Unreal Gameplay Ability System - #5 Gameplay Events

Unreal' s gameplay ability System, better known as GAS, is a fantastic system to create actions for your game characters. almost any real-time Combat system could benefit from using it. It's just sad that there isn't much documentation from Epic games to make this easy to learn. Which is why I will try it myself, to take you through all this step by step and learning how you can set up this plugin to work for your game!
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[@beleventh3998]

Hi there, Great video series and thank you for making this :). Just wondering if the abilities can also be simply turned on and off. For example when a player enters a box a take damage over time ability is started and then ended when the player exits the box.

[@thegamedevcave]

sure, you can turn on a gameplay ability any way you like, so also with a collision box, then simply wait in that ability for a gameplay event like shown in this video. you send that gameplay event whenever an actor exists the collision box again. Although I do struggle to think of many uses for that with whole abilities, if it's something that's just like "regen while in this box" you can just apply and remove a gameplay effect directly without the need for an ability. But I could see something like a character going into some sort of berserk state where he just keeps attacking when inside a certain area? for that your question would indeed be relevant :) Hopefully all my rambling makes sense XD

[@sandy00]

Hey man, great work you're doing here. I have a couble of doubts regarding 'WaitGameplayEvent'. 'WaitGameplayEventToActor' has a line in the description which says, 'If used in an ability graph, this async action will wait even after activation ends. It's recommended to use WaitGameplayEvent instead.' 1. Does this mean that 'WaitGameplayEvent' will stop listening once the ability ends? 2. To my knowledge 'WaitGameplayEvent' is only available in the ability graph. So I'm using WaitGameplayEventToActor in StateTree Tasks to get information from the ability system. Will the 'WaitGameplayEventToActor' inside StateTreeTasks end when the task ends? 3. Is there a way to debug 'WaitGameplayEventToActor' to know if it's still waiting or not? I would really really really appreciate it if I could get your thoughts on this

[@sandy00]

I texted him on discord instead of waiting for an answer like a normal person. Here's his reply: yeah so it seems that inside an ability you want to just use the normal wait gameplay event instead. but from how i read it, if you use wait gameplay event to actor anywhere else like in a BT, it will just keep lisening until it's recieved it's event. it wouldn't stop at the end of an ability because when it exists in any other place, it's not linked to a gameplay ability, the warning just seems to make note of the fact that the async task will get destoryed together with the ability, as does everything you create within the ability. as far as debugging goes, i'm not sure if there's a convinient way to do that. From what i can tell though, wait gameplay event to actor will always keep listening as long as the object it exists in is still alive. (unless you tick the "only trigger once" box of course) long story short,i believe the async tasks in both scenarios just have the same lifetime as the object theyre being made in

[@KnitterX]

I just can’t for the life of me figure out why this isn’t working for me. The overlap event is triggering and the gameplay ability is triggering too. But for some reason it gets stuck at the wait gameplay event node. The event received pin just never fires even though I set the correct tag.

[@thegamedevcave]

if you're sure the tags match, also make sure that you're putting in the correct actor and that that actor has a gameplay ability component.

[@KnitterX]

@@thegamedevcave yeah, I did all that. My best guess at the moment is that there’s something wrong with my animation montage. That’s the only thing that’s different from yours. Maybe it’s too short or something. I’ll try downloading a different skeletal mesh and animations and see if that works better.

[@thegamedevcave]

@@KnitterX does the montage play at all?? i doubt that is has much to do with the gameplay event not being sent either way, as you mention the overlap event working properly

[@KnitterX]

@@thegamedevcave The montage was playing correctly. I fixed it now. It had something to do with the slightly different collision system I am using in my game. Basically, I am not turning the collision on and off based on specific frames in the attack animation like you are and that caused my "begin overlap" to not always trigger within the exact time window of the PlayMontageAndWait node. So it was nothing wrong with your tutorial. It's just that it's not fully compatible with what I'm trying to do. But that's ok. I adapted a few things and now it's working. But thank you for your help!