Bring Beta Modding To Classic

Honestly the physics side of things is the thing I am least happy with in KAG, we should have rolled our own SAT based code and used that.

Unfortunately the decision to use box2d was made at a time when the game was literally in pieces - we could hardly test due to movement code being a terrible of the old and what eventually evolved into the new, the terrain physics being even more of a shambles than they are currently, netcode being completely non-functional one day and semi-broken the next. We needed something to fill the gap so we could fix everything else that was broken.

The decision saved us time at that point, and everything else more or less fell into line - however, issues with box2d (synchronising contacts, dealing with desyncs without crashing everything or causing more desyncs (imagine teleporting a crate to its correct position, which now happens to be inside another crate and you're on your way), issues with joints (using box2d joints gives physical feel but another thing to sync and hell to script, current joints simpler that way but allow things to push through walls), and so on) have eaten a lot of our time anyway - these are issues we wouldn't be having with something that we'd built.

In the end we've turned off or ignored 80% of what box2d can do due to it being too involved for a game like kag, too resource hungry, or just "not feeling right" gameplay wise. It's been akin to taking a sledge hammer to the tack you want to use to hang your picture - it works, but you end up swinging it very lightly and carefully or everything breaks.

 

You foolish fool, so foolish you are.

 

Yet even in beta there has been nothing as good as 190, and previous to that it's perhaps the only game I've ever played where for months at a time I (and many others) would fine it good enough to play 18~ hours a day for months.

 

I've been playing daily too, but it's not something (and I'm not saying beta is shit I haven't found a single game that's satisfied me this way since) that I can play literally 18hours a day and not give a fuck about my time wasted. I wish I could look back and say it was just rose tinted glasses and I hated it/didn't spend that much time either, but at that point it was 3fun5me.

One thing to keep in mind though is that's roughly 200 days after it started, and it took a lot to get there, and it was very easily ruined a few patches later, so hopefully beta gets there, the difference being if beta does, we can go back and keep it forever.

 

Just because it's new also doesn't make it better, your opinion you touted nearly as fact earlier quoted there would have me believe that he was poking at that notion, but who knows.

 

Forces are "additive velocities" at the moment, they're all applied to the velocity at the end of the frame, which is then copied across into box2d. The forces with a position are actually applied directly in box2d though and then the new velocity is taken from there, rather than the other way around, due to forces like that applying a torque as well.

The old movement system is mutually exclusive with "proper" force based physics, but not for the reason you suggest.
Classic simply used velocity setting/control to accomplish movement. If you walked right, your x velocity would be linearly interpolated towards about 3, or 2.5 if you were in the air, or like 1 if you were on a ladder. This happened regardless of if there was a wall there or not. The notching happened because you were "jammed" into the little notches by your x velocity, and could not "bounce off" them with proper forces because the next frame your x velocity would be set "forwards" again anyway. Jumping did a similar thing with y velocity, and the character was forced to "slide" up and over the bumpy, notchy wall. For one frame in there at least you'd be touching a "down" corner and be counted as "on ground" again, and you would jump again and again. That's how notching worked.

Vaulting worked by deciding if you could jump or not based on some tiles around you as well as your "on ground" status (so you could jump "in the air" a little), and made notching a little smoother as a side effect as well.

Of course, this completely destroys the idea of trampolines, boats you can stand on, etc etc - and made knocking someone away require stunning them as well, or they would just set their x and y velocity back to "normal".

Adding a hook like that would unfortunately be terrible for performance - there's overhead for both checking if a hook exists, and a really big overhead for actually calling that hook. Blobs can receive tens or sometimes hundreds of forces each frame, and the overhead there would be completely unjusified.

You should definitely not be using setposition to "fake" velocity when velocity is already there.

 

FWIW we've accomplished 95% classic notching and vaulting with the new addforce system Geti.

 

tfw classic comes to beta faster than beta will ever come to classic

:^)

 

Bad is pretty subjective. The pay has been more than enough to support myself and I thoroughly enjoy most of my work. I've been a big part of making something that hundreds of thousands of people have been able to enjoy. I call that a success.

Re: should be sad - If I let myself care about oldfags pulling the game backwards I'd be a sad man most days. The guys working on the Classic mod know me well enough to have some courtesy about what they're doing and also seem to be motivated more by a "feel" target than functional equivalence with classic, which I can respect.

inb4 @Yagger B8 macro