Character Movements are messed up

Questions & Answers
1

Hey All,

I worked through a couple tutorials for Unity3D, but am still pretty new. I worked through one tutorial, where we create a bot with the camera behind it and you can move him forwards/ backwards and you use the mouse to move the camera, and thus his direction. Everything works great, except for when no input is given, he just moves backwards on his own.

//Walk Speed

var speed = 6.0;
//Gravity for the player
var gravity = 20.0;
//This will store the player movement as X Y Z, so we register it as a Vector3
private var moveDirection = Vector3.zero;

function FixedUpdate() {
//Register the controller variable with the character controller attached as a component to our player robot
var controller : CharacterController = GetComponent(CharacterController);

//Don't move the character in mid-air because it's not super mario :D
if (controller.isGrounded && Health.alive) {
	// We are grounded, so recalculate
	// move direction directly from axes
	
	//We just calculate the movement in Z/Vertical axis
	//You can also add strafe but our robot model doesn't have a strafe animation so...
	
	moveDirection = Vector3(0, 0, Input.GetAxis("Vertical"));
	moveDirection = transform.TransformDirection(moveDirection);
	
	
	//We multiply the outcome with our speed variable, so it's customizable in the editor now
	moveDirection *= speed;
}

//Rotate the player in Y axis based on the mouse X axis
if(Health.alive)
{
	var rotateY = (Input.GetAxis("Mouse X") * 200 ) * Time.deltaTime;
	controller.transform.Rotate( 0, rotateY, 0);
}


// Apply gravity
//It's not mandatory, because I'm not adding jump to this project yet, and the scene has nowhere to fall, but let's just keep it for now
moveDirection.y -= gravity * Time.deltaTime;

// Move the controller
//And finally we add the movement that we calculated earlier
if(Health.alive)
controller.Move(moveDirection * Time.deltaTime);

}

I’ve run some Debug lines and it seems that the z component is always near -1 if no keys are pressed… Also, I tried seeing what commenting out certain lines would do, and it seems to be with the gravity line. If I comment that out, the moving backwards stops. However, the bot no longer moves…

I’ve tried Googling and searching through here (where I found a question that seemed to be mine exactly from the header, but the link wouldn’t open…). I’m hoping I’m just missing something simple. Any and all help is greatly appreciated!

Dan

2

I’d look here first:
moveDirection = Vector3(0, 0, Input.GetAxis(“Vertical”));
This looks correct, but it is possible that your InputManager has somehow gotten modified so you are getting strange things in your “Vertical” axis. Double-check that with a simple print statement:
print("moveDirection = " + moveDirection);
You should be getting 0.0 in the “Vertcial” axis when you aren’t touching any controls.

Now you say it seems to be related to the gravity line. This is curious because your gravity function is clearly only operating on the Y axis. Your world is Y-Up isn’t it?

This makes me wonder if maybe your collision capsule is touching the ground. When you select your character in the editor, the capsule is drawn in wireframe. Make sure the capsule glides just a little bit above the ground. Perhaps touching the ground will cause the character to slide.