UE5 - Hoverboard System Test
Hello! For anyone still looking for more of my medieval work, IT'S COMING. We've been zooming towards a full vertical slice demo and should have something out after the summer.
In the meantime, I've been toying around with a little greyboxed hoverboard system I created for a 3D platformer system I've been creating based on Ratchet and Clank. It's a nice simple setup, so thought I'd share!
You can see via the 4 debug lines on the board, I'm tracing downwards from the board to return the surface normal below. I'm then averaging out all the axes, defaulting back to 0 if the hoverboard doesn't manage to hit anything with its trace so that rotation still feels good whilst over ledges etc. (which you can see in the video!). This works similarish to suspension - for debug purposes the cyan shapes are the tracer origin points, and the green spheres where the trace is successfully returning its surface normal. The rotation is interpolating smoothly, so it maintains that sense of floatiness and not feeling attached to the ground like a skateboard would, but keeping things flowing with the undulations of the landscape - this will also work for obstacles/ramps etc. as all the traces are based on visibility. To increase the vibe of being a hoverboard, I then added some light up/down curved movement so it feels less static.
I wanted this to feel really tight and arcadey, similar to how it feels to skate around in any Tony Hawk game rather than doing any 'actual' simulation. There's still a few bits to be done (such as tilting for turning and more interesting things to do in terms of gameplay), but in general it feels good!