Alright, let me tell you about this “djokovic falling” thing I’ve been messing around with. It’s a bit of a silly name, I know, but it stuck.
So, it all started when I was trying to figure out… well, how to make stuff… fall. Like, realistically. I wasn’t going for perfect physics, just something that looked convincing enough.
First, I grabbed some basic shapes. A sphere for djokovic (in my head, it’s always djokovic…don’t ask) and a plane for the ground. Easy peasy. Then I dove into trying to get gravity working. I messed around with acceleration, velocity, all that good stuff. I started simple: just adding a constant value to the sphere’s Y-velocity each frame. It worked, sort of. djokovic went down, but it was super linear and boring.
Here’s where it got a little tricky. I wanted djokovic to accelerate. You know, get faster as he falls. So, I changed my code to calculate acceleration based on a “gravity” constant and apply that to the velocity. Better, but still not quite right. It felt too… instant. Like djokovic was hitting terminal velocity the moment he started falling.
Next up was drag. Air resistance, baby! I added a drag coefficient and adjusted the acceleration based on the sphere’s velocity. This helped a lot! djokovic now accelerated more gradually, and terminal velocity felt more natural. But there was a problem: it was still too smooth. Real falls aren’t perfectly smooth, right?
- I started thinking about adding some random wobble.
- Maybe some wind effects.
- But decided against it for now.
Then, I moved on to collision. When djokovic hits the ground, I didn’t just want him to stop. I wanted a little bounce! I added a “restitution” coefficient that determined how much velocity he’d retain after the collision. It was all about tweaking that value until it looked right. Too high, and he’d bounce forever. Too low, and he’d just splat.
The real breakthrough came when I started messing with damping. Damping reduces velocity over time, even when there’s no air resistance. By adding a bit of damping to both the velocity and angular velocity, I was able to get djokovic to settle down after a few bounces. It finally looked… natural! Well, close enough for my purposes.
Of course, I spent hours tweaking all these values. Gravity, drag, restitution, damping… it’s all about finding the right balance. I even added some rotation to djokovic as he falls, just to make it look a little more interesting. It’s still pretty basic, but now djokovic falls with a bit of style.
Finally, after hours of fiddling and debugging, I had something that looked… well, at least not completely terrible. It’s not perfect, but it’s a good starting point. And honestly, watching a virtual djokovic fall is way more entertaining than it probably should be.
