Player on moving platform can only jump when platform is moving up, not down.

Hello! I have a bit of an issue in my game. I am moving a platform vertically between two waypoints using Vector3.movetowards to move the platform to their position, alternating waypoints when the platform reaches a waypoint.

I use a trigger to move the player with the platform, so that the player becomes a child of the platform whenever they are on it. I also always set the player as grounded whenever they are a child of the platform. Using ThirdPersonController Starter Asset to move my player

Despite that, they cannot jump whenever the platform is moving down. Only when it is moving up. When its moving down, the boolean im using to store if player is within the trigger flickers between true or false, but there's no such issue when moving up. I even tried disabling gravity to see if that was the cause but nothing worked.
Would appreciate any help, thank you

Code (CSharp):

1. public class MovePlatformVertically : MonoBehaviour
2. {
3.     [SerializeField] public float moveSpeed = 5.0f;
4.     [SerializeField] GameObject[] waypoints;
5.     public int currentWaypoint =0;
6.     public GameObject Player;
7.     public bool playerOn = false;
8.     // Start is called before the first frame update
9.     void OnTriggerEnter(Collider other)
10.     {
11.         Player.transform.parent = transform;
12.         playerOn =true;
13.     }
14.     void OnTriggerExit(Collider other)
15.     {
16.         Player.transform.parent = null;
17.         playerOn= false;
18.     }
19.     // Update is called once per frame
20.     void Update()
21.     {
22.         if(playerOn)
23.         {
24.             if(Vector3.Distance(transform.position,waypoints[currentWaypoint].transform.position)<.1f)
25.             {
26.                 currentWaypoint = currentWaypoint==0?1:0;
27.             }
28.             transform.position = Vector3.MoveTowards(transform.position,waypoints[currentWaypoint].transform.position,moveSpeed*Time.deltaTime);
29.         }
30.     }
31. }
32.  

 

My first hypothesis is that something is causing your player to reconnect to the platform, inhibiting the jump.

Here is how you can prove or disprove it:

What is often happening in these cases is one of the following:

- the code you think is executing is not actually executing at all
- the code is executing far EARLIER or LATER than you think
- the code is executing far LESS OFTEN than you think
- the code is executing far MORE OFTEN than you think
- the code is executing on another GameObject than you think it is
- you're getting an error or warning and you haven't noticed it in the console window

To help gain more insight into your problem, I recommend liberally sprinkling Debug.Log() statements through your code to display information in realtime.

Doing this should help you answer these types of questions:

- is this code even running? which parts are running? how often does it run? what order does it run in?
- what are the values of the variables involved? Are they initialized? Are the values reasonable?
- are you meeting ALL the requirements to receive callbacks such as triggers / colliders (review the documentation)

Knowing this information will help you reason about the behavior you are seeing.

If your problem would benefit from in-scene or in-game visualization, Debug.DrawRay() or Debug.DrawLine() can help you visualize things like rays (used in raycasting) or distances.

You can also call Debug.Break() to pause the Editor when certain interesting pieces of code run, and then study the scene manually, looking for all the parts, where they are, what scripts are on them, etc.

You can also call GameObject.CreatePrimitive() to emplace debug-marker-ish objects in the scene at runtime.

You could also just display various important quantities in UI Text elements to watch them change as you play the game.

If you are running a mobile device you can also view the console output. Google for how on your particular mobile target.

Another useful approach is to temporarily strip out everything besides what is necessary to prove your issue. This can simplify and isolate compounding effects of other items in your scene or prefab.

Here's an example of putting in a laser-focused Debug.Log() and how that can save you a TON of time wallowing around speculating what might be going wrong:

https://forum.unity.com/threads/coroutine-missing-hint-and-error.1103197/#post-7100494

You must find a way to get the information you need in order to reason about what the problem is.

 

thanks, i will