5 tips for better platformer controls 

Excellent suggestion!

Hi sorry to bother but what exactly is an action queueing system?

Same question here. Would I apply individual actions from a queue (depending on the current state) instead of having conditions for all actions? But how would that be an alternative to a state machine?

​@@michasengotta2295​ its basically queuing inputs, of course you can use state machine but its simpler to queue inputs into an array

@@stan7132 I still don't understand how queuing input has anything to do with the way that state is stored or transitions are handled.

What if the jump button extends your legs and you let physics do the rest. At least the button will feel alive thanks to the animation.

Wait... Isn't what you're describing _exactly like_ Classic Sonic momentum?

​@@Onaterdemthey do sound really similar, really the only difference aside from the speed values, traction, etc. is that SMB's is changed with the run button.

@@Onaterdem well yeah but Mario and Sonic momentum are different in ways. You hold the run button to build up speed and Mario can’t go fast enough to run loops

@@PLAYER42_ready Hmm well holding down the run button is like holding down the forward button with extra steps, so it's still the same in that regard. The max speed is just an easily changeable variable.

Thank you! That's really kind. I'm just trying to be helpful 😅

I know the thing that you mean gem fruit, but don't be fooled! There is no secret sauce. All it takes is introspection, constructive self criticism, and the drive to better oneself. From there, you can become a master at anything. It all takes hard work!

Thank you!! Never know what the algorithm is going to do, so we can hope!

Reaction time of a human is 300 ms. Especially feeling what is under your foot takes all the 2 m of nerve signal through your body and may even be slower than seeing? Anyway, I accept this explanation for jump buffers, and demand that they are also used while running. So running gets a "take a swing" animation, which will instantly become a jump the moment you pass over a ledge? Why is a ledge more important than jumping over oncoming opponents?

@@ArneChristianRosenfeldt Enemies often have a smaller hurtbox than it looks like for just that reason. That way the game is a little more lenient when it comes to dodging them. The same can also apply to your attacks but in the opposite direction where your hitbox is larger than the attack looks like so it is easier to hit enemies than it looks. Coyote time and some ways that games may nudge you a bit in certain directions or making your hitbox a bit smaller at times can be used to help you with jump precision when running. Also the jump buffer thing I would say is more about registering the intent of the player rather than about reaction time concerns. Without it they can't time a jump close to the landing without running the risk of missing the window for it by as little as a single frame. Then it will take a fair bit of time before they notice and can press the button again. By using the jump buffer you make it a little easier to time it right.

Thanks! Glad you enjoyed it!

Hahaha, thanks! Always nice to have fans 😅

One example that I see of people having trouble with rigid body's is on slopes, it's because the idea that a running person (or robot or hedgehog or whatever) can be represented as a single rigid shape starts to break down in a case like this. It's intuitive to us that a person should have little difficulty running up a slope (like it literally takes more energy but platforming characters tend to ignore stamina) but in order to do that in a way we expect we have to things like rotating the player to match the slopes orientation, which is actually usually too much rotation visually but it works in a cartoony style. Even then the large increase in friction from pushing against the surface while it goes away from the direction of gravity is hard to account for in a pleasant way, especially if you want the speed up and down the slope to not be very different. The solution imo is to not actually slide the player along the ground, what you really should be simulating is the feet moving underneath the player at their intended running speed, while the feet are in contact with the ground they should be imparting force to the players rigid body (through a physics constraint of some kind, most physics simulations have these, hopefully they are capable enough to deal with a situation like this) and interacting with the ground by way of friction. This is obviously pretty tough to do, compared with switching to a kinematic system, but it's not like you really need to simulate the players legs as well or match their feet positions to where it looks like their feet are. so you can still have full control of the "feet" bodies and the constraints between them and the player. So yeah slopes are really hard for a rigid body player, because without them you can sometimes get away with making the player one solid rigid object that just slides around. Also there could be a more simple way to emulate the feel of running up and down a slope than with separate bodies for feet, For example I've played around with using friction to drive tanks in 3D by simply modifying the physics system to let me add a specific amount of velocity to the friction calculation specifically, so I could make the tread surfaces behave in a physically accurate way and it worked like a charm, even though the physics I was using was never built to accommodate that.

It occurs to me now that one very quick thing to try for a rigid body player on a slope is to modify their gravity vector to be closer to the direction of the slope, you could even potentially make the effect fall off for steeper slopes to get gradually less traversable slopes in a pretty smooth way (you wouldn't want that for games where you can run up slopes onto walls though hehe)

Good point! And if you need to enter fall state after jump state, you may want to start passing data between states, such as what the last state was, that way you can make sure you only start the timer if you come from a ground state. Can also do things like track when the player was last on the ground, etc.

Thank you! Glad you enjoyed the video!

In this example, I just change the position of the object by the appropriate amount the same frame it's detected. A little crude, but should be ok if we're just doing a small amount of pushing

Dustforce! A little bit older now, but a very slick platformer

Yeah, Super Mario World really nailed it in a way few games have been able to emulate. Kind of crazy how ~30 years later it still controls better than most. Thanks for watching!

Thanks! Doing a bit better now, at least :)

Thanks! It's an old flash game named Geote, so not directly playable these days but I just discovered that Flashpoint has it archived and it seems to be more or less playable! flashpointproject.github.io/flashpoint-database/search/#29cd3cb3-13f7-442d-8ab4-fb60fac5200f

Dustforce! It's a very flow-oriented platformer

@@TheShaggyDev Thank you ! The animation and art there is so inspiring , amazing .

There are exceptions to everything, including using rigidbodies. They can, of course, be used for a game, but it's easy to end up fighting the physics with them if you're going for a more traditional style platformer. That's all I'm getting at here.

@@TheShaggyDev And fighting the physics does indeed happen for a few specific jumps and other areas of the game. I was just wondering if you had any knowledge of the game's behavior in general due to how it handled things. And thank you for this wonderful video!

@@casualbird7671 Glad you liked it! Off the top of my head, no, but I've not looked at that game in a loooong time.

But what about us people who actually go outside and jump ( into and over water )? Why would an unrealistic jump feel right?

Changing the shape of the collision box may have other undesired impacts, as you don't want the character to be unfairly hit by something or to appear to be floating off a cliff if the player stops on the edge. Managing a simple timer on a character is very low overhead and not something I'd be worried about in regards to performance.

Games already use the bounding boxes for the ledge and it looks ridiculous when the player stands over the ledge with one pixel touching the platform.

Game devs seem to add random forces to a rigid body and wonder why the simulation wreck havocs on their level design. Has anyone tried to just run animations, like running or extending the legs of the figure? With the correct friction and in 2d this might work. And put a constraint on rotation ( but Sonic on slopes?) . Oh we may need some up vector logic.

In Godot, the move_and_slide function has parameters for handling stopping on a slope. No need to modify the state machine: docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/classes/class_kinematicbody2d.html?highlight=kinematicbody2d#class-kinematicbody2d-method-move-and-slide

@@TheShaggyDev i tryied it but my player still sliding

@@nada56nil Double check the up_direction parameter and the max slope angle. If that doesn't fix it, could check out some other resources on that specific issue and see if that helps. PigDev has done a video on slopes, for instance: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-9l-tf97z2bg.html

@@TheShaggyDev i tried the pigdev one and worked but where i put the script from the video? And this works in the 3.5 version?

@@nada56nil With the disclaimer that I've not implemented the PidDev technique myself, it looks like you'd just put it in the MoveState since he's working with the move_and_slide_with_snap function And yes, I don't see any reason why this wouldn't work in 3.5

Most likely it's because we can always jump when entering the fall state, and the jump state probably transitions into the fall state in your game, which has happened to me before as well. What I like to do for edge cases like that, is start passing a little bit of data into the state on change. For instance, if we pass in a reference to the previous state in our "State.enter()" function, we can only allow coyote jumping if we didn't come from a jump state.

@@TheShaggyDev ok, thx but I already fixed that

The code in this video is built upon my state machine series, which is where BaseState comes from. I've got a few videos on state machines if you'd like to learn about them and build the same machine I use here (can skip the Godot 3 videos if you're not on 3, though that's what was out when I made this video): ru-vid.com/group/PLaiU9HSaKMWtmAIR345HGIz_ijQiyr3kH

Dustforce!

Nah, this is all GDScript, the scripting language of the Godot game engine.

Oh dang, that's a shame. Thanks for letting me know. I'll update the description ☹

Dustforce

Dustforce

I'm afraid I can't help you too much there. I've not done a 2D platformer in Unity so while I've got some ideas, you'd be better served finding a Unity oriented channel to help. The general concepts from this video would still apply though. Coyote time, jump buffering, etc are all engine agnostic.

@@TheShaggyDev Cool, thanks

I believe you can add a rigidbody and make it kinematic in unity

I use Godot. May be what you're referring to?

@@TheShaggyDev it is, and thank you, was thinking of using Godot or Unity for my game, think I'll give Godot a try

Not sure I follow? The last section is about customizing how the jump works over time, including a variable jump height.

@@TheShaggyDev Sorry, i forget about it. Well, so I will just ask for some way to implement a slope movement in the state machine, I get confused about how to put it inside my player with a state machine, I dont found any tutorial who helps in this case.

@@nada56nil What kind of movement are you wanting to implement?

@@TheShaggyDev moving in slopes without bounce in the end, a slope who the player can up and down according of the angle of the shape.

@@nada56nil Ahh I see. You shouldn't need a state machine for that. Move and Slide can already keep you attached to a slope, then the speed can be adjusted appropriately, though I'm afraid I don't have a resource handy for how to do that. Can probably find more if you search around for slope movement in Godot.

Dustforce!

@@TheShaggyDev Tysm!!! Looks interesting 💕

Dustforce!

It depends on your engine. Most engines have some sort of simpler / faster physics implementation than a rigid body that you can use. And if your engine doesn't offer an alternative, rigid bodies can work too! It just may be more work to get it to feel right.

Maybe? I'm not actively looking, but I'd consider doing one, depending on what it is.

@@TheShaggyDev I don't know how game collabs work. I wish I know someone from my place.

Dustforce!