[WIP] Testing Unreal Engine’s Mover for Kalyskah!

Hello everyone!

While revisiting the game’s architecture, we decided to experiment with some of Unreal Engine’s newer tools, such as Mover.

This system should be a huge step towards improving traversal in Kalyskah!

The animation shown here is still a placeholder provided by the engine. Kalyskah will move in a more delicate and graceful way.

I’ll make a longer post later about the quirks of this process, and how and why we got here. Being able to use this system is actually the result of us finally solving a problem with the hierarchy of Kalyskah’s skeletal mesh that has been haunting the project for years.

Spoiler alert: this solution should also allow us to finish implementing the Control Rig we tried to make work last year, but ended up deferring because there was a problem in the foundation of the mesh. Now that this is behind us, it means the retargeting of animations, such as the ones we captured during the mocap session, is finally on the horizon!

For those who like to know more about the technical improvements Mover has over the Character Movement Component we are using at the moment, here is an article from Epic Games.

Kalyskah is not an online game, so the part about server replication is not relevant for us, but the part about modular movement modes is. Kalyskah can fly, and once we roll out these improvements... who knows? Maybe we can add climbing characters or a climbing system in the future!

That said, any new movement mode would still be far on the horizon, and only after we finish the tasks currently at hand and advance the main story.

Testing Unreal Engine’s Mover for Kalyskah! (YouTube)