I gave a talk at AMAZE JHB on building characters in Unity and driving them with PhysX.
Like I said during the talk, as I navigated through the example project I'd built, there's loads of ways to configure joints and forces to produce gameplay, I was just showing off one way to do it.
That said, here's the Unity 5.4 project for anyone who's interested to paw through and meddle with and (hopefully) learn from. I had a request afterward for the source, and it seemed to a helpful thing to do.
http://www.callofthevoid.com/AMAZE/AMAZE_PHYSX_TALK_How_To_Dematerialize_Completely.zip
The project has a couple of scenes in it, as seen in the talk at A MAZE. The final scenes have two characters that can walk around in them, and there's a kind of faceplant jump that they can do. It's very simple, but hopefully it provides an idea of how a PhysX driven character might be constructed.
I'd of course be super stoked if anyone built upon this project (please show me if you do). There's a little bit of code in there that is common in Free Lives projects, but I presume everyone who contributed to it is happy for it to be reused. Please use this project in whatever way you wish.
For anyone who wants to use this code in a commercial project, and needs all the legalities squared away, you may use this under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. You can read the full license here.
Basically: You can use this code in whatever commercial product you like, and make whatever changes you like, but mention me in the credits (Evan Greenwood), and mention if you modified the code. And also include a link to the license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode
(Don't worry about this legal stuff if you don't have to, it's just here in case it's needed, one person actually did need it)
Comments
I can't wait to play around with it! :D
This would be a lot better of course if collisions with other characters knocked characters down (I mean if there was more interaction between them).
Still waiting to see a release of that minigame you showcased at EGE.
p.s. Candle Light's "Custom Handles" is no longer around, but the latest Unity beta has built in support for showing joint restrictions.
That looks a lot like a plumbus btw
I really hope you work on this further, it looks super rad!
These cool uses of the talk/sourcecode make me want to do more talks like this :)
EDIT: I forgot to add the special attack as well https://gfycat.com/CorruptGroundedCanary ;-)
Have you seen One Finger Death Punch? It does this type of gameplay super well. Love that the badguys all drop piles of cash... Planning on putting in upgrades?
Obviously share when you feel ready, but I'd point out that early feedback is useful and it's much easier to perfect something if you've tested it (i.e. being a perfectionist is only useful if you actually know what 'perfect' would be).
Also, if the core of it is good it's easy to get people to try it again. If the core isn't good then spending lots of time tweaking the frills to 'perfection' won't be a good use of time.
I'm saying this as a serial perfectionist :)
Also, hope I'm not coming across as condescending, I don't know your level of experience.
I have pretty good results on the iphone devices (I've reduced drawcalls by baking meshes and added some faked shadows). On the android still the physics is quite consuming. I am focused on the appstore at first, will try to fight for the next world-wide feature :)
It is not possible for you to check it on the iOS?
@EvanGreenwood if you would like something for the android, I can send you a really fun "sandbox" boxing I made with your character movement. It will be my next game for the mobile :-)
EDIT: I've sent you the private message
Thank you so much for the project, although I could not find a video recording of the talk, the project file helped me a lot.
I used a lot of concepts that were in the project to build a prototype for a physics based fighting game. It uses control scheme similar to that of gang beasts, but the player can move each hands independently in any direction they want, so this allows the player to do various kinds of slams, throws, pull, push and fling after grabbing the opponent.
I also added a climb system and a grapple hook system to the character controller, right now I am still exploring fun things that can be done with this character controller.
I also made a game based on this character controller for Ludum Dare 40 game jam, https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/house-party
Some Gifs of initial prototype
https://gfycat.com/@richard141289/library
Itch.io page
https://richarddilip.itch.io/house-party
Once again thank you so much for sharing the project.
Nice work as well on the characters. And I love that grabbing and punching. The punching in particular is really well "animated" :)
Thanks for sharing your work. Are you thinking of going further with this project?
I will be going further with developing the character controller, by adding more animations, and experimenting with different types of movement, like swinging, wall crawling etc. as for games, I am currently working on a multiplayer fighting game like powerstone, using this character controller.
I love the sort of Noby Noby Boy texture look of things. Looks so rad! Please keep going
Is this a level select then?
First off I just want to say thank you to @EvanGreenwood for the talk and for providing this amazing project and source code. Secondly I just want to say congratulations to @dummy for the game release!
@dummy I just wanted to ask you: how did you code the spin move that the guys with the masks have on do? I have been trying to do something similar using AddTorque on the chestBody but its not working and I am at a complete stand still. Could you please share how you got the move working? I would be ever so grateful if you could show a snippet of your source code or even just wrote down some pointers in here!
Thanks again and I hope I can get a little game out in this style to show you guys soon!
You can get much faster spins if you increase the maximum angular velocity, the default is 7, so "rigidbody.maximumAngularVelocity = 100;" should allow things to be much faster.
Another thing to do is increase the maximum just a bit, and then add a smaller torque over a longer period (so a torque multiplied by the delta time over a few seconds). You don't really want your maximum torque to be much higher than necessary (because the other rigidbodies will struggle to keep up, and collisions might cause large angular jiggles).
You might also want to increase the maximum for all the rigidbodies on the character. (if the whole thing is spinning)... but it's the one that you're adding the torque to is the one that usually has it's torque clamped by Unity.
Hope that's the problem you're facing (otherwise it might be something to do with your character setup?)
Hope @EvanGreenwood to check the effect and would owe him for a respond :)
PS. @Chajies I responded in your profile, sorry for the delay.