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Anti gravity racers

A project log for A game about a certain space exploration company

Where most of 2018 went

lion-mclionheadlion mclionhead 03/16/2022 at 06:450 Comments

The genre lions have been attempting to emulate is the anti gravity racer.  Using anti gravity racers as a search term gives better results.  

Sadly, the godot editor looks a lot better after trying Unity.  There were attempts on godot which got a lot farther in a lot less time.

https://www.reddit.com/r/godot/comments/k53914/antigravity_racing_game_im_working_on_in_godot/

There's no source code.  For the physics system, he simply says "a RigidBody that isn't set to collide with anything so that I can use apply_force() and apply_torque() to try to move it more realistically."

https://github.com/Corruptinator/G-Zero

Like BFR, this one similarly focused a lot of attention on creating artificial gravity but doesn't do anything.

There are some other variations of the genre which support 3D navigation inside a tube.  It seems in this mode, they don't have to worry about artificial gravity & debugging move_and_slide.  They can just collide with the walls & stop.

This one looks real good, but seems rather boring.

There's a lot of precision flying through pigeon holes.  It still moves & slides when it hits a wall.  There's no jumping because it's flying.  It's been decided that some form of gravity is required to achieve any entertainment.

This one talks about using raycasts to turn the vehicle when it hits the ground.  BFR already uses the normals of the ground, but not a raycast.  The problem with this is it doesn't handle hitting walls, hitting the ground sideways, or hitting a ceiling.  Maybe the solution is raycasts pointing in every direction.  This one reveals the global_transform.interpolate_with function.

Interesting workaround by using a sphere to model a vehicle.  If the vehicle is long & narrow, it's going to stick beyond a wall, but lions are willing to compromise on appearance.  This one reveals the global_transform.orthonormalized function.

BFR doesn't use godot's gravity system, but this shows how it can simulate orbital mechanics.

Overall, the home brew gootube game programmers haven't yielded any satisfying physics system in the last  4 years. The question is always how these partial kludges are going to entertain for hours.

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