It takes time to make a mod in Teardown. Sure, you can just belt something out and push it on to the workshop, but the mods that seem to endure are the ones that had more than just 15 minutes spent on their design.
I’m a visual person, so when I’m working I like to sketch out things to figure out a specific problem, or just to have a visual representation of a bit of code that I’m working on. It keeps me on track, and is a valuable tool to double-check that I’m attacking something properly to solve it.
Here’s a few of the drawings I made while making the Omnicar, with some brief explanation of what is going on.
Remember Trigonometry? I sure didn’t, so I had to get some brush-up courses and relearn a few things. (I picked up a good deal via Humble Bundle for Gamedev dot tv “Math for games” courses. Cost me $5 bucks, lol.) One of my problems was locking a plane of coordinates to an arbitrary moving target, which required a few calculations. This diagram is basic Trig, properties of Sine/Cosine and how they relate to a unit circle.
The degree markings are how they are represented in-game. In Teardown you get 180 degree plus/minus, switching over at the 0 mark. The quadrants just represent which is positive at that degree of the circle, which helps with troubleshooting things.
Oh hypotenuse, we hardly knew thee! Seriously though, this came out to be more useful than I originally anticipated. Figuring out angles using right-triangles is quite easy and Hypotenuse lengths are useful if you’re doing things around an origin point.
The heavy-lifting of calculating tangent coordinates. I wanted to put sprites on a row of these, so they’d stay with the car and be properly perpendicular. I had to do some other steps that I don’t outline here, but this diagram helped me quite a bit to get it going.
Do you like dynamically resizing sprites? I sure do. This was the hairy bit that I had to figure out with the existing tangent coordinate calcs. Bunch of values that I was working with on a test case, just to make sure that I had it all nailed down before feeding the Sprite Renderer coords and values.
I went through quite a few iterations on how to make the “skateboard” design drive more consistently. Initially the rear of the car would pivot and overtake the front, spinning it around at times. It was very “loose” in its characteristics, so I had to design something that would dampen the Y-Sway. I’m happy to say that I came up with something that worked out.
Using any of the API functions that contain the “Constrain” keyword can yield some rather hilarious results. At one point, I tried a test where it immediately turned the car into a whirlwind of broken parts ascending into the sky. That was quite funny, now that I look back on it.
Figuring out acceleration curves. From what I can tell, most vehicles in Teardown use a linear acceleration model. That works for most things, but I wanted something with a bit more finesse. Enter Quad Bezier curves! With a start, mid, end point I could make a curve to my liking.
The real trick was doing the rescaling needed to take arbitrary bezier 2D coordinates and make them relate to the speed I was adding to my vector forces. That, and making a timer mechanism that allowed me to control the duration of the curve itself, feeding the Bezier function “live” so it would return a proportional speed value in relation to the maximum speed limit.
Did I tell you it got complicated? Oh yeah, it sure as hell did. But it works, so that is what matters. Its pretty nice to be able to “nudge” the forward control and get a smooth rise in speed – so you can control things on the low-end but also do a full burnout to maximum.
Did I mention the bezier curve is adjustable? Oh yes, it is. I haven’t put a visualization of it in the UI, but its in there.
There’s more to come as I complete things. I think I’m at the 90% stage in the project, which means I’m getting impatient to finish and I want to work on something else. I’ll get there though and release it, I promise.
Until next time…