Balls can be pushed through walls using the paddle

[NelloDev]

Issue description:
Balls can be pushed through walls https://streamable.com/ag0zy
Steps to reproduce:

1. Push ball through wall

[Calinou]

This is not about walls being too small, but about RigidBodies (the paddle) being able to push other RigidBodies (balls) through StaticBodies (the TileMap).

I currently don't have time to look into fixing it though.

[NelloDev]

I won't lie, I figured there was a technical reason for it happening but I couldn't pass up the name

[Calinou]

@NelloDev Thanks for opening the first issue here still 🙂

[sosasees]

The obvious solution I see to this bug right now, is adding multiple smaller collision shapes inside the main collision shape, like this:

In this case, the negatives outweigh the positives:
The Balls are less likely to clip through the wall
It's very labor-intensive to set up the collisions by hand
The Computer has so much more collisions to process, likely making the game walk at less than 10 Frames per Second.

---

I now have an idea for a possible better solution, but I'm not sure if it'd work.

• Moving the Paddle's Collision Box to another layer that can't interact with the balls
• Adding a Second Collision Box to the Paddle that's slightly smaller than the first one, but this one can interact with the balls

I'll make a Pull Request if it works, otherwise not.

Update: This did not work. Trying this method, the game runs slower but the bug remains.
I could not fix the bug, but at least we can rule out both of my suggestions on how it could be fixed.

[sosasees]

The best games embrace technical limitations.
Maybe this game could be about pushing balls THROUGH walls?
This would be something awesome and new, which we haven't seen before.

Great developers use this a lot, Almost every time they find that a bug actually improves the game:

It's not a bug, it's a feature
- I don't know who invented this quote

[Calinou]

@sosasees I'm not sure about this. This could make sense in specific locations (e.g. with dedicated tiles), but not everywhere.

[sosasees]

What about if you still could push them through everywhere, but don't want to because the ship would explode when you pushed them through certain tiles?

[Calinou]

@sosasees Maybe, but that sounds more like a frustrating gameplay mechanic rather than a challenging one.

[sosasees]

I had in mind that the explodey tiles look different from the normal ones.

[sosasees]

I have another possible solution:
Changing the paddle to only have collision for a split-second at a time whenever the player presses a button would still leave this glitch possible, but much harder to discover and perform.

[sosasees]

I don't know exactly How we could do this,
but maybe we could add some sort of "collision priority" to the ball:
it'd work like
the ball preferring to go through the player instead of the walls when crushed.

I imagine that the ball would:

• check if it touches the player And the ball
• if true, it will actively pass through player collision but not wall collision (maybe by disabling its "Player" collision mask) until it notices that it no longer touches player collision, which is when it will touch the player again.

---

I also came up with an other way to solve this, that i'm much more confident about:

Redesign the player character to have 2 distinct collision zones, 1 outside 1 inside:

▒▒▒▒   ▒ touches walls
▒██▒   █ touches balls
▒██▒
▒▒▒▒

This way, you don't need any special programming to solve the issue.

This solution might require a slight level redesign,
since you'd have to make the player a bit bigger if you wanted to keep the "ball collision zone" the same size,
and if you kept the player the same size the "ball collision zone" would be smaller (too small for my preferences), which you'd have to now account for.
But the eleganct end result will be worth it.

[sosasees]

@Calinou what do you think, are there any potentially good solutions for this bug in this thread?
if yes, which ones would that be?

[Calinou]

@Calinou what do you think, are there any potentially good solutions for this bug in this thread? if yes, which ones would that be?

I don't have time to look into it, but feel free to experiment and open a pull request if you manage to get something working 🙂

[sosasees]

i have gotten an error when opening the project in my copy of
Godot v3.3.3.stable.official [b973f997f]:

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│                          Warning!                        X │
│────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────│
│ Unable to load addon script from path:                     │
│ 'res://addons/smoothing/smoothing_plugin.gd'.              │
│ This might be due to a code error in that script.          |
| Disabling the addon at 'res://addons/smoothing/plugin.cfg' │
│ to prevent further errors.                                 |
│────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────│
│                    <OK>     <Copy Text>                    │
└────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

the game seems unchanged by this error,
but i'm still concerned:
@Calinou ¿what are the hidden implications of this error, and how can i fix it?, because i don't want to unknowingly make a broken commit.