I had some relatively amazing progress today. I had zero luck trying to move things myself in _physics_process. So I decided to play around a bit with Godot physics. Besides being fun, it worked out more or less how I wanted. It’s not perfect yet, but it’s a lot closer than it was before today.

I started out by changing the level boundaries from Areas to StaticBodies. Then I changed the Herbert from an Area to a KinematicBody. This caused a few things to break, but only because I had set “collide_with_bodies” to false in my raycast in a couple of places. Once I fixed that, I was happy to see that everything still worked the way it had before. Still no collisions (sadly), but my code generally worked despite it being a different type.

My first step at getting collisions working was to move the node in _physics_process, by simply setting the new translation as I had before. That didn’t work. So I tried reading up on move_and_slide and move_and_collide.

Both of them take a directional vector instead of a new position. So I tried simply taking the vector between the current position and where I wanted it to be. When I tried move_and_collide, it worked – except when it touched something. Then it started moving reeeeaaallllyy slowly. That’s because, I assume, move_and_collide stops the motion when it touches something.

That wasn’t going to work.

I tried move_and_slide next, since it sounded more like what I wanted, and it sort of did work, but it was slower in general. After some more reading and thinking, I decided to simply try multiplying the delta vector, and suddenly things started working much better. I’m not sure what the difference is (the docs mention taking delta into account or not), but I don’t really want there to be too much slop anyway. I just want it to meet the mouse position.

One interesting side effect is that the component with the cylinder collision object worked as I wanted, but the one with spherical collision object allowed the dragged component to slip up and over it. Fun to watch, but not what I want. I should be able to change the spherical shape to a cylinder one to solve it. Seeing this behavior though means that if I ever get into physics full time in a game, it’s going to be a lot of fun. (Maybe I can find a use for the “up and over” behavior.)

There is some quirkiness to work out, and I still have to re-enable the grid setting code (which wants to snap the position – that could be a lot of “fun”), but it’s an incredible breakthrough for me, and I’m happy to have learned something new today as well as move it closer to what I have been wanting.

Day 27: A glimpse of heaven.