GASPALS 1.1 | Unreal Engine 5.8 | Introducing Soft Cover

Hello everyone!

Back again with GASPALS 1.1. With the 1.0 foundations now solid, this update is the first step into the more exotic gameplay territory I teased last time. It also brings the project up to Unreal Engine 5.8.

Here's a non-exhaustive list of what's new:

• Soft Cover System (AC_CoverSystem).

• New Overlay System driven by a Struct instead of Anim Curves.

• UE5 First Person jitter fixed.

• General optimizations and project cleanup.

As for the specifics:

• Soft Cover System (AC_CoverSystem):

  • Built as a modular component, just like all the other systems in the project.

  • This will serve as the base for a robust soft cover system inspired by games like The Last of Us. For now it's purely a locomotion system, meaning it adjusts the character's rotation when entering cover, makes sure the character always faces the cover, and prioritizes inputs so moving along cover feels smooth.

  • Works for both CMC and Mover.

  • Supports Left / Right camera shoulder switching.

  • Fully configurable through AC_CoverSystem. You can disable it entirely by unchecking bEnableCover, and there are plenty of other variables to tweak, plus a Debug flag so you can see the system in action.

  • Again, this is just the pure locomotion base for now. It'll be updated down the line with Animation / Control Rig polish to keep the character properly tucked under cover, put their hands on the walls, and only enter cover when it actually makes sense, for example when in combat.

• New Overlay System (Struct based):

  • I was never a big fan of how layering values were read from the animation curves. It also meant that reusing the same pose somewhere else with different values required duplicating it.

  • The system now uses a struct that holds a pose alongside a Map of curve values.

  • This makes it possible to reuse poses, which cuts down the number of poses needed across the project.

  • It also makes tweaking entire overlay setups much easier, since you can edit the curve values for all poses from one single place: the overlay animation ABP.

• UE5 First Person Jitter Fix:

  • This was coming from the proportion difference between the UEFN and UE5 mannequins.

  • UE5 now uses its own Control Rigs, which solves the issue cleanly.

• Optimizations & Cleanup:

  • Made sure all ABPs are now fast path and thread safe.

  • Removed the UE4 assets and the Locomotor, since they were just bloating the project files.

Thank you all again for the support, it genuinely means a lot. Happy game dev 🫡

4nas out.