v0.93.0-rc1 Feet On The Ground

A character on terrain now stands where it looks like it stands. This is a beta: it changes how every capsule body meets the ground, so it goes out on the beta channel first.

What was wrong

After v0.92.1 the terrain collider matched the picture to a few millimetres — and a character still hovered over a rough hillside, and toed into it. The collider was not the problem any more. The shape was.

A capsule has a round bottom. On a slope, a sphere touches the ground off to one side, so the point straight under the centre — where the character's feet are drawn — hangs above it. In a crease it bridges the two sides and the feet hang over the bottom. On a bump it perches. Walking over a crest, it coasts off the edge and lands some way down the far side. On a coarse terrain, where one voxel is several units across, those creases and bumps are everywhere.

Measured while walking a character around a real project: the feet floated more than five centimetres off the drawn ground on one tick in five, and by up to a third of a unit.

What changed

Capsule bodies stand on their feet: the ground straight beneath the centre line. A body is pushed up out of the ground under its feet, and pulled down onto it while it is standing — so it follows a crest instead of hopping off it, steps down a stair instead of coasting past it, and walks up a ramp onto a flat top without being launched. A jump is untouched: leaving the ground under your own power is exactly what the feet do not interfere with.

Walls, cliffs, slopes past the body's slope limit and ledges still meet the round bottom exactly as before, so a character still hangs by its rim at an edge and still slides off a face it cannot stand on. Moving platforms count as ground too.

There is nothing to set. Every capsule, in every project, stands on its feet. Spheres roll on their curve as they always did.

Measured on the same project afterwards: the feet sit within two millimetres of the drawn ground on nine ticks in ten and within seven on ninety-nine in a hundred, and the only ticks more than five centimetres off are the landing itself.

floptle shot draws the terrain

The shot verb photographed a terrain project with no ground in it: the field loaded, the collider was live, the character stood on it — and the picture showed it standing on the sky, because the ground is meshed by the frame loop and a one-frame verb has none. It now meshes the ground around the camera before it draws, and says so if it could not finish in time.

Upgrading

Nothing to change. A character that was tuned to sit right on rough ground may now stand a few centimetres lower on slopes and in creases; that difference is the correction. A game that relied on a capsule coasting off a crest will find it follows the ground instead.

Switch the Hub to the beta channel to install this build. Once it has been played, it will be promoted to stable as v0.93.0.