It's a family shibboleth for hard games now too: "Is it Ecco-The-Dolphin-Hard?"

My little sister got the PS2 version of this game because she wanted to play with dolphins, and then when we realized it was actually a good game the whole family became obsessed with it. We never got past the alien mothership level though, it was too dark on our TV and we couldn't find our way.

It doesn't matter that it was "for kids", Infinity Train is my favorite show, animated or otherwise, and I've watched it through at least a dozen times with anyone who would let me show it to them. It was my go-to comfort on deployment. Thanks so much for making it.

I'm glad this is finally fixed, there's few things more frustrating than having your last missile make it through PD only to do nothing because of bad luck. Thanks to our tester Imaginary Lobster for figuring out the reliable repro steps that allowed me to investigate and fix this.

While it was hard to find the root cause, in the end the solution was simple: remove the AddForce call in favor of integrating the velocity for the body manually. That way I could be sure the velocity I was using the do the lookahead raycast was always accurate.

Once I had repro steps and could see where it was failing, a quick fix for the clonk could have involved UV sampling against the entire collider group, not just the detected collider, but I had an inkling there was more at play that was causing, or would cause, other issues if I didn't keep digging.

The example above is interesting because of the stacked colliders, which causes the clonk. If there is no other collider below this actually results in the missile just passing straight through the target, though that was rarer.

Because there is a hole (another collider sits on top, the one it missed) no UV is sampled. Without the UV to know where to check for armor penetration (remember this is main branch, old armor system not the fancy new one I've talked about here before), the missile detonates but does no damage.

The convex version is required by Unity for dynamic objects for performance reasons, so any holes are covered up. That means a ray can hit this collider even though there shouldn't be anything there.

The collider it hits is the one on the right, which is used on the physical hulls. This is a giftwrapped convex version of the left collider. After the hit is detected the UV to apply armor damage at is sampled using the collider on the left. You can see there is a hole there.

Here's an example on the bottom of the Ferryman. The gap goes across the bottom edge of the collider, but because there is also a collider underneath it still detects a collision.

In the first image you can see a gap between the end of the lookahead raycast and the solved position, because the raycast is calculated with the velocity post-capping (but pre-physics-solving). If this gap happened to align on the edge of a hull's collider we get an instance of this bug.

This meant all missiles could have one fixed frame worth of additional acceleration above their advertised cap, about 25m/s in the case of this rocket. The effect, and thus likelihood of the bug occurring, was more pronounced with high acceleration missiles like hybrids and rockets.

These weapons have a capped speed, and the order of operations is a killer. I was using AddForce(Impulse) to apply the thrust, and then capping the velocity immediately after, but Unity only applies the sum of all impulses after FixedUpdate completes.

This (ideally) makes it so a point projectile can travel at any velocity and always hit. Some of our projectiles go up to 2,000 m/s and hit without fail. The Clonk issue arises with weapons that apply continuous thrust, like a missile or rocket.

Projectiles in Neb move *fast* and are *small*, two things which don't play well in a discretely stepped physics engine. All munitions have a "lookahead" raycast, where they shoot a ray ahead to where they will be in the next frame looking for what they would hit between frames 1 and 2.

My favorite part about the B5 hyperspace effect is how they did such a great job visualizing the disconnect in distances between normal space and hyperspace by having the ships appear to travel a much longer distance inside the portal than the portal takes up (really apparent inside a gate frame).

I developed Neb solo for 15 years before I started on the version that eventually released. I have a team now, and never called myself a solo dev despite writing 100% of the code, making all the design decisions, etc, because I felt it discredited all of the art work by others. Personal preference.

There really are some people who can do it all, or most of it. I would not consider hiring a few voice actors or contracting localization to negate *years* of privately grinding away on your dream. But these people are exceedingly rare, and we see a lot of survivorship bias that media plays up.