Why Isn't my Player Moving?

Unity Engine
1

I wanted to start over with my movement script for various reasons… and now my player won’t move at all and I’m going to have a panic attack

I’m using the Brackey’s movement tutorial… literally all I’m using is the rigidbody2D, the character controller, and this much of the Movement script,

    float horizontalMove = 0f;
    public float runSpeed = 40f;

    void Update()
    {

horizontalMove = Input.GetAxisRaw("Horizontal") * runSpeed;
    }

    void FixedUpdate()
    {
controller.Move(horizontalMove * Time.fixedDeltaTime, false, false);
    }
}

The player should be moving but no matter what I do he just stands there. I must have done something to mess it up, but it’s not being overwritten by any other scripts because I disabled everything except for the Character controller, rigidbody, and this small script

Any idea why my player won’t move? Please and thank you

2

Nope, but here’s how you can figure it out yourself.

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://discussions.unity.com/t/839300/3

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

3

There’s nothing obviously broken in the code you pasted, so it’s probably something silly like a script or setting being misconfigured in your scene.

So try to run though all the components that make up your movement and check thigns like…

Have you set up the m_WhatIsGround layermask on the controller?
Are the objects in the scene proerly on this ground layer?
Is m_AirControl set to false and the controller thinks the player is in the air?

Throw a bunch of Debug.Log() lines at key points and try to make sure everything is working as expected.

Specifically, in your movement script right before you call controller.Move add a debug and check what the value of horizontalMove * Time.fixedDeltaTime actually is.

Then go inside the controller script and debug each condition, you want to not make any assumptions about the value of each of the bools and instead follow what’s actually happening, on line 77 the controller has a consition if (m_Grounded || m_AirControl) debug this and see if it’s actually entering the if statement or not.

My bet would be the controller script doesn’t think your player is grounded.

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