Day 94: Hitting A Wall, Metaphorically and Literally

Today was the perfect day to work on walls! Got myself to work field collision for the Robotron project so the boundary field could have four different collision checks to test each boundary as necessary. So far, with the addition of a slight top/bottom offset, it works well.

Today was also not the perfect day to run into a wall. Turns out time dilation in Unreal Engine 4 is SEVERELY limited by the PhysX it relies on. The Custom Time Dilation, supposedly for actor-based movement, does not keep into account physics-based motion. Strangely enough, Global Time Dilation is not affected by this issue.

How to fix this? ...There really isn't a way. Linear and angular damping can be increased 10-100 fold to limit individual movement, but still moves rather quickly when interacting with the player and adding forces. I'll have to run it by my producers to see if they want to continue further down that route.

To turn things around, I also looked into tessellation passes on meshes and distorting them with the extra vertices, allowing a neat crystalline effect that can grow as the gravity well crystals grow. By taking the vertices and displacing them by a combination of a tessellation height and a provided texture (normal, other texture, etc) one can achieve a really neat effect:

Oh yeah, and things also deactivate based on the tracking crystal instead of a tricky timed effect; it fits plenty better with our existing mechanics and provides some interesting limitations on the various effects of each line.