Hitboxes and Animations

The main issue this week was finding animations for the enemies and tying them to the existing AI behaviors, such as attacking. The animations themselves were easy enough, however with the current hitbox system we had in place, we struggled a bit to get them to turn on and off at the correct times during the animations. A big problem was that its not very easy to debug ABPs or event dispatchers without putting print strings everywhere to see if it was behaving the way we thought. Eventually we were able to find out that it was behaving how we thought it should, but the hit and hurt boxes were not interacting correctly.

The way we fixed this is instead of directly adding a socket to the skeleton and adding a hitbox to that socket, we had to make and invisible "weapon" that had a hitbox and attach that to the enemies. This allowed the system to work correctly since it was expecting some kind of "weapon" to work properly. Once we figured that out we were able to properly test and adjust the animations and hitboxes of the enemies' attacks to damage the player properly. It also led us to discovering another bug with the player not being able to damage the enemies so in the end it was a bit of a blessing in disguise. 

Author: Chase Thacker 2/1/2024