Bumper Bash: Comedy of Errors

Somehow it just never fails, I create a game plan, a well thought out one at that, and then begins the comedy of errors. It would almost be sad, if it wasn’t so funny.

First off, when I modeled my arena, I started it with a circle. It made perfect sense at the time. Oval arena… modified circle, very logical and ultimately very wrong. I had forgotten that the game engine prefers “planes” not “circles” for the floor of a game.

Which of course led to a good day and a half of watching my bumper car fall through the arena floor. Repeatedly. Over and over again as I adjusted settings, double checked everything and stared at that car falling every time I pushed “P”. I ended up opening a dozen or more game engine demo files looking for the solution. I recreated the demo files, they worked. And yet, using the same settings, my bumper car just kept falling through the floor.

Finally it registered what my problem was. A quick test with a “plane” under my bumper car confirmed it.

Ok at this point I have two options. Remodel my arena from a plane or just add a plane at floor level and set it to be invisible. Guess which I did? Yep one invisible ”plane’, added to game arena. Not elegant, but hey, it’s invisible. No one will ever see it.

Now on to some game play right? Yeah, okay, sure. Once my bumper car stopped falling through the floor, I got him moving. That actually worked as expected. Yay! But something funny happened when I set a second car to track the first one. It tracked the main car alright, but it did so while driving in reverse.

Okay, I admit it, this error was very funny. In fact I sat and watched for quite a while before I bothered to fix it. And for those who haven’t figured it out yet, I’ll clue you in on the solution. I had modeled the car backwards on it’s “y” axis. An easy enough fix, in Edit Mode, select all vertices and rotate 180 degrees around the “y” axis. All fixed.

A quick check confirmed that I had actually modeled all four bumper cars backwards. Oh well, easy enough to fix that too.

Now on to creating the appearance of intelligence in my computer controlled bumper cars. I have such a great idea for this. But you will have to wait until I test it out to hear about it.