Hips direction lock with a specific direction

[jomath229]

After testing how the hips direction lock works, I realised that it locks in the direction we were going when we entered the lock state. So if we have the rifle out, and start moving left to right, our lock direction is going to be forward, since the legs are pointing to the right. But it's also possible to have the rifle out and have the lock direction go backward. If we move backward, than move towards the right, and then back to doing left and right our hips direction is going to be locked going backward, and will keep going backward if we keep on doing some left and right movement.

Could there be a way to decide which way we want the lock to go towards? I feel like adding a curve for a hips direction lock forward and backward could be beneficial, since, some overlays would be better with always having one direction when moving from left ro right.

That way, when the character moves from left to right, if there's a lock on a direction, both of the forward states or both of the backward states would be the only one being able to traverse to and every other direction should go to the locked direction and not the other one while the lock is active.

[jomath229]

After playing a bit with the movement state graph, I was able to force a permanent lock on the forward hips direction quite simply. I added some transition nodes from "move backward -> move right forward", and from "move forward -> move left backward":

The condition for the "Move Backward -> Move Right Forward" is as so:

Basically, we can go to "move right forward" if there's not feet crossing, if we have the hips direction lock and if we want to move right. I gave the same blending settings as the "Move Backwards -> Move Right Backward" but made it a priority 0.

I had to modify the transition from "Move Backwards -> Move Right Backward" to not go if we had some hip lock otherwise it would go through if there was still some feet crossing which made the new transition not ready:

(small mistake here, the condition "<" should be 0.5 and not 0.0, but im to lazy to update screenshot x) )

I did basically the same thing for "Move Forward -> Move Left Backward" but simply changed the boolean for going right to going left.

Now if we modify the existing curve HipsDirectionLock to HipsDirectionRight and add a new curve HipsDirectionLeft and add the same style of transition but made to go backward instead of forward, we could achieve specific hip direction lock, which could be an added bonus for specific type of overlays we want to keep a specific direction. Especially for the rifle/pistol/bow, it feels more natural to not have the legs go a different direction than the upper body orientation. Also, this could potentially be used for some mirroring where we move the weapon from the right hand to the left hand, locking the hips to the other direction etc.

I feel this could add more possibilites to the overall system and give more freedom.