/games/ - Games

I’ve been coding some more in vscode and learned a few important things about coding player movement for really any 3d game. I then went to test and compare results to both movement shooters like ultrakill, apex and titanfall and with games with generally pretty good movement overall but aren’t as free like mw2022, insurgency sandstorm and the latest version of arma 3

It’s hard and complicated, and should be treated with a lot of care. Generally the players overall speed should never, under any conditions be set to a specific value. What do I mean? It’s simple, just make sure the players net velocity is always open to change and isn’t locked into a set speed under any given moment(unless they’re attacking or preforming an interaction that’s a little tricker to handle) since it gives the player the inertia they need to quickly transition into other forms of movement or interaction they wouldn’t be able to preform if it was locked completely on frame one. Why locking in movement causes this is because of startup frames, if your speed ever gets locked in to a set value then every time you try to preform any other action you have to wait for the startup frame duration to end before you have the speed to preform any other action. For example transitioning rapidly between ADS while sprinting. From what I could gather if the player quickly decelerates but doesn’t lock immediately into their aiming speed they have the momentum to cancel out of that speed and go back into a full sprint without stopping. If there speed and movement were locked frames they would aim but they’d have to wait slightly longer for the end lag of the ADS animation to start and then finish before they can move at a faster speed again. There’s many more interactions that handle way better with a little acceleration like this and it’s part of why it’s important to allow some level of inertia for the players character available at all times, helps make movement feel faster even in games that don’t have necessarily strong movement in comparison to others.