BGP 2015 – fourth week: loops, turns, rotations & illness

Hello!

This week has been pretty bad for me because I’ve been ill for the most part and as such have not been able to work as much on the project. It really does wonders for your stress levels.

I have been able fix the custom gravity effect for loops and turns by making prefabs that are essentially trigger boxes that apply a gravity effect on any players within them. The direction of the gravity effect is determined by the rotation of the object itself (which is invisible), or rather the direction of its local y-axis is the inverse of the gravity direction. This way anyone, not just programmers, can place and manipulate the custom gravity by rotation the objects and transform their trigger colliders. Indeed, they could even replace the box trigger colliders with trigger colliders of different shapes if they so desire, what’s important is the game objects rotation and that it has the gravity script attached to it. The script also has a public variable for multiplying the gravity strength if the need should arise.

This way it is possible to place several gravity objects with different rotations along the turn or loop in order to make it’s custom gravity.

I’ve made a similar type of game object that takes care of rotating the player as the level twists and turns as the players are not to be able to pitch or roll when on the track. They work in principle the same way as the gravity objects except they affect the players rotation instead. The rotation is handled by an individual type of object since the rotation and gravity direction don’t always coincide, they need to be independent of each other. Compare the image below that shows the rotation boxes for the loop with the image above that shows the gravity boxes for the same loop.

I’ve also managed to clean up some of the code. Previously the input form players and the player movement was in the same script so I had to make one for each player. Now those are separated, which should help make things easier from now on, at least when developing the player prefabs.

Cheers!