Posted June 25, 2025 by croutin
Now I have been using as many references as I can to be as accurate as possible mechanically, but because of the differences in compatibility, and of course, the difference in dimensions, most of my work is guessing and assumptions.
My version of what I thought was happening was the obvious two separate hitboxes, but instead of keeping both connected and restrained, scraping yo toes on the ground type shit, I followed the floating capsule method, which for an example sends a raycast from the top hitbox to the ground, and giving it an offset and a restraining point, of which if moved higher or lower than the said offset will send a force in the direction required to recenter it. There are other mechanics such as a balancing rotation, which works pretty much the same, except only for the rotation of the object.
And in our case, I shrunk the hitbox to be a sphere and placed a second one under it. This is the illusion of a weighted body that wiggles and squirms and all that fun, and creates some interesting (and I think accurate) movement situations from the base game.
For future proofing, the slugcat and all other creatures are separated by physics logic and visual logic to help with performance and stuff (just like base game), and the individual colliders still have free rotations, allowing for the slug and other creatures to look and interact with things later down the road when I get back into more advanced procedural animation and IK stuff again.