For Kobold Kit (the Sprite Kit game engine) we’re working on Super Stick Spy, a 2D platformer game. Like so many others, we started out using the (Box2D) physics engine that’s so neatly integrated in Sprite Kit to get everything up and running quickly.
But we knew full well that for the final product, we’ll have to scrap the physics engine altogether and follow best practices when it comes to platformer-programming.
Now with the demo version nearing completion (see video) I can tell you in full detail why you don’t want to use a physics engine for a 2D platformer!
Moving Platform Hell
A moving platform with physics needs to be a dynamic body. Don’t even try moving static bodies, at least in Box2D that will end up in jumpy movement of the body. Though kinematic bodies work better (if available).
The player or other game characters standing on a moving physics body will have the platform slide underneath their feet. The characters won’t magically move along with the platform! And there is no feature in the physics engine that lets you set this up. You have to program it to synchronize character movement with the platform they’re currently standing on, and end the synchronization as soon as a character lifts its feet up from the platform.
Which can be a problem for downward-moving platforms as the player loses contact with the platform every other frame, starts falling, and lands right back on the platform. To put it in Homer’s words: “Doh, doh, doh, doh, doh, doh, doh …”. So you need to make the character stick to the platform, yet allow him to fall off of the ledges and jump, and possibly also allow him to be forced off the ground by normal collision events (projectile impact, platform moving through a tiny crevice). Continue reading »
This continues and concludes the previous post of the Fast Pixel-Perfect Collision Detection for Cocos2D with Example Code (1/2) article.
Detecting collisions on pixel-perfect boundaries is the holy grail of collision detection in 2D games. As such, it seems like the ideal, if not to say perfect, solution to collision detection in general. Yet, it’s also quite complicated and the straightforward solutions don’t perform very well until you start optimizing the code.
This first post focuses on creating a pixel mask by analyzing the raw image data, as proposed over 3 years ago by Ernesto Corvi. It’s the fastest solution if you want to test if a point collides with a pixel on an image, which also works for rotated and scaled sprites. However it does take some optimizing to speed up detecting collisions between a bounding box of a node and the pixel mask, or two pixel masks.
The alternative solution is to render the two colliding objects onto a CCRenderTexture, as developed by Dani and others on the Cocos2D forum. It is able to detect collisions of arbitrarily rotated and scaled sprites but can be expected to be noticeably slower than a pixel mask. I will discuss this solution in a future iDevBlogADay post.
The results will find their way into Kobold2D, to make the solutions readily available to all developers.
