I’ve been thinking about this for the past few weeks and I just can’t seem to come to the right conclusion.
I don’t want to use humanoids, as I can’t find a way to make movement instant. The way humanoids currently work, they apply a force (you can’t control) which means that the character slowly increases to the desired speed, rather than immediately reaching it. I can’t find a way to enable rigidity which would mean players would immediately be travelling at a certain speed either. It also means less control over other potential movement types (like sliding, crawling, custom flying, or other small things I like to tinker with).
I don’t want to use body movers (such as LinearVelocity, etc…) as they do not immediately move an object within the same frame it’s set to, and can have side effects such as friction. While they allow more control, they feel less reactive, and aren’t instant or rigid. However, they do allow collisions, which can be good.
I am considering CFrame because this is: instant, rigid, and allows me to move the character within the same frame that input occurs, making movement feel snappy. I can also have further control, in the future if I wanted, over the rate at which a character should reach a target speed and also de-accelerate. They also mean I can implement any number of other mechanics, without interference.
Implementation
Part 1. The capsule Itself
I wasn’t imagining a full length capsule collider, something like this instead:
I.e. the torso, arms, and head would be inside where the capsule collider would be, however the “leg space” would be occupied by where the legs are. This would allow me smoothly move up stairs, ledges, and the sort without encountering bumpy behaviour. I believe this is the optimal way to do part 1 of the problem.
Essentially, collisions would focus on just the upper part of the body (because if your hips can’t make it, then the whole body shouldn’t either).
Part 2. Movement, and potential collisions
This sort of has me stumped. I’m not sure what the best approach to take here is.
My first thought is to do some kind of raycasting, however determining the number of rays to do per second is problematic, as too many rays may cause performance issues on older machines at the cost of higher accuracy, however fewer rays can increase performance at the cost of accuracy.
One problem in particular I can think of is the following.
Imagine this as a picture from behind the capsule collider, moving forward.
The red is the outline of the capsule collider, with the crosses being where raycasts are being shot out, to detect collisions.
The brown grid is some geometry within the game, imagine a garden square fence thing.
With the raycasts, its entirely possible that the character would not detect the geometry and could clip through it as if it was never there.
Now, while this is a low possibility, its still a possibility, and not something I’m really happy about.
There are also other possibilities such as a thin horizontal part, or wedge, not being detected and the character walking through the part, despite the fact that shouldn’t be possible.
One way I could potentially get around this, is by using a boxcast, or partcast, of some kind, in the direction of the movement vector to attempt to detect any parts that may be in the way, and determine the closest point in the opposite direction of the movement vector, to the surface of the capsule. This would then be the maximum magnitude of the movement vector and would be how far the character would move.
This may be possible with standard parts where the shape and orientation can be known, however it’s not with unions or mesh parts as geometry data is not revealed to be able to do collisions on them.
I’m not sure if some kind of method exists that would allow you to sort of partcast, with a direction and magnitude and then return the longest magnitude you could move when that cast is complete without colliding into anything, if it does, please let me know.
Thanks for reading, I know there’s probably not going to be many people out there who are able to answer this, let alone read this, so if you do know, please share your knowledge 