The character controller

[KingSnail]

Is it me or is the character controller from the newton demos really bugged?
Inside my game when I repeatedly go in a wall, I suddenly bounce in the air and end up outside the level.
This also happened to me in the compiled demo which was included with newton 2.16.

Will these bugs be fixed? or is it better to write the controller myself? I have no idea how to even start

[Julio Jerez]

No, that should not happens at all. do you have a test to reproce it?

[KingSnail]

http://www.zshare.net/video/750904987e61fbab/

shows the demos, I havent touched them,
and also my own engine which which uses copy and pasted code from the demo

[Julio Jerez]

I do not remeber if I changed the joint since 2.16 I knwo I make so change on it some time I did no see those crashes, but maybe I did not test it long enough
2.19 and try it, in your engine, let my know if it is the same before I check it out. That sould not happens.

[KingSnail]

Ok I have taken a long time to post here about this issue, but I have now programmed a complete new engine using OpenGL.
The character controller works a lot better, but theres still some issues.

max stair step factor and jump
if you add an impulse then the character will have resistance to jump.
I had to change the stair factor to 0 when Im jumping and back to other value when I land for a temporary solution for this.


stuck issues
The controller still gets stuck on sharp corners!
Please please please fix it
That would make people very happy, because otherwise the character controller is pretty perfect.

[Houdini0091]

I have the exact same issue as KingSnail. Impulse does not work when using the player controller if the player is on the ground. If the player controller is in the air then everything works great. Changing the stair factor to 0 makes everything work, but of course then the player can't travel up stairs, etc. Changing the stair factor to 0 also fixed another issue where when the player controller would collide with another body that is against an immovable object, the player controller would suddenly appear on top of the other body, even though the body was much higher than the step factor.

Julio, can you take a look at these two issues? They are both related to the step factor, and the only two issues I know of with the player controller.

Thanks!

- Houdini

[collerblade]

Hi all

I have the same problem too. I cant jump when im on the ground. But if i set the stairfactor to 0 it seems to be working. I monitored the m_playerState variable, & guess what? If the stairfactor is zero, the player state is jumping from 0 to 1 and back to 0 again (0 = ground; 1= air). In every update it changes its value. Thats why the jumping is working.. I hope i was clear.

CollerbladE

[Carli]

I solve the problem by destroying the controller on jumping and recreate it on hitting the ground.

[KingSnail]

I just want to bump this topic.
Julio please look into the character controller, I know your busy at work with Newton 3
but character controller is a very important element of a game.
Currently you have no tutorial for it
It gets stuck.
The bug with the jumping on the ground being impossible (main problem from this thread).

I think it would be very nice for you to do a detailed tutorial with diagrams of how it actually works
And fix the code by doing some extensive visual debugging by making a 'playground' of slopes to test every possibility
And i am sure users will apreciate a way to make it crouch etc.

[Anacardo]

Bump seconded. I changed from bullet to newton because I was told it had a working character controller. Now after setting it up I find this out

Could we know what is the status on this?

[Julio Jerez]

Bump seconded. I changed from bullet to newton because I was told it had a working character controller. Now after setting it up I find this out
Could we know what is the status on this?

what it is that you want wit teh controller?

[KingSnail]

I am about to work on character controller again and I will post some videos if its still broken,
I havent checked out the controller for a while

[KingSnail]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULt9sANqPOw

OK I uploaded a small video of a character controller bug.
It is using same settings as the cpp files inside newton samples folder.
Maybe if you have time you can try the same model as I have loaded.
http://www.crytek.com/cryengine/cryengine3/downloads
I import it with assimp library and have optimized collision tree as serialized
collision. I plan to add it to scene collision later.

[Julio Jerez]

I clearly see that you are usin teh Netwon palyer controller but the site you poste is from a crytek engine.
I am a litle confused,
any way, I see the tunneling Bug but hwo can I test it?

BTW that looks very elaborated, is that your work?
I think you are using the same level mesh I use in teh demo call Atrium Sponza Palace, but is a small section that is public domain.

[KingSnail]

I am using my own engine. The crytek page is just a download page.
The main artist from crytek remade the sponza atrium adding the lion and more.
There was a huge bug with the plant leaves causing character to be stuck in place
and the controller kept going up and up until it would reach the roof. So I removed the collision
on the plants and its fine. I can understand that lots of small pointy triangles would be bad for
the physics engine but I consider the lion to be fine for this purpose.

I have the collision running localy (interpolating character controller positions in another thread).
I also run the same simulation on the server, and in the next week or so I am going to connect the two
and the result should be decent I think. I already had the client sending inputs and server controlling collision before
but lerp/extrapolate/client prediction was turning out to be messy. I think dual collision simulation of client + server is ideal.

Maybe you could download the obj model from the crytek link? And test it out?