Changing core mechanics to better support solid and uphill cross country jumps 🐎 (Patreon)

Quick video of the latest bigger work-in-progress project.

For the cross country aspect of Tales of Rein Ravine to truly work well, one core thing needs changing - how the playable horse pawn is built. By a pawn we don't mean the horse's appearance, but how the character is programmed and interacts with the world.

Jumping solid obstacles was horribly unideal with previous character. This is mainly why cross country was omitted from the demo games. The demo horse was built on top of a standard character layout, which has a vertical hitbox. A hitbox is an invisible shape in the game world that makes objects collide with each other instead of going through.

Above a human character with a vertical capsule-shaped hitbox.

The vertical hitbox went all the way to the ground between the horse's legs, if that makes sense. So when jumping over a solid object, the hitbox would bump into it mid-air, stopping the horse. The only way to get around that would have been to make the jump insanely high - if you've ever wondered why horses often jump unnaturally high in video games, some type of hitbox issue is likely why. 

Another annoyance caused by the standard hitbox was that the horse's back went through walls. If you back up the horse into a wall in the demo it goes through it.

So what I'm doing is programming a more advanced custom character where the hitbox is horizontal instead. It's a bit of a process, since many core features have to be built from scratch, like gravity. In the video you see a rough version of it, though it doesn't visually seem much different.

Another change in the works is how the jump animation is programmed. To the previous video some of you commented about the jump looking odd - it's because the jump is no longer one animation, but it consists of multiple phases which blend relative to how far the horse is from ground. So if you jumped off a cliff the jump animation would not finish until it actually hits the ground, or with an uphill jump the animation finishes sooner.

As a bonus, at the end of the video you can see me testing a falling feature for laughs. If you followed the very early Horsegame.exe practise development you've seen this before. 🤣 However I do want to emphasize that this feature is very very experimental and by a big chance it might not make it to the game. If it was added, the fall would only happen on extreme fails, and more likely the horse would refuse than to attempt a dangerous jump. Or maybe some horses would be more trusting of you with the distances and some less.