Crawling around in the dark

Hello!

The last couple of weeks have been a bit hit-and-miss in terms of work. I had an event last weekend, and I've got another three the next three weekends, so I have been spending a lot of time preparing for those. However, I have made progress with what I've called the "vent cutscene".

[SPOILERS] In the third area, you find a room with a loose, rattling vent. If you choose to pull it off, you reveal a hidden notepad and a crawlspace. The original design for this was a trigger volume that becomes active after having read the notepad that gave you an "Enter Vent / Don't Enter" option - if you chose to enter, it would trigger a cutscene of sorts, where you would lose control, the player character (PC) would be swapped for an AI that I could control and tell it to crouch, then crawl forward to a specific space inside the vent, before handing control back to the player. This is how I set up the area exit doors, so I figured the same would work well here.

(narrator voice) It didn't.

While I sucessfully set up the required animations on both the player and AI characters, I had huge troubles when swapping back to the player trying to have them in the same pose. They would ping back to stood up, no matter how or when I set the animation to be crouched. And when I did finally get the AI to move properly (some navmesh and collision issues) they slowly slid sideways on their belly into the vent, which as I'm sure you can guess, wasn't the intention.

So, in the end, instead of having trigger volumes at the vent entrances/exits that brought up a menu choice, I decided to not swap for the AI at all. I reused the trigger volumes to just force a change in the player animation state to match where they were moving to and the whole area now works seamlessly!

The intention behind having the menu interactions with the vent exits was so I could control the dialogue and have the PC muse on whether they were doing the right thing or not, but having thought about it, I can still fire off a dialogue line as they crawl around, so in the end I've made the whole sequence much less 'clunky' and it just flows better.

I need to slow the player crawl speed a bit (he properly goes for it like he's Special Forces) and add some more dialogue triggers, but it's finally working :)

Hope he doesn't find anything too terrible in there.

(narrator voice) He did.

Tony.