[1.0 Final] Hedge Physics - 3D Sonic Engine on Unity.

Looking good so far man. Physics seem to work like a charm, though I'd rather judge when I get the chance to test myself (travelling right now). Some noticable kinks at the moment though I'm sure you're aware of most of them already and are planning on ironing them out. Nice prototype level design too. I take it you're a fan of machines-in-the-sky like myself :v: not enough love for Egg Fleet like levels.

One thing I might say would benefit you is putting in actual walls, i.e. a mode of wall-running in select areas so moments like 0:34 don't happen unintentionally as that can disorient the player if impropperly done. The level design itself wasn't an issue as much as not knowing where the hell down is.

Looking forward to how far this develops. Definitely a polished basegame as it is for sure.

 

I've been playing around with the engine over the past few days and I can't really figure out how the animation system works - specifically, how to add new animations into the system and play them via script. It looks like CharacterAnimator.SetInteger("Action", X) is the way to do it, where X is some number between 0 and 5, but this only covers the base animations. How would I assign new animations to Action 6, 7, 8, etc?

 

I'll probably be crucified for asking this, but... how about some scripted loops? :specialed:
+ - We're going full-on Adventure, aren't we  

 

I think some scripting would be a nice feature to have, actually- not full-on automation, but maybe a flag you can set so Sonic's forward vector conforms to a spline. That way you could just hold forward to clear a loop successfully without awkward steering compensation, but you still have the freedom to move left and right relative to that path. The challenge there would be keeping it subtle enough that players don't necessarily realize they're being guided, which they will if they deliberately do a hard turn to break away- maybe there could be some falloff where the strength of the snap tapers off depending on how close the player's directional input matches the direction of the spline?

 

Ah, thanks! I got it working.

I actually see where my problem was - I completely missed the Conditions list when clicking on a transition, so I filled that out and it's good to go.


As far as rails go, what I would suggest is that if your current physics engine isn't playing nice with what you want to do, disable the physics entirely when Sonic jumps on a rail and switch to a new physics script that's specifically built around rails. When you think about it, if you disregard all the twists and turns, a rail is basically a straight line on a 2D plane. The trick is to first figure out how to move Sonic along the rail at a set speed, and then adjust his velocity based on the curvature. Lastly, disable the rail script and re-enable regular physics when he jumps or falls off.

It sounds like a similar technique to camera rails / splines could be used for Sonic? Google "unity camera rail" and you'll see what I mean.

 

I like this a whole lot, and I think you've made some phenomenal progress. I had two things that I'd love to see changed, but they're both a matter of preference.

First, like Atendaga said and you responded to, the homing attack feels way too guided. It seems like if it had a shorter automatic lock-on and a narrower direction cone, that'd make it feel like more of a challenge to chain several enemies rather than a "Mash A to Get Through" section.

Second, the Sonic model you've made is SO GOOD. I love its design and the animations, particularly the running. One nitpick though, the muzzle isn't rounded enough, so it makes him look a little top heavy, or like he's got an underbite. But again, preference.

Left is Original, Right is Changed.

 

I have been wanting something like this forever! Thank you so much!
I am finally being able to make my own Sonic games in Unity as perviously all I have made is silly games based off of other games e.g Floppy Sports is a silly ragdoll version of real and fake sports.

But really this kind of thing deserves a lot more attention but at least it has more attention than any of my games (lol)

 

All in all, I feel analog sensitivity for controllers should be less. It should be even less when moving at slow speeds. An idea is to have turn sensitivity be dynamic with player speed. I also found my self having to wrestle with the free cam.

Also, found a piece of code that can potentially break things in the slope detection script:

transform.rotation = Quaternion.FromToRotation(Vector3.up, GroundNormal);

I was doing slope detection in Unity too, and you have to be careful about what's going on. By asking from Vector3.up to ground normal, your code will break at a slope of exactly 180 around the forward axis, or at least when you can't specify which way the angle calculation goes. I emphasize this because you likely can't replicate this with a model import from Blender. Floating point precision and all makes it so 90 degrees in Blender is something along the lines of 89.99999. I haven't tested this out in HedgePhysics, but came into a similar issue in another project:
You're asking Unity to take 2 Vector3s and calculate the angle between them. Thing is, say we have a Vector direction of (0,0,1) and our current Vector direction is (0,0,0). How would we rotate between them? You can't specify whether you just want to turn around or do a back flip on your head. Whenever something like this happens, Unity will wrestle with the 2 results and basically just break Slope detection at that point. This part is just me spit-balling but this can also explain why Blitz Sonic has a similar bug at certain angles.
What I'd say would be a fix for this is something along the lines of:

transform.rotation = Quaternion.FromToRotation(transform.up, GroundNormal) * transform.rotation;

Anyway, what this does is take your current slope direction and compares it with the ground normal direction and gets the rotation between them. It then takes your current transform.rotation and applies that on top. Quaternion multiplication really just means to rotate by this. Something to also note is how Quaternion multiplication is non-commutative, so keep track of multiplication order!

All in all, nice job LakeFepard, HedgePhysics is really looking good.

EDIT: Cleared up clarification a bit and grammar. Sorry mods for the amount of edits I do on my posts
EDIT: Super late edit. Removed some incorrect information.

 

I haven't played this yet, but in regards to controls and sensitivity, are there options to adjust that exposed in an options menu? Plus if adding sensitivity vs speed , I think being able to adjust how that works in options would be a good way to play test to get something comfortable for the player.

 

Maybe it's just a feature of the test level, but when the camera is scripted to switch to another angle, it's way too fast and incredibly disorienting.

 

@LakeFeperd Is there any way to remove the weird camera shake when you perform a spindash?

 

I'm pretty sure there is considering it's an opensource engine