Proper Ragdolling - Ali Abunada

author: Ali Abunada

Regarding a lose condition for our game, I thought it best to implement ragdolling for our game. Ragdolling is when the mesh suddenly seems to lose all control and goes limp, however on the game side it's using a system to simulate dynamic movement based on physical forces. I thought this would be better than a simple death animation due to the fact that our resources are limited and it would save time on finding a unique animation for each of our meshes. Ragdolling could be used with each entity (players and enemies) and we all thought it looked comical. However something strange was that the player's mesh was leaping up into the air as if an invisible force had moved them. Not only that, but the enemy was still attacking where the player used to be. 

It wasn't until I looked through the editor and figured out that the player still needed to have their components be disabled, namely their capsule component. Turning it off solved the issue of the mesh not bouncing off somewhere far away due to sudden collision, but it still left the problem of the enemy being alerted to the player. To this I consulted the aid of my teammate Jordan who worked on the player. He taught me about the behavior tree and intelligence of the enemy, who searches for the player based on the tag "Player". So I went into code and put it down so that the player has their tag stripped away when they're dead. In the end I believe this makes for a better game but it's really all temporary. I plan on exploring more including us implementing a revive mechanic for multiplayer.