Best practice to stop ability when interrupted

[longshotsg]

Hi,

I was wondering what's the best practice to stop an ability that does for example clapping hands on the spot, if a lower priority left branch interrupts it.
Just a simple basic example, there are 4 branches under a sequence task.
In the 4th branch, it does 3 things.
1) Start clapping ability
2) Wait for 5 seconds
3) Stop clapping ability.

While in the 2nd task waiting for 5 seconds, a left lower priority branch (say branch 2) interrupts it, the ability will not be stopped and branch 2 will start to execute its child tasks.
Right now, I can put a stop ability(always success) as the first child tasks of EACH of the 3 branches to the left, but there should be a better way to do this?
It will get a lot messier if we have more abilities to start.

Things I have tried:
1) Add a check of "Moving is false" in the transition to the clapping animation but it doesn't work. As I wanted the ability to stop if it starts walking again.
2) Automatic stop type in the ability stops the ability almost immediately after it started.

Appreciate any help, thanks.

 

[Justin]

Can you post an image of your tree?

 

[longshotsg]

Hi Justin,

As indicated, if the branch 2(red) starts an ability and before it can stop due to the wait, branch 1 of lower priority(green) interrupts it, then the ability in branch 2 will not be stopped.
One solution as I mentioned is to put a always stop ability task in branch 1 but they will be very messy.

Any recommended solution or better approach?
Thanks.

 

[Justin]

Thanks. In cases like that you'll I have a set of tasks which perform the reset in case of a conditional abort. You can see this in action with the Deathmatch AI Kit tree - as an example the search branch will reset the necessary variables in case of an abort.

Search For Target - Opsive

The branch with the lowest priority is the Search For Target branch: If no other branches can run then the Search For Target branch will . . .

opsive.com

You could do something similar where you stop the ability before performing the seek.

 

[longshotsg]

This does not really address the issue as it is resetting at the lowest priority branch(rightmost branch). If there is a conditional abort, it will never reach the lowest priority branch till sometime later.
But you do give me an idea what I can do.
Most probably creating a custom task and passing the strings of abilities that I want to force turn off, so that I have one task instead of multiple tasks.
Thanks.