Archive:
Got the room to tilt. That wasn’t too hairy in the end. I’m using three Scene Components. The first (Root) is static, the next (Pivot) moves to stay under the player, and then another – containing the geometry – offsets itself in the opposite direction, so it looks like the geometry stays where it is. Then I can do what I want to the Pivot, and everything looks cool.
But man, making it feel good, that’s taken all day. Super Monkey Ball does some really cool stuff, and I don’t have time to write a custom controller to get close to it. I’m using physics forces, on a sphere, and then hacking around with gravity, and the sphere’s linear & angular forces. It’s nowhere near as nice, tbh, but it’s OK.
I started off with something similar to Lumo’s rolling ball; heavy and ponderous, but that doesn’t gel with what I want to do with the geometry. So I went light and agile, but that suffers from too much bouncing. This is one of those things I’m going to be tweaking forever.
Made a lovely iridescent material for the ground, though. As you tilt, it cycles through the hues. I might use that in a few other places…
I’ve spent sooo much time trying to get this to feel nice… And it’s still only OK. 7/10. Maybe good enough, but it’s not great. It’s certainly better than yesterday, though.
I’m 100% sure I understand what the original was doing now, but I still don’t think it’s worth me spending the time writing a completely bespoke controller to nail it. I’m chalking this up as “Yet Another Reason Why You Never Use The Physics Engine For Character Controllers”…
Finished off the texturing, added some lights, and wrote the code so you can get back to the main game when you reach the end of the room.
I still need to add the player character to the top of the ball, model a Golf Cup as an exit, and probably make some fireworks. I’m going to use this ball thing a few more times, so I’ll add to it as I go. The Player Character’s blatantly going to need bespoke animations, and I don’t want to get bogged down in that just yet…
I always liked the rooms in the original game that formed around you as you moved. They were one of the first cool looking things that I made, and it was a nice trick that you couldn’t really do in the 8bit isometric games. So, yeah, I was always going to revisit that, and today’s the day.
I pulled the original code out of my archive and, er, wow. That wasn’t the smartest bit of programming I’ve ever done… In fact, it was god awful. I guess I didn’t know how to lerp back then… Or, I was very hungover. Hard to tell.
Wrote a new thing from scratch, and the new thing is way nicer:
DataAsset on it, and it’ll switch the mesh and materialI think I might add the option to track multiple actors, and react to whichever is the nearest. I have a couple of ideas that might be cool…
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