Controlling a floating/hovering pawn from BTs

Development Programming & Scripting
1

Some of the pawns in my game are hovering (floating) a bit over the ground. That “hover” feeling is achieved by using a force on the Z axis, as described in the official tutorial video. To stick to that feeling I want to control movement for these pawns also with forces on the X and Y axes. Like an Arcade version of a (small, maybe remote-controlled) plane.

Now I want to make use of Behaviour Trees for controlling these pawns. From various forum threads and questions here I saw that apparently there is no support in UE4.7 (yet) to fully control pawn movement via BTs, only for characters. It seems there might be a floating movement component coming soon for pawns, but apparently not yet in 4.7.

So I have two questions:

  1. What is the best way in current UE4 version to control pawn movement via BTs?
  2. How can I make use of forces to control pawn movement, as described above?

Thanks in advance for your help!

PS: I would prefer a Blueprint-based solution, but C++ is fine as well if that is the only option.

2

You are always able to write your own BT Tasks, so you could easily implemnt this yourself.

3

That’s true, but what about the issue with controlling movement of a pawn (instead of a character)?

4

Yeah I am thinking about that. I was hoping though that could be combined with pathfinding and navigation somehow …

5

Since you have a pretty Special case of Movement, it is probably best if you wirte you own Movement component that applies forces to your pawn, based on input on each tick.

6

Serious necro here, but did you ever find a way to do this? I have a very similar problem to you (pawns that move by having forces applied to them) but unfortunately no knowledge of C++.

7

Yeah we ended up with a custom C++ component, that sets the location of the controlled pawn directly on all three axis …