May 21, 2018 - Making noise!

Collision sounds:

This week I added collision sounds to all of the "cuttable" objects. The cool thing is that the pitch and loudness of each sound clip is determined by the velocity and mass of the object that is colliding. I still have some tweaking to do to find the right recipe but it already sounds pretty cool.

Hilt catch and strike sounds:

In addition to collision sounds which is mainly a bunch of free sounds of metal being hit by a hammer or something, I also recorded my own sounds for the saber being caught in your hand and striking an object.  To get those sounds I dug up an old spring-piston air pistol and recorded it being dropped onto a kitchen tile floor and throwing it up in the air and catching it.

Frustum grab, with force "sense" and jumpy saber hilt:

So, what I'm calling "Frustum Grab" is a misnomer because it's really a cone-shaped area of influence until I flatten out the tip of the cone. Anyway, the force-grab mechanic now requires that the right controller is aimed in the general direction of the saber hilt.
And when you're pointed in that direction you will feel a little haptic feedback as well as the saber hilt will get sort of jumpy trying to get your attention.

Better cutting with collision detection modes:

I tweaked the rigidbody collision detection mode of the saber to achieve a little more accuracy in cuts.

Edit: I must have been in a rush when I wrote this (actually I was feeling a little ill) but anyway, I should say that more specifically, in order for a fast-moving rigidbody, like a tennis racquet, and another object like a ball to collide you would/should set the racquet to "Continuous Dynamic" and the ball to either "continuous" or "discrete" but it depends on the situation. I think I'm setting all of the cuttable objects to "discrete" and the saber blade to "continuous dynamic".

Object pooling of audio sources:

Under the hood I'm pooling the collision sounds for a huge performance boost. Unfortunately I can't give you a before/after example because my video captures came out without sound for a couple days before I realized it.

Haptics:

In parallel with the audio updates I added haptics to represent the saber hilt striking another object.  I'm looking forward to doing a lot more with haptics in the future. It's tons of fun to talk about but very difficult to represent in video captures. My previous haptics recording was a pretty big hit on social media so I'll give that a try once I have more stuff to show off.