Emit "Explosion" like force from player, that doesn't effect player

Hello All!

I'm currently building my first game in unity, i am really enjoying it coming over from xcode and scenekit. In my game, I am trying to emit some kind of force from my player on key press. I'll try and paint the best picture possible here and post my current code below.

The player is a spaceship, and when you press a key, it triggers a particle system effect that bursts a ring out around the ship. That works great, but now i need to also repel any rigidbody away in a certain radius 360 degrees around the ship. It's like a defence mechanism when things are getting too close to you. This should only fire 1 burst per key down.

Here is my current code, The force IS working... it's just really really weak. When I log the rigidbody's in the collider loop, it only picks up other body's when you are right up against them, and apply's a very weak impuse push, as in, the other body's only move a few units away. I feel like my `radius` and `power` variables are big enough that they should go flying away dramatically.

Code (CSharp):

1.     public ParticleSystem particleSystem;
2.     public float fireRate;
3.    
4.      public float radius = 500.0f;
5.     public float power = 1000.0f;
6.  
7.     private float nextFire;
8.  
9.     void Update () {
10.         if ( Input.GetButtonDown("Fire2") && Time.time > nextFire )
11.         {
12.             nextFire = Time.time + fireRate;
13.             particleSystem.Play();
14.             FireBurst();
15.         }
16.     }
17.  
18.     void FireBurst()
19.     {
20.         Vector3 explosionPos = transform.position;
21.         Collider[] colliders = Physics.OverlapSphere(explosionPos, radius);
22.         foreach (Collider hit in colliders)
23.         {
24.             Rigidbody rb = hit.GetComponent<Rigidbody>();
25.  
26.             if (rb != null)
27.                  rb.AddExplosionForce(power, explosionPos, radius, 0f, ForceMode.Impulse);
28.         }
29.     }

Any advice, tutorials, docs you could throw my way would be amazing!

 

OverlapSphere will include your ship. Check the tag of each object and exclude your ship. hit.gameObject.CompareTag("Player") for example.

 

Awesome i never knew about the tags stuff, really nice. I updated my question after i put that in a did a bit more digging... the problem is different.

 

Use ForceMode.VelocityChange or more impulse force since it takes into account the mass.

 

Nice, i definitely see the change, everybody is affected equally now which is perfect. But the radius & power variables still don't seem to affect the amount of force that is applied. My objects just barely get pushed back. Do you have theories as to why this is?

 

Try to pass 0 as radius, so there is no linear reduction.

https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Rigidbody.AddExplosionForce.html

 

hmmm that doesn't seem to make any difference. really, no matter what i change my radius and power values too, the object affected always is pushed the same very small amount. There has got to be something about how my objects are setup that is messing with this. But it's quite simple at the moment. I have my spaceship, and a sphere, both have rigid bodies and collide with each other properly. The game objects only move on the x and z axis, no Y movement. The ship has a mass of 10 and the sphere has a mass of 1. Does any of that seem like it would affect what i'm trying to do?