Besides fixing the UV's for the VecDispenser, Adding in the box model, and some added sounds thanks to ThirstyPanther, most of the work this week was done with adjusting scripts so that the game as a whole plays better.

Picking Up Objects

Last week, I mention that I adjusted the pickup system so that it will auto center the object when it's picked up. While the stock code for the pickup system is good for occasionally picking up objects, in Vectronic, you're gonna be picking up boxes a lot. Not only that, but some puzzles require you to throw the boxes straight a head. The stock code locks the position and of the pickup with the picker position point which produces results like this.

The pickup system needed to feel natural as possible. I wanted the object to tween from the current location to the center of the player's crosshair, much how the pickup system is in Source. It only took an additional transformed point from the camera, and using Math:Curve to translate the two positions together. The box position will always now be centered with the crosshair when picked up.

This fix caused a few more problems which I'm still tweaking, I've added collision back to the picked up object, prevented the player picking up the object if they are standing on it, and also made the player auto drop it if the speed of the object is going too fast due to movement speed or violent collisions. It's not perfect now, but I feel that it's better than the stock pickup system, at least for this game.

Platforms

Another fix I've made is with the moving platforms. One major I've found with the sliding door script is that if a heavy object is on the joint object, the joint will fail, and fall through the floor. Since the boxes need to be heavy so they don't bounce really high, I felt like this was not a good system for the platforms.

In the demo, I've made a script that just moves the model's position over time, but further playing with this script showed me that there was issues actually pushing the player up, while jointed objects did not have this issue.

So I went back to the sliding door script with the problem of heavy objects effecting them, but lifting the player is fine. I solved this by making the joint object invisible and it's collision set to only collide with the player, and nothing else. Then, have the platform model as it's child which collides with everything else. This solved both problems as heavy boxes don't screw up the platforms as it's not colliding with the platform, but the player and objects can ride with the lifts without any issues!

I still need to work on a better way to set the distance, as right now you have to guess and tweak the distance values which I don't seem to like very much. I plan on switching it to a location point instead. Overall, the platforms need to be more user friendly as right now it's just a modded version of the sliding door script. I might work a bit on that this week.

I'll continue to work little by little to get everything as solid as I can. There is also a map in this set that I feel that's not as fun, informative or needed that I want to adjust or replace before working on any new maps. The goal is to get all this basic stuff perfect before continuing.