Conveyor belt physics and UV tricks

I had a bit of a problem making a secure and fully functional conveyor belt line that moves any objects on top of it towards one direction at a certain speed, regardless of the object's mass. It should also do so with multiple stacked objects and dynamic moving objects such as the player character.

Ragdolls

Everyone loves ragdolls! It's not like they're a necessity, but throwing enemies around with the GravGun looks stupid without them. We encountered some problems and found solutions to them and that's what this post is about.

Player movement

  One of the most important things about gameplay for me is how fluent the controls feel and how the character behaves in the game. It has been a constant battle of fine-tuning the values, adding and removing and changing the code to make everything as flawless as possible.

Unity 4.5 Animator improvement

Have to sync your animation event accurately to physics? It just got easier with Unity 4.5. Now you have this little extra parameter at your disposal:

"Updates the animator during the physic loop in order to have the animation system synchronized with the physics engine." - http://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/AnimatorUpdateMode.AnimatePhysics.html

Earlier we had a problem with syncing a climbing animation to rigidbody movement. It had to be frame accurate, but the animation would sometimes trigger one frame too early or too late. It was unpredictable.

Unity 4.5 to the rescue - the AnimatorUpdateMode worked its magic. Combining it with WaitForFixedUpdate() yields a nice solid result.

Small victories!

-Timo