Star Citizen: Bugsmashers! - Floating into Oblivion

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:06

   [Music] hey everyone welcome to bug Smashers I'm your host Mark aent and I'm a gameplay programmer here at cigla and I take you behind the scenes of some of the most ridiculous bugs we have hope you guys enjoy let's start the show bug bashes all right we are here in the fun fun main menu and we got a fun bug where um when the player first spawns into a single player match um like free flight or DF or survival mode or whatever you wanted to play in single player and if you don't touch any of the

2. 00:00:54

   buttons the player will start floating above the ship and then just keep keep going and going and going forever I did not believe this was true cuz it sounds ridiculous until I tried it and I swear I was laughing for a good 10 minutes it's so ridiculous and so awesome so I just started the match let's let the loading string go and and now we're there and everything might look normal but we're actually ascending into Oblivion if I actually um do free cam you'll notice the player is not in his a

3. 00:01:42

   seat because he is floating somewhere somewhere in Oblivion I don't know where he is he's up there somewhere if I do free cam disabled one he's floating far far far far away you can kind of see the tformer moving it's so weird what's happening well this took me down a long long Rabbit Hole um so to start off um we have a ship and we have a seat and then we also have where is we have a player um we stick the player onto the ship by an attachment using uh the good old attachment system and in theory when the

4. 00:02:30

   ship moves and animates the player will get snapped to the position unfortunately or fortunately our attachment system is a little bit too optimal in a good way where if our ship isn't animating or isn't moving it doesn't necessarily need to move any our attachments so that means if our ship is staying perfectly still we're not shooting we're not flying we're not doing anything in theory we do not need to move the player to this position or any of its guns or items because its position is always going to be the same and that's what this beautiful bits of code do here um so that's why our player actually not teleporting to the seat the reason why he's not moving is because the good old physics code decided when we transition from one

5. 00:03:20

   zone to another zone or the world to inside of the ship um we need to maintain his velocity relative to the zone and that includes um a bunch of things such as As you move in your rotation and all that fun Jazz and during that specific calculation it decides to give the player a slight position due to good old floating Point um resolves so he's moving really really really tiny and it just accumulates really really uh quite a bit so to get around that fun stuff uh in the attachment uh the player um animated character this handles the player's actual skill skeleton and stuff like that uh we have specific areas where when he animates it updates relative to the attachment and all that fun stuff so

6. 00:04:09

   what we want to do is when he's in this specific State we want to just clear the velocity um just in case he happens to get some uh so what we're going to do here is we're going to use uh what is it P I closed all my fun stuff here we go uh so we have this thing called PE status living which we ask the physics system because the player is we call him a living entity it's his physics type you have rigid you have static well the player is living because he has ragd dolls and all that fun um we have this structure called PE status living which will fill out a bunch of interesting information um the particular

7. 00:04:57

   information we want from physics is this velocity um which is what you when you press the button to move or if you're moving through that zone as I was saying um this is the velocity the player has so he can move through the world and if this is not zero what we want to do is now tell physics to clear all of his velocity and rotation because when he's in this seat and stuck to an attachment he shouldn't be have any velocity and just so happens switching from zones does give him a little bit so we're going to disable velocity if he ever has any so let's hit the magic recode button actually we don't have to recode for this one we'll just build CU it's pretty simple to replicate this one since we have to go to the main

8. 00:05:44

   menu and then two single player so we'll let that build and then we'll start up the the game and see what happens I'm sorry I don't have bacon today so it's just going to me drink coffee while it get gets done all right we're back to the main menu let's go to Arena Commander wait for more loading and then go single player go to our free flight and then go to some more loading I love these Line rides they're the best now if I don't touch anything I should still be in the cockpit of my set there we go so I'm no longer floating way into Oblivion I'm actually still in uh the

9. 00:06:36

   ship and everyone's having good times ridiculous bugs hope you guys enjoyed until next time so we had a fun little bug here where if you join into a map and you stay absolutely perfect still the player decides to ascend into Oblivion and well that was just our backend attachment code deciding to be a little bit more OPP opal than it needed and our physics code deciding hey let's give the player a slight velocity when we change his zones with those two combinations and you know having fun and doing their thing it was a perfect storm to send the player off into wherever he wanted to go it was a quick fix to make sure that if he's in the seat and he has done that zone transition to just nuke out any velocity so he stays in the ship until he's ready to move with the ship

10. 00:07:24

    sometime later hope you guys enjoyed until next time thank you for watching so if you want to keep it with the latest and greatest and Star Citizen of Squadron 42's development please follow us on our social media channels see you soon