TL;DR

Good stuff 👍

What is a Advanced Locomotion System?

Advanced Locomotion System is a umbrella term for a set of systems and techniques used by studios to produce AAA quality animations for movement in games.

We all seen weird animations in old games. The speed difference between the animations and the character in Fallout 3 that causes a weird gliding effect along the ground, or how the character’s feet never matches the steps on a set of stairs.

Advanced Locomotion Systems (A.K.A.: ALS) aims to solve these issues through sub-systems like animation warping, distance matching, and many others.

Why use a Advanced Locomotion System?

We all want our game to look and play the best as possible. And this is what is used to make the highly detailed animations and interactions seen on Uncharted 4, The Last of Us 2 and the new God of War games.

Players are already used to this high level of detail on human like characters, and taking that away may also lead to a bad first impression with the game.

My idea is to have animations that help with the immersion, without directly taking the attention for themselves.

How to Advanced Locomotion System?

It does required years of experience for someone to properly implement a system like that from scratch, but thanks to the advent of the internet and the modern state of information exchange, you can easily find resources online on how to do one yourself.

Just give me the damn thing

You can just download and import the pre-made system to your project. Advanced Locomotion System V4 is currently free to download on the Epic Games store, all implemented using blueprints. So it is simple to just open up and try to figure it out by yourself.

They also recently released a sample project for motion matching with animation samples, together with plenty of free resources on how to use it.

Going down the hard route

Because I will be doing customizations and adding features to my character movement set (spoiler: a wall hug feature), I need to completely understand what is happening and how everything is working behind the scenes.

I decided to buy a course on Udemy: Unreal Engine 5: Advance locomotion system ALS (Intermediate), which I got for 74% off during a sale.

I’ve been looking into it over the past couple of weeks, and I can highly recommend it.