A few questions of my own.

First, I haven't purchased Unity yet.
I need to be able to control a creature (not necessarily humanoid, could be an animal, etc) and be able to have it conform to pretty much any surface or object.

I've somewhat been able to get this to work with other engines I've used, by shooting a ray (RaycastCollider?) down from the 'player', and seeing if he was walking on anything...and having a force (or gravity) push the player in that direction. Granted, coming up against a sharp corners required rays to be cast somewhat forward.

Unfortunately, often I'd would run up against things like...bounding boxes cannot be translated to align with the player axis, thus collision was wonky. Or, gravity was hard coded to always be 'down'. In which case, I would just apply a force down the player's "down" axis, towards the surface.

How felixible is unity regarding this? This -ISN'T- a spider man game, but it would function somewhat the same...the creature/player/whatever could climb on pretty much any surface. I know it involves a lot of raycasting. Perhaps it would be better to simply turn off a collision object for the entire player, and attempt to somehow put collision 'points' for legs or other extremeties.

Thanks,
JC

 

Unity can certainly handle that.

We did a lot of these kind of things for GooBall - you have a slimy ball that can crawl around things. You can't stick to the underside of things, but that was a design decision (there is a 'Travel mode' in the retail version which does allow this).

You can download the demo version of gooball from ambrosia's website www.ambrosiasw.com - just hold down the apple key and crawl around on things.

It took a lot of tuning to get feeling right, but it definately can be done. It's the rays, man ;-)

To start with, I would recommed you not worry too much about the camera - it'll give you plenty of worry later on. When you have some specific questions, just fire away.

 

Welcome!

I'll chime in that Unity lets you have gravity go in any direction (and magnitude) you want. (But if you want ONE object to have different gravity from others, I think you'd be better off just applying a force that cancels the world gravity and adds its own.)