the next month to replace what we have. This is our challenge as well as we are using Photon. Good luck, please share once you get it working!

 

Same here. We are using UNet and Ice at the moment is our biggest challenge. We did manage to get other assets integrated so will try in case Pit is unable to get to it.

 

If I stumble upon it I will post as I love knowledge-sharing, however I'm going to work on other parts of the game until Pit is able to give a response on the subject. Keeping a close eye on this thread as the multiplayer creatures are the soul of my project and ICE is the soul of my creatures.

 

Hello Tethys, could it be that your creature or part of your creature uses the same layer as the specified ground? In such a case it could be that the raycast beam will be blocked by such an object and so never can detect the correct ground or rather the correct texture.

If your ground is not a terrain, it could also be that the given ground-object does not have a MeshRenderer. This is rather unlikely but please check it also!

A third reason could be that the Ground Scan Interval is set too high. Especially if there are many different ground textures a low value is important, otherwise your creature can't detect the correct surface not in time. Tip: the default value is 1 secs and you can increase this value if your ground textures will not change so often. However, to reduce the cost of this feature you should not set a value smaller than 1 secs if not really required.

Have a great day!

Pit

 

Greetings,

**Update - Found the solution - Problem first**

I have had a hell of a time getting the Escort mission to work. It seemed like I was kind of there, with random freakouts, but what I had was pretty much complete fail. My creatures would spawn next to their escorts but walk in the wrong direction and then run off.

Solution - The day before I noticed creatures were turning too fast. In behaviour on walk and run I set the turn angle to default which switched it to 0. I changed this back to 2 just now and boom, my creatures started following again - they couldn't follow because they couldn't turn hahahaha! Now everything is good again.

Question 2 - I want my wolves to only attack my deer and fawn when their own hunger is past a certain level. So, in my interactor for wolves I have my range and distance set, its all good. I have added the advanced parameter for Own.Hunger and then I say > 60. I then set my walk and run behavior to slowly add hunger as they are used. This all works fine, I can see the hunger level go up. However, in the interactor, the Own.Hunger is completely ignored and the wolf just goes right into the hunt and then attack behaviors I have set up for it. I have even verified that indeed, the wolf hunger was NOT > 60, even though it attacks the deer when in range. I think I may have missed something here as well - any suggestions are most welcome! I never did get sound to work, went ahead and double checked everything according to pits setting but footsteps nor effect (so i'm guessing nothing on the surfaces interface) work for me. Must be something with my project or how we generate the ground. Could be something with VR, however, if I just set the chainsaw sound on loop and play on awake, on a blank GO, I hear that fine.

 

Hi mattis89, Tenkoku Dynamic Sky will be supported in v1.4. The implementation is already done and if you want I can provide you an update of the ICEIntegration package.

 

Hi r-dotfunky, you need to enable vertical speed within the movement settings of the FLY or DIVE behaviour. Now, you can adapt the desired vertical speed and the desired altitude. The Body Orientation will be automatically set to GLIDER and the creature will try to reach the specified level.

You can also define what the adjusted height is. If GND is enabled, the altitude is determined above the current ground level, otherwise the absolute altitude (Y) is used. When TRG is activated, the height is oriented at the y-position of the active target.



Once a behavior with a vertical speed is activated , the creature will attempt to reach the specified Operating Level. For the landing behavior, it is sufficient to set the operating level to 0 and activate GND and for an air-attack, just set the desired attack height relative to the target and activate TRG.

I hope this will help you and please forgive the delay. I will also answer all other posts as soon as possible.

Have a great day!

Pit

 

Hi Teila, UNet will be supported in v1.4, I am currently working on it. In addition, the new version will include an integration of uMMORPG as well as some other new integrations e.g. some further integrations for different weather and environment systems, such as Weather Maker, Time of Day & Weather System, Enviro - Dynamic Environment and the above mentioned TENKOKU Dynamic Sky.

I'll try to finish v1.4 within the next two weeks and will send you an early update as soon as possible.

Have a great day!

Pit

 

Great! Looking forward to it. I'll hold off on trying to implement networking code for my creatures until then.

 

Thanks, Pit. Good to hear. We will wait too.

 

Another question: I'd like to set a creature to a certain behaviour via a script. It seems like "SetBehaviourModeByKey(string _key)" in "ice_CreatureBahavior" is what I'm looking to call, but I'm not sure how to get there from the ICECreatureControl component. How should I be going about this?

 

You sir, are AWESOME! We use Time of Day so this will save us having to write any kind of bridge between the two. Thanks so much for all the awesome effort you have put into ICE - Love love love this AI asset and community around it.

 

Hey @icetec , would you possibly be available this weekend/Monday?

Keep up the good work

 

That sounds really awesome!! =) How to do this ? =)

 

Hello,

I'm fairly new to ICE and have made quite a bit of progress from watching Tonan Bora's videos. I'm running into an issue with an attack animation however. My animal has an Animator component. I'm using the Interactions to have my animal hunt a prey. Everything works great until the final act of "Attacking". It seems to be sending the "Attack" command over and over without letting the full attack animation play. So it just looks like my animal is spazzing instead of properly attacking. Is this something i need to fix within the animator or within the Attack Behavior?

Any help would be great.

Thanks!

 

Hi lazershow365. I have exactly the same problem. I can see the current action as FIRE in Info window but not animation or damage taken (it is like it can fire only one time, if not at all). I have checked the animation WarpMode (tried all param there with no success), the selection range, the stopping range, etc..

I would greatly appreciate if you found the solution aside to let me know as well.

Regards.

 

In the past, you talked about the Mission API. Is the Mission API complete?

 

Good afternoon. I've read that a new update will be released soon and there are many new integrations and additions. Will the bug fix with the photon in the new version? New mobs are not visible to new players.

 

Alex, have you gotten the Network Spawner to be able to spawn creatures in a MP game? If so, if you could list a few of the steps you took to get Photon working with ICE in the first place since some of us are a bit stuck and any details would be wonderfully helpful. I've been trying to get Networked Creatures to spawn but they never do, let alone new players not being able to see them. Any wise words on the set/settings would be appreciated by many- I'm sure. Thank you!

 

Example in percent

ICECreatureControl _control = GetComponent<ICECreatureControl>();

_control.Creature.Status.AddDamageInPercent(xx);

Regards

Carme

 

I have pun and ice working fine. I use a script attached to a game object to photon instantiate the NPC, i.e. I do not use ice network spawner. so eh, probably not helping you.

The NPC has ICE World Network View (I use Photon view only, not the transform/rigid body or animator).

I used ICE integration, identify assets for pun. Then add the 'network manager' adapter to your scene.

Regards

Carme

 

I think and I could be wrong; I set the rule length to match the animation, or be greater so that an npc plays an animation, then chills for .25 or.5 of a second. think this might be controlled here (but I could be wrong).

Regards

Carme

 

@icetec

 

check the "exit time", you can use that then it should play it all.. or you have something in ICE within the parameter that handles what should happen now when the creature and enemy is here...

 

After you kill the mob, do you have a new mob ??? And it can be seen for all players new? Or you are talking only about the mobs that originally stand on the stage. My in-game mobs on the stage are also working. But if everyone is killed, then there will not be new ones!

 

Tomorrow I'll try to throw off all the settings of the mobs for the network.

 

Hello @icetec !

I know you are a busy man but do you have time soon to send me the time/date system update that is compatible with Tenkoku?

To my email?

Thanks//
Mattis
AstralStorm Games

 

Hi Cartoon_Mania,

Is this what are you looking for?
ICE.Creatures.Objects.MissionObject Class Reference

I think, It is useful when you writing Mission from scratches.

About the Missions, I had heard Pit planning about "Missions editor" for users, but I'm not sure it would be add in next update. It is depend on priority in his plan.

regards,

Ryuichi

 

Thank you for your help and thank you to Matthis too.

It still doesn't work but I found something interesting in the path :
- unity seems not to save all parameters of ICE or sometimes reset some to default values (not cool)
- I had 2 rangeweapons attached for my testing with only one activated. Strange thng is that when I re-enabled the one that was deactivated, things get working fine.... Seems more like a bug to me but I do not yet know enought to be sure yet.


Also one more question if you guys allow me : I want to have rocks that my creature (not a player) can farm (like shooting at it and when destroyed get some ressources to pickup). I succeed doing that with the creature component but do you know a better way ? (I do not want to instanciate a full-creature for each farmeable gameobject..)

I tried with the plant component with inventory set on DOD and corpse set but, even at durability 0%, the plant never die nor drop its inventory nor corpse..

As the plant component do not expose event I don't know if it is the best solution/component to use for this.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks again.
Rob.