Tentacle Base IK Works!

Yay!

It’s alive!

The tentacle will accommodate player movement as much as possible without detaching any of the fixed segments. But once the base gets too far then it will detach as many as necessary. Pretty stoked about it working.

Hardest part was figuring out whether I was talking about the segment’s start or end point and off by one errors. Cleaning up the code and adding comments helped with that a lot.

I need to improve the player controls because it’s annoying hitting the WASD keys dozens of times.

Also on the docket is collision detection when doing IK. Here’s an example of the problem: I’m okay with the error at the top where the tentacle base and the pivot of the first segment don’t line up. But that point labeled “159” should be colliding and refusing to rotate. Maybe it should even become fixed?

Taking two frames from the animation above to describe a point.

The first frame is the starting position after the tentacle has been directed south east ish and has had a few segments attach to the ground. The second frame is after the base moves to the right a few steps.

You can see the first segment endpoint (labeled “60”) moves to the left. Well, relative to the base. It doesn’t move with the base to stay ahead of it at all, it just stays where it was and the base moves past it.

I would like it to look more like this. I guess in this case we’re preserving the relative positions of the base and the first segment rather than moving as little as possible.

Actually, that makes me think. Right now, I’m running IK from the base to the first fixed segment. I bet if I run it the other way around, from the first fixed segment to the base, then it’ll look better.

Interesting. When the base moves, maybe the segments closest to the base should move with it and those that are farther away should stay where they are. And some sort of gradation of the points in between?

Booyah. This is just too much fun. Haha.