How to make a rigidbody sit on another rigidbody while moving

Hi, I'm having difficulty solving a problem and could really do with some help.
I have a situation in a game im working on, where I have a pirate ship, which has a mesh collider and a rigidbody. Which is moving forward across a water simulation and rocking above etc. And I have the player which is using a rigidbody too. When the player is on the decks of the ship, and the ship is moving, the player is sliding about and not sticking on the boat, this is causing problems with my ladder script for instance, where the player can climb but as soon as the ladder releases the player, the player flies across the ship to the rear castle deck. Comical to look at but annoying to figure out ways of solving this. I'm at a loss, any advice, tips, suggestions, will be much appreciated. I can't change the player or ship from using a rigidbody though, so answers oriented around this fact will be greatly appreciated, thanks in advance.

 

The easiest answer would be to use a fixed joint: http://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/class-FixedJoint.html

That said, I had a similar problem with a project of mine (using space ships instead of pirate ships)
Where I wanted to have dozens of moving objects inside a moving ship, and using a joint for each of them seemed wasteful.

Instead what I went with was using an "interior" representation of the ship, which is simply a collider attached to a non-moving game object on a separate collision layer.

When crew members are inside the ship, their rigid-bodies would be disabled and they would have interior physics representations on the ships interior representation, and their crew would simply obtain position updates by getting the relevant data them from their representations. When they are outside the ship, their rigid-bodies would be enabled again.

This way you can have the ship bouncing and floating in the waves, and all of the crewmen on the ship wouldn't slip and slide off of it.

 

you may want to set the Ship as parent of the player transform...
what happen if you do that?

 

If you're using physics, that doesn't work.

 

oh yes.. you're right.. Fixed Joint is the way..

 

Im sorry however I dont see how a fixedJoint could work, I've tried it, it gets the character to stick to the deck of the ship, and I have tried setting the connectedBody to null and reconnecting after using MovePosition, and I cant get the character to move at all :3

 

I've got the same problem m8.

 

Edit: I just figured it out... I think. Parenting the rigidbody seemed to work for a spaceship I was making that let the player move while the spaceship was flying. I guess you can try parenting @TwixEmma

 

Another solution is to keep the ship fixed in place and move the universe around it to give the impression the ship is moving, I think the game "Sea of thieves" does it like and and it could also be applied to a space ship.