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[Jeddychan]

Best idea for a video game I heard in ages.

Very big fan of mechanics based game design with humor that ISNT purposefully bad controls.

Thanks! Maybe my next game after this will be table flip simulator and I can pour all of the purposefully bad controls into that...

I'll be blunt, I doubt people will even consider taking a look to the game until they already know it's about table flipping, so it's actually probably in your best interests to give it away as soon as possible (don't forget that people will still be wondering how it plays exactly! =P).

Yeah, I see your point. I think if I show what the game is along with the title, I can keep the pun and still get people to look at it. Something that's best of both worlds.

since its still being discussed, just want to chime in and say i LOVE the "Flippin' Table Tennis" name 

Thanks James, glad you've come back to check it out now that the art isn't garbage or non-existant.

[jamesprimate]

oh ive been lurking, as always 

looking good!

[lululuprimal]

Wow! This fulfills everyone's dreams of flipping tables!

[oahda]

ya u flip dat tabl u bad icelandic copper

[Jeddychan]

ya u flip dat tabl u bad icelandic copper

I tried two translators online and got "wonder kitchen table on head" as the translation...


I should be able to make some progress later today on some more of the physics math stuff for the bots. Currently I'm sitting in a class writing out formulas trying to find the ones I'm going to need for later. Let's hope that the allure of Elite: Dangerous doesn't keep me from entirely making progress tonight.

[oahda]

"[he] flipped the kitchen table"

It's from the icelandic crime novel i'm reading (Mýrin by Arnaldur Indriðasson – it's been translated to English too but I dunno the translated title).

The main character got very angry for some reason and started flipping tables. (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻

[Jeddychan]

"[he] flipped the kitchen table"

It's from the icelandic crime novel i'm reading (Mýrin by Arnaldur Indriðasson – it's been translated to English too but I dunno the translated title).

The main character got very angry for some reason and started flipping tables. (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻

Thanks for the clarification, my friend and I were quite confused. Maybe the main character needs to play some table tennis to vent his rage.

[Donutttt]

How does serving work?

[Jeddychan]

How does serving work?

When a team is serving, the table sits on their side of the court until someone goes and hits it, then the timer to get the table to the other side starts. Hope I explained that well.


Also, update on the table ballistics math stuff. I held off on posting about this the other night because I got some buggy behavior, and had thought I messed something up, but turns out everything is fine.

Now, instead of launching a rigidbody and tracing the path to get my trajectory estimate, it's all done with math. The force, gravity, mass of the table, and a few other things are used to calculate the time of flight, the distance the table will go, and the height at any point in time. The last one allows me to draw the arc that the table follows in-flight.
I've figured out most of the math I'm going to need, and one step closer to having smart AI for the bots.

[Jeddychan]

So over the course of a day, with some help from a handful of friends to rubber duck debug with, I finally got the bot movement AI stuff sorted out.





The next step for me is to generate two sets of points around the table, one ring which is at the range of the table being hit with one arm, and the second ring with the range if the table was hit with two arms. I initially had some trouble with the list I was using to store my points, mostly because it was 3am and I was fairly burnt out, but I eventually got it working, sort of...
And this is what happens when you forget that you should be working with radians and not degrees.





This is what it looks like currently, all fixed and everything.





The next step is to take all of the points, remove the ones that are out of bounds, remove the points on the side of the court you're not aiming for, and from what's left, pick one in the middle to be the target landing point for the table. Then I'm going to have to figure out a good way to work backwards from that point to get the point a bot should be standing in to take the hit.

[oahda]

I love how much thought is being put into this.

[Jeddychan]

I love how much thought is being put into this.

This is what my scattered thoughts look like when I try to organize them and work through them. These are my scribbles for trying to figure out how to take a target point for the table to land, and get a point for the bot to walk to. There's like 2 or 3 ideas there that I'm trying to work out.

[Sik]

Did I get unsubscribed from the thread or something? =S I didn't get any notifications *clicks Notify again to make sure but...*

[Jeddychan]

Did I get unsubscribed from the thread or something? =S I didn't get any notifications *clicks Notify again to make sure but...*

not sure why that would happen, but if you want to be doubly sure, I tweet about updates 90% of the time @Jeddychan

[Sik]

And now I got a notification! ?\(?_o)/? (maybe I thought I had subscribed and I didn't?)

[Jeddychan]

Okay, so I've been thinking away, trying to figure out the best way to go from a target location for the table to go, to having a point to tell the bot to go stand at.

The brown rectangle is the table, and the box around it is a collider on it's own special layer. So imagine we want the table to go to the red X. If I draw a raycast (light blue) from the target X, towards the center of the table, I can get the point (blue) at which the raycast hit's the special collider. If I flip that point over the origin, by multiplying it by -1, I can get the point (green) where the bot would need to stand.

The whole reason why the special collider is needed, is because if I were to tell the bot to go right up to the table's edge, the bot would bump into the table and keep trying to walk before it actually got to the point.

[Jeddychan]

So last night I got the bot movement AI working smooth enough to my liking that I thought I would try having the bot actually flip a table! The flipping is manually controlled by me at the moment while I figure some things out.

In the video you'll see that the bot tilts to follow the table, which is unintended behavior, and the table is also being hit farther than it should, so that's another issue. I'm hoping to get those two issues solved soon, if not tonight.

Click to watch video

[tinyDino]

This idea just makes me wanna..... makes me wanna..... (╯'□')╯︵ ┻━┻.

There we go that's better

[gimymblert]

╯'□')╯︵ ┻━┻

how i learn to stop worrying and love flipping table

╯^_^)╯︵ ┻━┻

(how do I install japanese character on my computer?)

[Jeddychan]

This idea just makes me wanna..... makes me wanna..... (╯'□')╯︵ ┻━┻.

There we go that's better

┻━┻ ︵ ╯('□' ╯)

(how do I install japanese character on my computer?)

if you open Run (you can press the windows key + R) you can type in "charmap" and see a bunch of different symbols that your installed fonts have




So, I fixed the bugs!

The bot leaning back to look at the table was an easy fix, I just had to add like two lines of code and that was solved. As for the table completely overshooting it's target, I figured I'd just get the table's self-righting script re-enabled first. After doing that I got a slew of null reference errors because my game controller object wasn't in the test scene, so I solved all those errors and it fixed all the issues!

Here's a video showing how it should work. The left and right arm flipping, and the calculating a new target is controlled by me pressing buttons, but all the calculations, movement, and whatnot is taken care of by the scripts on the table and the bot. The red and blue rectangles don't affect anything, that's just some debug stuff on the game controller script.

Click to watch video