Prevent collision physics effect

In the platformer I am making I don't use the character controller but I need to detect collisions between the player character and the world (platforms). Both my character and the world's platforms have a rigidbody attached and to be able to generate the OnCollisionEnter event I have set the player character to be kinematic (I move it the old-school way - that is without the physics engine).

The problem is that when the character bumps into some platform, the platform moves (about) the amount of the collision penetration between the rigidbodies. Well I need the character to stop before the platform and prevent the platforms to move... any suggestions? Thanks!

 

Maybe make an invisible collider slightly bigger than the character, and if that hits, refuse to move the character?

 

Actually there's a slightly easier fix. If your platforms are moving around due to physics interaction, then they must have rigidbodies attached. In the rigidbody component of your environment pieces, enable the checkbox that says "Is Kinematic".

That should do the trick. However, if you want to move them physically through scripting, you will have to disable isKinematic via your script.

 

Unfortunately that doesn't work because I already have turned on the IsKinematic property for the character (the first collider)... from the manual: "Note that collision events are only sent if one of the colliders also has a non-kinematic rigid body attached."
Am I stuck?

 

Have you looked at setting one of the colliders to a Trigger and using OnTriggerEnter()?

 

I am on that way it seems.

So can I create many triggers and put them in strategic places to detect various collisions (feet on ground, body against wall, etc...)? Is this a good strategy? I was hoping I could use the OnCollisionEnter event to get more info on the collision to detect where the collision took place, but I guess I can obtain pretty much the same info with triggers. Am I in the right direction?

Thanks everyone for helping.

 

I wonder if it would be worth just biting the bullet and making the character controller non-kinematic. It would take rather more effort to get the movement right, but you could make all the platforms kinematic so you won't have this issue at all, plus it would open up the possibilities for having various physics effects on the character if you wanted to get fancy.

--Eric

 

I don't know on that one Eric. I am trying to keep the game as simple as possible, just to finish a project once for a change I have been thinking on making everything physics based, but that would probably be an overkill for my precious spare time working on the project.

Still, I believe I can simulate most of the physics anyway... I have to think about it.