How to fix your diagonal movement!

Diagonal movement may be easy to implement, but you might want to consider normalizing your vectors.

#gamedev #shorts

[heartofdawnlight]

speedrunners hate this one programming technique

[rory]

This is why they move diagonally in original Doom speedruns

[Neodel]

"When will we ever use Pythagoras in real life?"

Clarification: this comment is mocking people who think this

[pinkie]

The fact that this is as common as it is is kinda mindblowing to me. This happens in Minecraft, which especially is a big deal for bridging quickly (in Java). It just sounds like such a silly mistake though

[thelred-phlq]

Note to self: When escaping from danger run diagonally. Those straight line runners will have a hell of a time trying to catch up.

[glltyt]

This is the first time I've ever understood the relation between the game math and the result. Thank you so much.

[MrSirSquishy]

Sometimes its actually better to leave this in as a "bug but actually feature" since it can help make walking less monotonous for certain players, as strafing can keep things feeling active.

[Pie_Mastah]

The problem with this for pixel games is that you can't move half a pixel. If you try to code that in, you move in a jittery way, depending on the speed.

To fix that, you would either have to do some complicated code that take frames into account, or you just super size everything by 2-4x

[kennethha]

"When are we ever going to need to use the Pythagoras theorem?"

[TheGarcia]

After 12 years of school my dude finally answered the most asked question in math class. When am I ever going to use this? Pythagorean theorem, vectors, square roots. I think some of us owe our math teachers an apology 😅

[GugureSux]

The first time I noticed this was back in the N64 days, playing Goldeneye 007. Diagonal movement was a legit tactic I used to speedrun missions.

[stellar]

Love how algebra actually becomes so helpful when you get into programming

[equal]

In this type of game(with 8 direction movement) it is easier to just create a new constant that is approximately equal to sqrt2 and use it for diagonals. This reduces the need of constantly normalising direction vector, which implies square root every moving frame.

[neeha]

I love the xenoblade bgm in the background! Nostalgic..

[shad-fanatic]

As the artist of an indie team, I really want that guy to have diagonal animations

[TheEuropeMan]

Speedrunners want to know your location

[DustinM]

First time a YouTube "Short" got me to subscribe to a channel. Well done!

[codahighland]

If you have to use integer pixels, have moving diagonally by 2 pixels in each direction take three frames. This means you're moving sqrt(8)/3 pixels per frame, which is about 0.94, which is close enough to make the speed difference far less noticeable.

[errantcondor]

I could swear I heard Colony 9 in the background. I love you.

[linksword]

For anyone wondering how the code works
local vec = vector(dirX, dirY):normalized() * player.speed
player:setLinearVelocity(vec.x, vec.y)

DirX and DirY are either 1, 0 or -1 depending on which direction he goes
The code is grabbed from his Zelda game