How can I shoot a puck into an octagon?

[Emerson3]

Hey Clickteam,

I'm making a puck throwing game that has 30 different challenges. One of the challenges is to time throw a puck into a spinning hollowed out octagon type thing. The octagon is missing one side so the player could make it inside the octagon. I made a simple octagon active object and animated the frames so that it spins. Here are two issues that I'm running into.

1. When my octagon spins, the pixels look a little distorted. Is there a way for it to keep it's natural shape while spinning?
2. Even though one side is open on my octagon object, the puck doesn't enter it. No matter how perfect I shoot the puck, it just bounces off. Is it because the octagon is a single object?

Thanks Clickers!

[casleziro]

1: This happens unless you use some fancy scaling/rotation shader or have a very large object. Not using Quality = 1 on the rotation will make it look less blurry, if that helps (it's what I usually use).
2: Make sure you have Fine Collision checked in the octagon's properties. If this doesn't fix it then it might be:

-You have some stray pixels you missed when erasing the side of the octagon, that the puck is colliding against
-Your puck's hitbox is too large for the gap, or is a square that causes the edges to catch (might be a no-brainer, but it's good to make sure)
-Something up with your collision engine

The octagon being a single object shouldn't have any effect on that bug, as long as it is indeed hollow.

[Emerson3]

Thanks Casleziro! I'm at work right now, input mario dying sample, and can't wait to double check if I missed some pixels.

What does "Not using Quality = 1 mean?" What is quality and what does giving it values mean? Thanks Casleziro.

[casleziro]

When rotating an object using its angle in the event editor, you'll be asked what Quality you want to use for the rotation: 1 (resampling) or 0 (no resampling).

speed quality.png

I just realized that you specified you were using an animation to make the octagon spin, though :P

This only applies to manually rotating the object through events. You might be better off switching over, because then you'll have those two options available to you. In my experience the animation editor always uses horrible resampling when using the rotate feature in it. You also might find that rotating this way is smoother.

For a quick test when you're home:

-Set your spinning animation speed to 0 (or make a new animation with only one frame of the octagon, preferably one that isn't rotated)
-Open the event editor and make an Always condition
-Go to your octagon's event column and find Scale/Angle -> Set Angle
-Set the angle to Angle("your octagon")+3 (or minus, if you want the octagon to rotate the other direction)
-Set the quality to 0 at first, then to 1, and find which you like better

Play around with the number 3 to adjust the speed, of course.

[Emerson3]

Hey man, that's great to learn! I'll try using the angle this evening.

[casleziro]

Edited my post a bit after the fact (like usual ) and posted an example. Good luck!

[schrodinger]

+1 what casleziro says ^

rotating an object in the animation editor leds to awfully distorted pixels
while rotating in runtime will give you crisp & smooth results
(and far more control on speed & direction!)

plus a minor notice:
remember to place the hotspot in the middle of the octagon animation

[Emerson3]

I appreciate that example casleziro!

Yeah Schrodinger, is there a reason why it looks so bad in the animation editor?

[Shabadage]

Sorry to hijack this thread, but I've a quick question about action points and rotating. I built an FPS thing a while back using the built in vector movement, I handled strafting by placing two other actives based on the action point of the player character and then moving the player character over to that other active. While using this practically, it seems like the action point rotation only updated every 5 or 6 degrees, even though each loop the angle of the player character was only changing by 1. Does setting higher quality rotations have any effect on when the action point is recalculated?

[Sumo]

@Shabadage

Were you having the character always look towards the active? The animation editor only allows for 32 different directions when rotating. Maybe that's why it seemed like it only updated every 5 or so degrees. To fix this look up 360 degree rotating using trigonometry, that will allow the full rotation.