Preventing Bouncing At Phys-Seams

You know how things in Unity (and UE4 - it's a PhysX bug) tend to bounce when rolling over seams? How if you roll a ball down a slope made up of multiple boxes sitting perfectly end to end, the ball often still jiggles or outright bounces when going over the seams? Ever noticed how it gets even worse if your collisions are set to continuous?

Want to fix that? Simply zero out the impulse that the collision tries to apply to your bouncing object.

It's quite horrible, but in my testing (and that of @PartlyAtomic - who turned me on to this fix) it appears to work perfectly. We only enable this mode for things without rigidbodies because we can reasonably assume that we don't want to accelerate away from collisions with say, the wall or ground. We just want to hit the ground or wall and stop, because it's a huge immovable surface. Bouncing against another rigidbody though, you likely want the two things to kind of rebound away.

Anyways, what you're doing is making this sort of bouncy behavior: https://twitter.com/glassbottommeg/status/1278395042697080839

... look more like this. Bounces still happen, but they're immediately clamped and don't influence movement much at all: https://twitter.com/glassbottommeg/status/1278391056984272898

(btw, check out that sun conure! that's one of the recent voted birbs! also, we're currently working on cinnamon green cheek conure)

Also, it's a really simple code post this month, so everyone gets it, and I'll leave this one public. Why? Because I didn't find much of anything when I googled this before, and only found the solution thanks to one random follower who noticed my question, so WOW let's try  and get some more solutions for this into google.

June Project Update

The big huge thing was fixing that horrible bounce when going over seams. It cropped up everywhere. Like in the demo, did you ever try to go up a ramp, and have birb kind of pop up barely halfway up the ramp, go into a tiny vert, and then zoom back down? That was caused by this bug kicking you up off the ramp's surface. SO BAD. Thankfully, it is now gone, and that fix should even be present in the XBox demo coming up soon. Yay! Hopefully everyone saw The Steam Summer Festival demo too, cus it's gone now. It was neato, folks seemed to dig it.

We have a resident owl now, which is pretty cool. Not sure if she'll stick around all year, but she's been consistently hanging around. Expect a barred owl to appear in-game :D

Oh and we did some filming for an upcoming thing. No, I can't talk about it yet. Should be cool though!

One of the bigger things I did this month was realize ragdoll is bad for birb. Bailing, of course, used to look more like this, and I got consistent feedback that folks just did not like hurting the birb. They felt awful when they bailed. In a game about trying your best designed around bailing a lot, that was baaaad. So I redesigned bailing to be this kind of joyful thing where birb is clearly into bouncing around just as much as they are into skating. Got that in by the demo, didn't get a single bit of feedback about feeling bad cus they hurt birb, so MISSION ACCOMPLISHED heck yea.

I also fixed a ton of warnings, and I know that seems silly, but seriously, warnings are there for a reason and you ignore them at your own peril.

This was also the month where I moved to MasterAudio, which means my audio systems can be a LOT better and I can do a lot of stuff I couldn't before aaaaand I can't show you anything for that cus this is a text blog with images. Sorry. Anyways, if you're on Unity, you probably should be using FMOD, wWise, or MasterAudio. Unless you've got a separate full time audio person, you probably want MasterAudio, because the other two have a separate massive program you use to configure everything. You'll have to rethink how you approach audio to use any of these, but when you come out the other end, your games will sound better and not boom horribly and not destroy speakers and etc. Tweet me if you're ever having trouble, I can explain basic principles on how to use sound busses and what the voice limits are for and how to handle NPCs vs players and etc.

The other thing that's hard to show is I did a big revamp of how I was using grind lines and space in the level. This is what I started with,

and people were struggling to navigate it. I initially took that to mean that the steering was bad, or push/stop was bad (and I do need to rework regardless), but Xalavier pointed out that it was just dense. Like super dense.

So I tried this,

... and hey, that was already feeling better. I could navigate that bit better. Didn't bail very often. Had more space to plan. But wait, now we're over to the desk, so what if I just,

... and along with that desk park starting up and being fun, I realized I could further declutter the space by removing one of those 2 big blue things that nobody can really skate anyways. Looking better!

Then this is where it ended up, roughly. Those red lines represent the grind lines I flung around the level to give better navigation. It's why I was experimenting with hanging christmas lights way up in that tweet, trying to figure out what would work for those lines. I settled on floss, actually! I even have a cool plan for how to make the fact that you can skate right through the lines seem less weird.

Still, this was the big shift. Realizing that not only could I get away with lower density, which makes level design cheaper and faster and easier, but that lower density was actually much more fun. Like much, much better across the board. That, in turn, lead me to making the whole room collidable just as a what-if, and then a ton of people had fun skating up on the bed and stuff during the demo. It was fun to play around out there even without a park. So if I can make a few more hotspots, make stuff to find in the room, generally expand the level design across the entire space... well, hey, why not just make the whole dang room the level?

Which brings us up to today! This next bit I'll be cleaning up a few more tasks (like push/brake) I want to revisit, then I'll be focusing on level design for a while. Seeing just how much I can make the large room skateable, how long it takes, etc. Then that will dictate a lot about the rest of the game. Cya next month!