Day 6?

Continuing to fine tune physics. Recently I was able to tighten a hard to catch portion of the movement physics. In the air, there was no friction applied to the ball, so adding the same amount of torque that you do on the ground (which is how it was working before) would, in the air, immediately send the ball into overdrive, and cause the landing to be uncontrollable. Now I've changed it so that in the air, only a portion of the torque is applied, which doesn't effect the air movement speed, but it does make the landing much more reasonable.

Another thing that was changed was the way jumping was checked. While it is still definitely a work in progress, I added accuracy to the ground check by increasing the number of points checked from 1 (in the center) to 5 (all sides and the center), which means that on slopes, the check is much more accurate. I'm still working on the actual physics of the jump, so bear with me

I also fixed a bug where the gem indicators would sometimes disappear (this was caused by the gem indicators going behind gems, which were ahead of them in the render queue, now the indicators are always the last thing to be rendered, so they will always show up).
If you were getting lag before, I've added a couple things (and removed some) that should definitely help your frame rates. Before, all quality settings were using the reflective and refractive gem shader, this has been changed so that only the highest quality setting will use that shader, other settings will just be slightly translucent with secular reflections. Also, the camera that shows the map when loading the game was remaining enabled even after your marble spawned, which was requireing the level to be rendered twice every frame for each camera. Now when the marble spawns that camera is destroyed, so you should see a decent framerate boost from that. I also added occlusion culling (meaning that geometry that is hidden from view by other objects is removed) which should give a marginal increase in framerate.

No pictures since it's hard to show these changes, so you'll just have to play to see

Some Feedback


First off, it seems more responsive and playable now, which is good. The physics could still use some work IMO, but they are still pretty good as is. Maybe speed the marble up a bit, and completely eliminate what skid is still there. (Or maybe you have and I am imagining it, not sure.)

One minor change I would suggest that makes a big difference is to make the marble bigger. It's hard to get used to at first, but I think as a multiplayer game MBO at least was better for the larger marble. Of course testing this could come later, since its such an easy change.


Now, as for graphics, the shadows fade out very close to the camera (except on max detail). It gives the sense that the marble is bringing the night with it when you roll under a bridge, even on the second best quality setting. And even more so if you go lower. Probably best to entirely disable them at that point, though culling them would probably be fine if it was done quite a bit further away. Or you could entirely avoid the issue by baking them in, and only having dynamic shadows for things that move.

Also not finding any gems, are they not currently on the map?


BTW, just curious, hod did you get that map into Unity?

Hey Don.Gato, the map was imported in as an fbx file, Trace sent it to me and I was just able to drag and drop. The gems currently only spawn when two people are in the map. I did this so that you can't join a round and be 100pts behind, but I realize that this is probably not necessary, so I'll likely change it.

I tried baking shadows, but there was a problem with using hundreds of little pieces to build the map instead of one large mesh, and unity couldn't handle over 300 lightmaps at a time. I'll continue to work on it, but baked lighting may have to wait for a new map.

For marble size, it's a tricky thing, because if I zoomed the camera in and shrunk the map, it would accomplish the same thing. Changing the size of the marble changes all the physics variables, and after doing a bit of research from MBG and MBU, the current marble is in between in size. I am constantly tweaking all of the variables to try to tighten everything up, so it is quite possible that I end up increasing the marble size. I'm not sure there is any skid left, at least I haven't seen the marble skid in a long time, but I'll see if I can replicate it and if I can, I'll try to increase the friction even more.

Thanks for the suggestions!
- Blueteak

Jul 27, 2013, 2:55am, helpme wrote:
BTW, just curious, hod did you get that map into Unity?



Any marble blast map can be converted into pretty much any 3d file format if you want. Just need to know how to do it, but unfortunately I never had a use for it before this Unity project

I guess there is no skid, but something still feels a little... off.

Also the marble occasionally hops a little when rolling around. That could be mis-alignments in the map though

I added the first version of lightmaps, they'll be updated later for higher quality but should be good for now (also increases framerates). And because using lightmaps required combining all the mesh pieces, most of the bounce off map alignment issues have been solved.

The unfortunate side effect is that currently the ice has normal friction, and the green bouncy surfaces don't bounce you.

Fixed