Quadrupeds + blocks = problem?

Hm.. care to elaborate?

 

Have it so that if the NPC or mech's leg is hanging off a ledge far enough that they'll fall off instead of defying gravity. Although it would probably end up being a bit annoying if you were a little off the edge and just randomly fell, so it would hopefully be designed to only happen if your feet were far enough off for it to look weird.

 

Hm, I was thinking that too, like how they would center their gravity to the blocks they're on. Interesting.

 

Yeah... Interesting...

 

Thats the best sollution as it's increadibly easy, just set the body to align with terrain, if there are 1-1 angles of bricks set alignment to 45 degrees else 90 degrees, the feet would always then be planted at 90 degrees to make contact with the steps. you could also set a terrain check so if the 1-1 angle only lasted for 1 or 2 steps this transformation wouldnt occure and the standard angle is preserved or some unique 'stepping' animation is played. As far as code goes it wouldn't take much and I'd be surprised if it wasn't already implemented in some way or shape for the final release

 

your angular walking requires knowledge of the upcoming terrain changes and would be a little more complex then needed seeing the # of possible angles of motion

 

When it comes to mech I think the best way of having movement well implemented is mechs destroying/moving blocks.

 

But how would that work when's it's hanging off a ledge, and not just a couple of blocks?

 

Behold my artistic demonstration.

 

Is anyone considering terrain like this:

In the mini canyons

or this:

The green hills on the very far right.

Not to mention, terrain is modifiable. You could make insanely irregular floor patterns that would make it really rough. I doubt with so many variables, it would be as easy as it seems to just rotate or pivot or whatever the sprites to the terrain, when the terrain itself can be warped into pretty much any possible position. And in addition to changing at all, it can happen while the creature is actively walking. I think it would be best for the developers to just leave it as it is, for their own sake.
Now I'm not saying it's something that shouldn't be discussed. Quite the opposite! It's fine to speculate on how it would be best to make it aesthetically pleasing to the eyes. But there's actual coding and programming that goes into it, and it's not just as easy as it is to speculate with an artist's mind of how to fix it, than how it is to actually make said fix work.

 

Idea: Anything large enough to occupy a large space that tries to stand on a Block Amount less than half of their width is also heavy enough to squish down those Blocks if the material is too soft to hold the weight, (example: Dirt trying to hold up a Mech) & if the Material is too small an amount to hold up the large heavy thing & is too strong to squish, then what should happen is what would happen irl: The large heavy thing will flop over sideways & go tumbling down/fall down. Anything that would be made really large, yet not heavy must have a reason to not be heavy as well, like if it floats & doesn't need a fat lotta support surface to stay up & could thus not squish the ground under it or tumble/fall over it. (example: A Creature that was Jellyfish-like & full of Hydrogen, thus supports most of its Weight via floating while living on a Planet that has an Atmosphere full of something heavier than Hydrogen so it just floats most of its Body Weight & maybe just crawls & pulls itself along the ground to move around without needing a lot of physical strength & dodging having to have a heavy bulky body.)

 

I'm seeing several nice ideas here but we don't know what the devs will do, is there a way to ask one of them about it? Not about what is the best idea but what do they intend to do about this. Depending on their answer, this topic could follow a total different course or even making this topic unnecessary anymore...

 

Well considering you've seen it in videos and pics, I doubt they're going to have a rehaul on movement physics pre-release. At the very least it could be a post-release change, since this solution is actually quite a bit of a game-changer in a way. That is if they do plan on doing anything about it.

 

Well the developers regular the forums quite frequently, so I doubt none of them have yet to see this thread.

That might actually work, But it should just be for mech's.. NPC's shouldn't be able to modify terrain.

Well just like in real life people shouldn't use a mech when there's uneven terrain like that..

 

Unless dragons, yes.

 

We talked about this a lot when we first started making "long" monsters.

Yes, it's not ideal, but really if the gameplay is good (crossing fingers) most won't notice or care. Any "fix" would likely contain a lot of programming which is a resource we can't spare right now. Making creatures more realistically walk on the ground is just not as high of a priority as say coding more boss battles. In fact it's pretty much at the bottom of the list. So far that other things can easily overtake it so it might never get done. But maybe it will. We just don't really care at this moment in time. So many MANY more important things.

We'll see if it becomes too glaring when we really test HUGE things some more. But at this moment dealing with varying sizes of monsters and how they interact with the environment on a "feet always touching the ground" level is just not something we care to do right now.

I'd compare it to Minecraft trees. The first time you knock a tree block out and the rest is floating, yeah you notice. Yeah there are jokes made. But seriously, it's still a good game and who really cares to the extent that their experience is ruined? If anything it just makes a funny story. And I think our creatures feet not always touching is much more minor than that and has been in games throughout history!

 

It's not not big of a deal for me, but it's still definitely a sore to the eye.

 

That's understandable and cool, but from all the progress so far I was impressed with attention to detail and effort that goes in to polishing and fixing little things to make this game. I take floating monsters as one of those things, its small thing that takes a lot of effort, but if you making a great game, then why not make things right from the beginning?

I might sound crazy, but I rather give up few bosses but have proper monster to ground interaction, because I know more bosses can be added later and devs can take their time working on them, but stuff like floating monsters is something you constantly going to see from the very beginning of the game.

Also I never minded trees in mine craft, because game is made out of cubes, heck the trees hardly look like trees to start with haha.

 

How hard would it be to say... make it so that "long" monsters are more prone to walk on flatter surfaces?

 

The first question is, can the monsters walk up that terrain right now? There is no need to do anything crazy if monsters can't walk on terrain that is higher than tree blocks, otherwise they should jump, which should look pretty normal.

And no matter what kind of "crazy" terrain you can come up with, it always will be simplified into straight line and a porabola that goes over two blocks, if its higher, then monster jumps, also if there is a gap and its one block, then monster just walks over it without any change, if its two blocks than monster just kinda lowers down into it and raises back up, if its three blocks wide and deep, monster either turns around or jumps. It might look crazy in screen shots, but the walking surface can always be simplified pretty easy.