{"author_name":"Julio","cat":"LD #36","comments":[],"epoch":1472521020,"likes":1,"metadata":{"p_key":"3472","p_author":"Julio","p_authorkey":"501085","p_urlkey":"38933","p_title":"Post Mortem Et Lipsum Dolor Sit Amet","p_cat":"LD #36","p_event":"LD36","p_time":"1472521020","p_likes":"1","p_comments":"0","p_status":"UPD5","us_key":"501085","us_name":"Julio","us_username":"Julio","event_start":"1472169600","event_key":"35","event_name":"LD36"},"text":"

My excuse<\/strong><\/p>\n

The one thing I needed to make my game complete was to\u00a0be able to tell when you’ve hit an obstacle or thing.<\/p>\n

\"Screen<\/p>\n

Pretty simple, right?\u00a0Add a collider to each thing and then check if the player’s\u00a0thing is\u00a0touching any other thing. Unity’s physics engine makes this as painless as it can be.<\/p>\n

But\u00a0that\u00a0didn’t work for me. Even when my objects were touching one another, they still\u00a0failed the\u00a0collision check every time.<\/p>\n

Can you guess why? I’ll give you Unity pros a second to figure it out.<\/p>\n

Yes, all the objects had proper box colliders.<\/p>\n

Yes, the collision areas were overlapping properly.<\/p>\n

No,\u00a0they weren’t on separate layers.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0problem is\u00a0that\u00a0colliders are not updated synchronously.<\/em><\/p>\n

They only get updated when the physics engine does its thing; that is, on FixedUpdate()<\/a>. And my game doesn’t use FixedUpdate() or even Update(). It’s turn based; all iterations of the game loop are triggered by the Next button.<\/p>\n

So when\u00a0you click Next, the mule moves forward, touches\u00a0the obstacle\/relic\/whatever, and the game immediately checks if they’re touching; but they actually aren’t, because even though their positions have moved, the colliders haven’t yet.<\/p>\n

I don’t know what the right thing to do is in my situation. Maybe I should store the locations of the obstacles in an array. Maybe I should use colliders and refactor the game logic to run in FixedUpdate. Either way, LD36 is over.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

What I learned<\/strong><\/p>\n