Bespoke Character Animations

Adding a new character move to the base character controller

AnimVars (Animation Variables) are our system of choice to replicate player animations to other clients. Since animations are relatively expensive and we need to do a lot of animating each frame (crowd members are animated too!) we have limited the amount of possible animations.

AnimVars are defined in code, and as it’s not possible to add new code to World Builder projects there are four generic boolean custom AnimVars you can use in your own custom Animation Blueprints (ABPs). These are never used by existing Origin blueprints so you can use them however you like in your project. These are client-authoritative background replicated variables, so will be replicated to all players, including all crowd members.

There are functions on the JM_AnimVarsComponent to set and get the values from the authoritative client. This example will toggle the first bool:

The bools will be replicated and set on the M2_AnimVars struct that’s available in the ABP (see the existing AnimVars macros). They will look like this:

You can use these to drive your new animation state changes as usual in your custom ABP