Devlog #1: Speed, Level Design, and Camera Bugs

In this update I talk about tuning the vehicle's speed, the beginning of deliberate level design, and some tricky camera bugs that made me try to understand quaternions.

I realized through playtesting that the speed of the vehicles was too high for combat. By the time you noticed an opponent you had already sped past one another. Introducing a global speed multiplier which I can modify in network games allowed me to find a speed that made combat feel good.

Slowing down the vehicles helped make combat more interesting, but also made traversing the maps boring due to how long it took to pass stationary features. The need to keep both feelings of speed in mind has begun to inform level design, making that process more deliberate.

While blocking out levels to discover features that work I encountered some interesting camera bugs. The occluder avoidance system was failing on slopes, for two reasons: the pitch angle was not clamped and could exceed -90 or 90 degrees, and adding incremental pitch values to eulers while looking for line-of-sight candidate positions is not the correct solution. Switching to quaternions and identifying the correct axis of rotation is the right approach here.

The axis of rotation, in this case, is the cross product between the camera's desired rotation's forward and up vectors, since we typically want to look for a new line-of-sight by rotating up or down (depending on where the occluder is).