Automating Contact, Pull, Recovery

I got stuck trying to figure out what the ideal angles for contact and recovery phases are so I’ll just hard-code them for now.

For automating the three phases of the walk I guess I need to have it automatically extend in the direction of recovery, then automatically make contact. Then if the player is pressing ’d’ then move the player to the right as soon as contact is made.

Combined Recovery and Contact Phases

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I pressed ’d’ manually to move the player when the tentacle was fixed but damn, that’s looking close.

Also, I switched from using ImageMagick back to gifsicle for generating these. Not sure if it was my reason for using it before but ImageMagick gets memory allocation errors if the animation is too big… and not even that big. The above animation is 590 KB.

Tentacle Bounce During Pull Phase

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During the pull phase, the segments between the base and the first fixed segment bounce up and down. It makes sense. It’s because I’m using segments that have a length so when they rotate off the ground the height changes a lot. Looks like the error at the base is moving up and down, too. I hope I can smooth that out. Maybe just by having shorter segments (and more of them). Or maybe when I add thickness to the tentacle I’ll add some smoothing that helps things.

Damn, that’s cool, though.

Player Moving Faster than the Tentacle

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When there are more tentacles then I’ll be able to move the player forward during the recovery phase. During this phase I need to give the tentacle a stiffness so that it doesn’t just fold back into the player as the player moves toward it. Or worse, fail to get in front of the player at all because the player is moving faster than the rotation of the first segment.

Collisions During Player Movement IK

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I think the next thing to work on is getting collision detection working when the player moves around. The sketch is working well for players that are moving to the right but they need to be able to move in any direction.