Sometimes the dumb way is best

Kind of a general coding post this month, so everyone gets it, since it's more about general approach. If you want development update stuffs, scroll down.

Let's Get Stupid

Anyways, here was the problem: the dang bird keeps skateboarding out of cutscenes!

You'd think this was a simple problem. It is, sort of! I thought I had it fixed. Initially the problem was of course forgetting to clear any tricks you had going when I teleported you into the cutscene, so ok, sure...

... then I realized we had to set the position in multiple places to avoid anything leaking, and oh the wheels are actually separate objects jointed ONTO the board, which means they can carry in their own velocity...

(there's actually this whole subset of problems related to having to reset wheel velocity and position, that was a nightmare two or three separate times in dev)

Which we also needed to apply here, oh and ALSO zero the board velocity, since it's of course a rigid body and can carry in its own speed and twist

Ah and of course the teleport might happen when they're in Switch, or bailed, so yes let's handle that too...

... and the joke is that it still didn't work. It regularly failed. I'm pretty sure the culprit is the friction and slope code I added last year, where when given a perfectly flat surface, it still somehow gains a slight amount of speed, or... something. I don't know. I gave up

The bird has a parking brake now.

... and as stupid as that is, it WORKS. Perfectly. No interruptions, no embarrassing cutscene drift, nothing. Bird is on their mark, every time. What's more, because the mark is an object that the bird teleports to, I can even animate the target position around in a cutscene now. Where before I couldn't easily move the bird to different spots mid-scene, now I can. Want to animate a kind of terrible but it'll barely work skating segment? Yep I can do that now. It's NEAT.

Someday I should fix the drift the right way, because it's slightly annoying in play. Sometimes you want the bird to just STOP, so you can take a cool screenshot. Still, though, the stupid solution? Worked perfectly. Took me 5 minutes. If I'd done that last year, the problem never would have been visible at all.

Hence, our moral: Do It The Stupid Way First. You can make it less stupid later, if and when you have time. This is all a subset of the coding axiom KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid), of course, so I'm hardly being original here. But my example involved birbs.

General Development Update

In case you missed it, we had a cool Steam demo event, it's over now, and folks seemed to like the result! We didn't have much, if any, real negative feedback. Quite a change from the last demo. In general, it indicates that we are indeed just about ready for launch, barring a few pretty easy polish things that we already knew needed fixing going in. Which is good since, er, we're close! Super close! Launch is SOON.

More on that later though. For now, bye! :D