How It Works 1 - RECREATED - Half Life : Alyx - Movement and Collision

[@Aerotactics]

Off-topic, but the metallic controllers are oddly satisfying

[@NimsoStudios]

It's a slight update to my personal themed controller set, but I probably won't be keeping the metallic materials after this. The separated colours are intentional to show which one is left / right at any time without really thinking. I always have the same rule on colours: R = Right = Red, L can be anything L, sss (else). Read that as "Red or Else", or "R or L"

[@Aerotactics]

@@NimsoStudios How do you feel about Beat Saber putting Red on Left?

[@BaseRealityVR]

I love these kind of videos, I often load up the VR games I have to study how things work and make educated guesses on how the systems are working so I can takes notes and try to replicate them in my own VR projects. Having somebody else with a bit more knowledge and experience also confirming how stuff is done is super helpful to me.

[@bossbam]

Not sure how well it would work, but I was thinkingayne you could add a ui that showed what buttons you were pressing on the controllers so that people can tell what buttons you are pressing. I think this would have been useful so that people knew exactly when you were using the artificial movement. And I'm talking about the kind of ui that pro video game players might have just for some more context

[@NimsoStudios]

Good suggestion will try to add that in the next Recreation part.

[@waporwave5066]

Wait what else would be in the series, boneworks? Would you spend that much time to recreate it's system?

[@AlexCKnoll]

We put the entirety of the blueprints for how to make boneworks body/locomotion on display in the game, so it hopefully shouldn't take that long.

[@thesensur6214]

Alex Knoll Wait, your a boneworks dev? If so, Love your game!

[@RDR911]

Alex Knoll that’s awesome that you guys made it public!

[@NimsoStudios]

As Alex mentioned they'd put a diagram on the wall in the first level of the game. I'd studied a bit of the actual movement though the same way I did with HL:A especially out of curiosity for how they handle things differently to what I do. If I do take on the game for a How It Works it will likely be in small elements, it's considerably more complex than what HL:A does though there are always similarities when it comes to games. To answer the primary question though, this isn't dedicated to VR games, I think HL:A and BW are pretty much the 2 absolute extreme sides of player movement and pretty much cover everything in between as a result. I want to do this stuff for way more than just VR games, and of course not just for movement systems but any game system.

[@waporwave5066]

@@AlexCKnoll Yes I guess that's true. I know about Bonework's locomotion system to some degree, but I thought that even if you know *how* to do it, it would still take some time/tedious work. I was really just asking if Nim Sony was planning on putting that much time into this series or not. But I guess now that you mention it, maybe it wouldn't take as long as I thought.

[@asterlofts1565]

Amazing work Nimsony!

[@BrainSlugs83]

Good and intriguing content as always. -- Though, I'm still way more interested in physics based systems that track the combined player movement (not just the center of the play space), that prevent users from waking through objects, and that let them fall off edges. (They're not super hard to make in Unity; I'm just tired of seeing so the games that let you walk through walls.)

[@NimsoStudios]

I think you're missing the point of what the game is trying to do here. This system does exactly what you're asking, but it does it intentionally only when the player tells it to. Here I could literally modify a single line of code and skip the Joystick check, it would allow you to have full collision the entire time even when you walk around in play space. The center of the play space is not for the player to understand or care about, it is just the necessary element to correctly applying movement in VR, you never move things within the tracked space by code, they follow tracking no matter what, it's what you can add to that that matters.

[@ryc2236]

I never thought about physics objects and snap turn, interested to see the next vid and what solution/explanation you show off!

[@NimsoStudios]

Hey remember the spoon in the Matrix. Well that's kind of what's going on :P

[@honglouis]

this is really impressive!

[@claudiu2317]

making half life alyx 2? 🤔🤔🤔🤔

[@hewhoisknownastaco]

I imagine this subject matter does not interest a lot of people, but for the people that actually enjoy this, this is super freaking interesting. Thank you for sharing all your investigations/research. I'm curious though, do you/anybody like or dislike the way HL:Alyx pops you back to where you were before you collided with a wall? Or would it be better if it detected a middle somehow and realized it should pop you out the other side since you are closer to the other side of the wall? To me it seems more intuitive the second way, but maybe it would be jarring for some reason.

[@NimsoStudios]

It should never put you on the opposite side of something in my opinion. there is no way you could get there based on the character control system's physical limits. Here for example there's no mantling, so it's physically impossible for me to have climbed over the walls, in HL:A yes there is mantling, but I can step through small head sized gaps (as I showed in my review) and the game just allows it, I think it should always put you back where you were, unless the control system itself is capable of reaching the destination, which is more complex to calculate.

[@hewhoisknownastaco]

@@NimsoStudios I think that definitely makes sense at least from a game design perspective. You wouldn't want to let the player bypass parts of levels by letting them stick their head through a thin wall and essentially teleport to what would be a location further along in the level.

[@christianlipa7342]

It's amazing dude!!

[@kmemz]

What if you implemented this system, or at least part of it, in your physically based IK project? Instead of using a capsule, you have the mesh of the player model detect collisions. And for stuff like leaning over the concrete barriers, the IK detects that collision, and starts leaning over it, instead of pushing the player back, or otherwise not letting the player put their head over the barrier. I think it could provide an extra layer of smoothness and potential immersion on top of what's already there. Also, for better reference of controller input, I would suggest rigging the button presses and thumbstick movement to move the ingame controllers via armature, and perhaps you can model in some transparent light points or rings that show up on top of or around each button when you provide capacitive/non-touch input. That would give us a much better idea of what you're actually inputting, assuming the hands/controllers are in view.

[@artmanstudios7037]

What if collaboration projects could be done inside a vr world?

[@forwatching6708]

Still interesting but this is kinda like when you're watching an anime and they put in filler episodes mid season just as things were getting really good XD

[@zneez4768]

How does the slightly shorter capsule work? He says it traces horizontally and checks the ground for height differences. Is this a trigger collider or is he using raycasts?

[@NimsoStudios]

I write all my character controllers' collision systems manually rather than using the existing helper components. So I use the physics functions for detecting and tracing Capsule and Sphere shapes through the scene. Here I use 3 shapes as part of the code, the Head Sphere, the overall Capsule, then the Step Capsule. The step capsule is hovering a specified amount above the ground, when I trace movement I trace using the step capsule so it never hits things that you can step over, it then traces the radius of the capsule down and extends the same amount below the ground level, this allows me to instantly step up or step down if the floor level is close enough. If the floor is too low it isn't detected as a step and counts as falling off a ledge, if the floor is too high to step up it gets hit in the first trace, so it's detected as a wall.

[@PavolZajicekXR]

We need unity plugins from you :)

[@RDR911]

Sweet!

[@dennisrichards2540]

I know this video is about movement but wanted to say, I would rather VR developers created graphically simple but well thought enviroments like this over attaining graphical parity with normal games any day of the week. I understand some companies are held to a very high standard when it comes to graphics like Valve and I respect their decision to make HL:A look great (but I would still enjoy HL:A if it looked like this) 90% of developers out there could do with taking a step back from the graphics department and take advantage of lowpoly enviroments.

[@kingreinhold9905]

300 lines of neat code is not really quick and simple in my opinion 😂

[@blaccy5991]

It kinda is tho.... 300 lines for a vr Character Controller on par with HL alyx is "neat"

[@BrainSlugs83]

"neat code" isn't related to how much of it there is. Though 300 lines is a pretty small amount, especially if it's well formatted and commented (i.e if it's neat and tidy).

[@NimsoStudios]

Precisely as @@BrainSlugs83 said. The reason I mentioned neat code here is to highlight just how little was involved in writing this system. I'm a neat freak with code, my scripts have white space, neatly aligned comments and bracket placement that other coders often don't like because I'm apparently "wasting space" So in actuality it's probably more realistic to say 200 - 250 lines of actual functional code... that's pretty short. My platformer game has over 700 lines in just the camera control with no player movement at all.

[@harmlessnut5619]

Dang it 1 minute late

[@mattymatt2323]

I never really liked the slow falling in Alyx, kinda made me feel like I was a balloon boy. I want to see a hybrid of your walking system in HL Alyx with their collision model

[@NimsoStudios]

Was considering trying that out, but I might leave that until after the next element.

[@pixelatedfusion7801]

Wait im actually first, hello!

[@pixelatedfusion7801]

i see "No Views" instead of "0 Views" lol