Updated Movement
When further looking into the capabillities of the movement system that was made in the last devlog part, I discovered that it wouldnt work with future features we wanted to add such as friendly AI and detection fron enemy AI as the movement system was built around the animations driving the character and not elements in blueprints that could be referenced in other blueprint classes.
With this setback behind me I began working on a system that calculates movement speed and direction of the player through the speed and direction of the player character and not the preset animation.
This required building a new animation blendspace, though how this one works is a bit different to how the one was set up for the previous system. Unlike the last one that was set up to something simular to the layout of a compass and where the animations would be placed, this lay out is more set up as a graph and each animation is in a location that calculates the speed of the player and the direction of their movement.
Below you can see the results of this animation blendspace for the base movement along with the crouching movement. Though there are still some tweaks that need to be made regarding the players capsul size and the camera movement and placement when crouched.
Below shows how the players movement allow the option to sprint and how the speed effects the player's animation blendspace.
Friendly AI Actor
With the movement done for now, I moved on to looking at implementing friendly AI into the game. My plan was to have the AI follow and react to the player by have reactions built into the player's blueprint. An example can be seen below with it showing how when the player begins to sprint the AI will acknowledge this and begin to sprint itself, so it matches the player.
This was the final result which overall im not happy with and will have to look down further routes of changing how the Ai perceives the world. This result to me reall just feels like animated magnets latching on to the player and fighting to be able to keep hold.