Collision revisited... again... please may it be for the last time!

Arrow keys for movement and crouching, spacebar to jump. Use arrow keys while swinging to increase his spin. Hold down spacebar to make the jump last longer. Hit spacebar again when holding on to a wall to wall jump. Try to make the collision detection fail!

If you want to check out the combat go here

Today's been a good day. I like it when I figure out solutions to long standing problems. Do you remember a while ago when I did a whole update about the bugs I'd fixed? Well this is more of the same, really.

I'm sure you've all noticed that I've always had floors sort of overshoot the walls they're over. This was due to several reasons, all of which would have Dreg happily drop through a floor/wall into oblivion. This is not good for gameplay.

I'd resigned myself to the fact that I would I'd have to make the floor extend beyond the wall whenever designing levels.

But then I noticed some other problems. If Dreg jumps just high enough to be above the wall, but not quite high enough to land on the floor above, this happens:

oh noooooooooooooo!

Yeah, that sucks. You can try to do it on the previous post - it's not so difficult once you realise it's there.

Also, You can very easily fall through the geometry of the little podium at the end. As I said before, I'd simply decided that this would be a limitation of the game engine, so I couldn't have that kind of geometry.

Dreg and the podium are one

But today, as I said, was a good day. My brain was working even better than usual, and I though up a solution. Well, specifically it was to solve the problem presented in the first picture, but the solution was so simple and effective, I realised I could extend it to everything, and it would even work for the podium!

Then I did more stuff to deal with all the little problems I knew existed. Somehow the programming muse was on my side today, and I sorted them out. What a good day it's been!

This is a much bigger deal than you might think. I means I've suddenly liberated myself from constraints while designing my levels. I can have the geometry all over the place and not have to worry about the issues from before. It's amaaaaazing. Did I mention this is a good day?

So I quickly cooked up the level you see above, and it shows all the sorts of things that couldn't be done before, but now can. You'll see there's still some overlap at the corners, but this is done automatically - in the level editor I just have the lines meet each other (of course, don't forget that in the final game you won't be seeing any of these lines - just beautiful, beautiful backgrounds, yeah?).

Play around with it - I'm pretty sure the collision detection doesn't fail, though obviously if it does for you, pleeeeaaaaase tell me!