AFX Selected Objects, AutoAttack AI and Jerkiness.

I made the leap and bought AFX to checkout the coolness of this wonderful resource. Immediately i thought what cool this would be to use AFX to create weapon effects or even summoned weapons (www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLpLoLGdack&hl=en). That's when I found the cool AFXWeapon resource from Michael Perry, a good starting point and even has a stats class with it, shouldn't take long to mold this the way i want it. But first! How to go about actually handling the battles. Well spells are simple, just cast from a distance, but what about normal attacks.

I decided on implementing an AI method to control the player and target and bring them together to hash out the damage. Lets cheat here and use AFX's selectobj system and a spinoff from getAIMove. Strange, AFX's getSelectedObj() is NULL, how can that be?! I clearly have a player selected, there is netcode here to transfer the selected object, whats up?! Oh wait.. that's sending it server to client but the selection is client side. Weird!? Not a problem... (Hack, hack, hack).

Under mMoveList.serverReadMovePacket(bstream);

mMoveList.serverReadMovePacket(bstream);
	  
[b]	  // [Danni] Retreive and resolve selected client object.
	  if(bstream->readFlag())
	  {
		  if(bstream->readFlag())
		  {
		     S32 gIndex = bstream->readInt(NetConnection::GhostIdBitSize);
             setSelectedObj(static_cast<SceneObject*>(resolveObjectFromGhostIndex(gIndex)));
		  }
		  else
		  {
		     setSelectedObj(NULL);
		  }
	  }[/b]

      mCameraPos = bstream->readFlag() ? 1.0f : 0.0f;

Then under mMoveList.clientWriteMovePacket(bstream);

mMoveList.clientWriteMovePacket(bstream);

		[b]// [Danni] Send selected object to server
		if (bstream->writeFlag(mChangedClientSelectedObj))
		{
			mChangedClientSelectedObj = false;
			S32 gidx;
			if (mSelectedObj && !mSelectedObj.isNull() && (gidx = getGhostIndex(mSelectedObj)) != -1)
		 {
			 bstream->writeFlag(true);
			 bstream->writeInt(gidx, NetConnection::GhostIdBitSize);
		 }
			else
			{
				bstream->writeFlag(false);
			}
		}[/b]

		bstream->writeFlag(mCameraPos == 0);

Problem solved! Here is a nice video of the result antihax.net/movies/AFXAutomoves.wmv Now to interpolate out that nasty jerkiness and free the camera's rotation. May not notice but I already freed the camera height.