Garbaj is Garback!

"Why don't we have both?" -TF2

One disadvantage about stair-stepping is that it can be jarring to have your camera snap up whenever you climb a step, and it can cause motion sickness - this is part of why I prefer ramp stairs.

Something interesting about Doom stairs is that the marine can climb any sector that is 24 units or lower, so a bunch of time you can Go up places you don't look like It would, modders uses this + the thin stairs exploit to make ladders with out the fancy scripting some sourceports (like GZdoom) gives you

With almost infinite examples of walking in games, they chose to start with double horny bait

0:24 gonna be the most replayed part of this video

Years and years ago I played a 2D flash shooter that had a level editor. The game did stair stepping, but the stair step detection was taller than the smallest unit of measurement in the level editor. If you did it right, you could arrange a bunch of 1 unit tall platforms with a 1 unit gap completely vertical and just functionally teleport upward. Best part was the game had ragdolling, even (albeit much more rigid) while the characters were alive, so in the precious few visible frames while ascending thousands of units you'd see your guy folded like a lawnchair.

For anyone curious, have 2 raycasts - 1 for the bottom of the collider and another slightly above that. Both casts should be pointing forward. The bottom raycast checks if a wall is encountered, the higher one checks if the player could/should be able to climb over it. If the bottom one hits but the higher one doesn't, apply negative gravity. This makes it look like the player is actually stepping up stairs in first-person. This setup requires some tweaking obviously.

I instantly thought of Minecraft's cake staircases at 2:10 (although you have to ride a horse for them since horses can step up an entire block while players can only do half a block without jumping)

Stair smoothing is best done on the camera only, so it doesn't make stair stepping unnecessarily slow. id Tech 3 has a very good implementation of this that still stands the test of time today (much better than it was in the Quake 1 and 2 engines). The downside of applying it on the camera only is that it won't smooth out the player from a third person perspective, so you'd need to apply this offset on the player model as well (which can come with its own issues, such as being misaligned with its actual hitbox for a split second). It's also worth considering that using ramps instead of stair stepping makes it possible for projectiles to smoothly move up/down stairs, which is sometimes desired for gameplay purposes. For instance, if you have a grenade launcher, you may want grenades to roll up stairs even if it's not realistic to make the grenade launcher more usable at the bottom of a staircase. Otherwise, most grenades would end up bouncing back towards the player shooting them due to the "wall" of every step bouncing off grenades.

Huh, I wonder what the most replayed part of this video is going to be

Usually when people suggest ramps is when they're not really seeing the full scope of the problem: stairs are not just staircases: stairs can be everywhere. The same code that can climb a staircase is what will climb a sidewalk, or a small box, or any kind of small prop model, or a stepped rock, or any kind of steps you might have in your geometry. Ramps can only be feasibly used in very simplistic levels, if steps are few enough that mappers can be relied to not forget any.

Mine is when the devs forget to put a negative speed cap combined with a way to build up negative speed.

The "magic carpet" strategy is my favorite, which I use in my game: The character is just always floating above the terrain at knee height, like a boat. A downward scan gathers the distance to the terrain as you pass over it, causing you to gently rise or sink by applying a force proportional to the error. It handles all irregular terrain as well as stairs and always feels smooth.

I want a new game mechanic where if you aren't looking at the stairs you trip on them.

GOD FORBID ANY VR developer doing this i instantly get sick if i go such stairs in VR

sorry but i’m gonna have to be the one to comment on dva.

Dude is crazy, he did not only represent ramp wrong, but he says that stair stepping is better

And yet one of the things we see commonly done in CS for the last 10 years has been adding clip brushes over stairs so they all act like ramps. Heck, I even do this in my HL2 maps.

It's interesting that you mentioned CS:GO, where developers deliberately turn most stairs into ramps, specifically to give that smooth feel and avoid throwing off your aim

I use godots physics server to test if the body of the player can sit on the stair then teleport up. This covers a lot of edge cases. I also have the camera lerp to the new position to smooth out the transition as you can get some jittering on un-even surfaces. You also have to be aware of ramps, had a bug where the player began accelerating up the ramp as the character controller was handling the ramp and the stair step was handling the ramp.

my personal favorite is ability to recover from 1km fall by grabbing the edge. Characters in games have really great upper strength

I am talking within the context of Unity specifically but this can work in anything, my favorite(underrated) solution for games with a physics player: shorten the players collider to be about their height without legs, then hover the player to the intended height by applying a continuous force (ray cast down player height meters from head, add an upwards force to the character that’s JUST enough to hover them to their intended height, then add some damping) and then your character moves nice and buttery smooth, over small objects and stairs with ease. The only downside is the character has accelerated motion and would take a lil bit to get to it’s intended walking speed which isn’t always good for instant reflex games, as well as needing to separate the camera from the player body transform in order to prevent camera jitter. You can adjust the bounciness, the height, the friction, etc. it’s a very nice system and makes jumping and crouching very easy to implement

It's a little weird to me that most games of the 21st century opt for the ramp approach, considering that Doom had smooth stair-stepping all the way back in 1993, albeit with the exploit seen here (most famously seen in MAP19 of TNT: Evilution).

I've recently started working on my first 3D game, and hadn't looked into how others handle stairs, but only gave them a little bit of thought. I hadn't considered doing a hitbox near the feet, but had thought of just casting a couple of rays in the direction of motion, one at the feet and one just above the max step height. I figured if the bottom one hits an obstacle but the top one doesn't, it means you ran into a step you can climb.. That way the length of the top ray can also determine how steep the stairs can be and still allow the player to climb, because if it's too steep the ray will hit the next step up. But now that I'm thinking about it, that may not work well when going up a sloped floor because only the bottom ray would hit the floor so it would be treated as a stair. Thinking out loud, though, if the bottom ray angles upward at the angle of the steepest slope that I want the player to be able to walk up, it won't hit the slope, and that might work for my purposes.. or if I don't change the angle of the bottom ray, but instead check the normal of whatever it collided with, I could tell whether it's a slope I could walk up or something I'd have to step up.. hmmm.. I'll need to look more at this. Thanks for this video, it's made me think about things that I had been putting off

Smooth stairs (with a ramp) are a must for VR games... otherwise with stair-stepping it's too uncomfortable.

That reminds me of that one staircase in Minecraft where you use pretty much everything to make it 6x1x2 blocks

Funny how you used CS as an example of stair stepping. Yes, it supports it because of how old roots of Source are but over the many years of development of CS series and TF2 as well, both Valve and even community worked on smoothing out the stairs with simple or complex ramps because a series of stairs where you just keep bouncing is neither realistic or fun. It's just jarring to look at. But hey, Valve can do whatever, what do they know about good design and what players prefer? Well turns out most players agree. The very same 3Kliksphilip whose video you used has another video about the curved staircase on Dust II. How many times it changed, how for the longest time it was bumpy, how players developed a pattern of invisible colliders that could work with the shape and within Source engine and how finally Valve used a very similar solution to the one provided by the community. The best solution for many seems to be a ramp starting after first step so you get a single bump to know you walked onto the stairs and the rest goes smoothly. Just a bumpy staircase? Big nono.

Unreal Engine already has a "Character Movement Component" that handles these use cases. You can define the Max Step height as well as max walkable slope angle.

I do really love how Sucker Punch handled stairs in the Sly Cooper series (and I guess inFAMOUS as well as they implemented the same system there but it blew my mind as a 5 year old in 2002) where they had a hybrid system of the slope method but the stairs were still coded in a way where whether the player were walking or just stopped, the inverse kinematics of the legs would still reference the stair step and place the foot on it even altering the idle animations foot and leg placement and movement in the process. It was always so funny to get Sly somewhere where the ground was flat but there was a sudden slope transition and watch him go into his idle animation where he crouches and watch one of his feet and the leg it was attached to just pop up higher than the rest of his body in such an unnatural way.

I've been working on an FPS in Godot, and I spent a while trying to figure out this issue. Eventually, I decided to just use ramps- due to the way momentum works in my game, snapping up stairs would fling the player into the air at a very high speed. The player is able to skate at up to mach 0.3 currently, so the plan is for collision and visuals to not match 1:1- if they did, a cable could send the player flying a hundred feet in the air, which would feel wrong in power armor. Although, a cable would be more likely to stop the player dead, or deflect them 45 degrees, as I'm having the player and all enemies use cylindrical hitboxes.

this is such a huge deal. im happy more people are talking about this and its awesome to see youve made a video on it. trying to create this in godot was one of the hardest things i tried to solve as a beginner gamedev

the downside of stair stepping is that it can be visually jarring. at least to me, a lot of games that implement stair stepping can make my eyes hurt. of course, this all depends on the game and its implementation of stair stepping, if it uses it.

Stryxo and Garbaj back, perfect.

Welcome back

An approach I've seen some folks use is to use separate "climbing" collision for the player which is in the form of a sphere or an ellipsoid, so pushing forward lifts them up through the lateral force of the step's corner on the climbing volume. This also happens to give you a few other nice benefits for free, like an inherent limit to how high you can climb on a single step, and slows you down during climbing and gives a much more graceful height transition.

Naww he used Haydee footage 💀💀

Then there's GTA IV. The character actually stepped on every single step and had to slow down to run up a staircase. Even NPC's did so too. A funny thing to do in the game was to find the longest staircase and walk up to an NPC and bump them so they stumbled. If they couldn't catch themselves they would trip and actually tumble down the stairs in an extremely realistic fashion. That game was so ahead of its time.

I think for most competetive shooters (but depending on the type/ style) it is better to have some kind of slope, the jitteriness can be annoying, both for the player on the stairs as well as for the second player trying to kill the player on the stairs (the head youre aiming at jumping up & down). Even if you have the gradual steps, I think this is most effective if you have really good animation that makes the player model move realistic, which isnt always so easy (I think). But even if you have really good animations, it can still be abruptive to the flow/ speed of moving around. For CS, I think it was the right decision to go for slopes with the rotating stairs in "lower" on the dust2 map, even when it meant they had to make the stairs more narrow.

The invisible ramp collision technique is way better. It's also what Counter-Strike does btw in official maps and pretty much every serious community map.

literally had this problem yesterday and now you upload this video XD amazing

Yeah the way the camera just jerks up all of a sudden when you come do a step unlike how it would be in real life if the camera was equal to your eyeballs is kind of interesting.

I like to reframe it as a "curb" or "step" problem. Since its something you'll probably want a general solution for. Imagine what you would have to do for a curb step that can move around if were using the ramp method. My trick is to make the hitbox not cover the legs and use a raycast to determine what height it needs to adjust too. This way you dont even notice the little things you step over and you go smoothly up stairs.

this is how people make "ladders" in doom

stair stepping has the drawback of being unrealistic in terms of head movement. in real life your head goes smoothly up almost in a diagonal line (can be if you try but normally there will be some amount of deviation). ramps are actually more realistic in this way.

talks about stairs uses footage from gamma gamma, the game where the staircases are known to get you stuck/ not smooth ascention of the staircase just run up the stairs from the bar in rostov, im bunnyhopping up to avoid the steps xd

Stair stepping is so jarring tho. Maybe it’s just tf2 trauma but I absolutely hate it. also, in real life, waking up stairs isn’t actually that bumpy, so the ramp solution is more intuitive.

I love the stairs in Detroit Become Human. If you run around in some of the levels, there's TONS of animations just foir stepping up, and over things.

dirt kids, the only replayed part was when that lady had her ass swaying

Halo 3 ODST does a super cool thing where the stairs feel like a smooth ramp, but by some wizardry, your ODST places his feet EXACTLY on the steps- they always land where your feet logically would In terms of both height and depth

Hot take: the auto smoothing that gmod has looks better than walking up a clip brushed off staircase

wicked, garbaj is back

Garbaj you made me realize making games is more fun than playing them

The feel of walking up the stairs in The Return of The Obra Dinn is really good!

The one game I always felt like the developers did something different with stairs is the new Hitman trilogy. I don't know if it's the 3rd person or they did something real different, but in those games whenever you approach stairs be it walking or running, you always slow down just a tiny bit and the character is walking step by step up or down, if you run he's skipping a step or in most cases he just "jogs" up those stairs. I can't really describe what I think is different about that game, but those who played it and can visualise it in their minds must agree that game had some darn clean stair mechanic

I hate "realistic" movement on stairs in first person because it's often jaggy. In RL you don't just hop by a step height.

biggest brain option is to have a slop that visually functions like stairs. The players collision follows the slope, but the model follows the stairs. Like sonic 1's bridges in greenhill where sonic doesn't actually drop down with the bridge.

Another solution is 'Inverse Kinematics' where you partially separate the legs and the rest of the body so the body is more stable while the legs move move to adjust to the terrain. This is often used for animations but it is also sometimes used for physics.

Surprise surf gameplay, much appreciated

I also like the floating capsule approach to handle stairs. or any uneven surfaces.

welcome back Garbaj man

I appreciate you calling out the potential for disability instead of just generalizing

the issue with stair stepping is also when you try to go down you yeet yourself away from the staircase

These videos really hit the spot in bed at the end of a long day

I added stalagmites to MineTest, built out of nodes atop one another at decreasing widths and depths... Starting from 2-8 decreasing until 1 or not-an-air-node. The character shot up the side when testing it's collision. Now I understand why, thanks to this video. Minetest is using approach B (stepheight). I'm not changing it, however... because I find it fun. I will find a 'world physics excuse' and make it consistent, the same way gravity only affects particulate or detached nodes like dirt or sticks (otherwise a collapsing world happens which collapses your hardware too!) Fun.

The stair into "elevator" thing depends on if the game determines if a player has to be some distance onto a step as well (the way collision boxes are used might prevent moving onto a sliver of terrain), and whether it needs a stair terrain type to allow for this type of movement. So it seems that for some games it's more like a hacky modded map kind of thing than something which is part of default game maps.

giggling at how the replays are drastically higher for the haydee clip

I remember the Stalker games having some weird stairs. They felt like they weren't always working as typical video game stairs, but I can't remember what they actually did.

Moving the camera along jagged stair collision, even with interpolation, is terrible for people worried about motion sickness btw, especially at faster movement speeds.

In tactical games like Counter Strike most of the stairs are smooth ramps so the sudden bump up or down doesn't throw off people's aim when they are trying to move up and down.

Furthermore, to avoid that issue, you could check the depth of each ledge too

The way I handled steep stairs is by reducing the player's horizontal speed based on the stairs angle (horizontal/vertical distance). This way the height increase is capped. I even used this to make ladders that are effectively near vertical stairs.

love the tall stairs exploit. Been thinking about that since playing worms armageddon years and years ago

Another thing to mention here is that the snapping is often how ladders work, plus both of these is why 3rd person games with stairs look jarring.

Every Garbaj video should have the Haydee clip

My dude here recreating 1990s engine bugs for fun. lmao

came for the haydee in the preview, stayed for the information on how games work.

Another solution is to also measure the depth of the stair so the player can only take a step up if there is enough room for the player to stand on top

Staircases and elevators! absolute nightmares!

You could always calculate the length of the top of the stair and if it's shorter by a defined length, don't allow to step

Garbaj coming back and showing footage of modded Haydee is a surprise to be sure... But a welcome one 💀👍

2:45 i was so certain you were going to say "add upwards force to the player character" and then give examples of using steep slopes to get insane vertical momentum

In my modded minecraft world I have a pair of boots that lets me auto step up an entire block, so I made a "staircase" using progressively thinner slices of blocks to get up to part of my base

I actually really like Honkai Stair Rail's approach to stairs. They have the stairs as a ramp, but if you pause on stairs, the characters gets ever so gently pushed up in order to actulaly match the visual appearance of the stairs. At least, this is what I think they do. I noticed the phenomenon on some relatively low incline stairs, so I may have simply been mistaken.

It'd be easy enough to add a secondary check to see if the place your player character is trying to step up onto has an area large enough to support a virtual foot. A small ring of raycasts aimed downwards (8 is enough without being too expensive to calculate - FPS games use plenty more for shotgun spread anyway) can check where if you have even one raycast reporting a gap/fall, just don't let the player move upwards.

woop woop garbaj blessing our eyeballs (mostly ears) once again

Miss you, Garbaj

This exploit makes it really easy to make ladders when mapping for the original Doom games.

let's goooo!! another upload

Extremely steep stairs can be an interesting way to make slightly leaning ladders which is kinda cool I suppose technically you could push it to the absolute limit to make mostly vertical ones too

Walking up stairs? Are you mad?

My favorite method of this is Payday 2, where everything is smooth, and there are no different surface types for walking collision and you instead just don't climb slopes angled too high. What this does is let you "climb" up steep slopes by repeatedly jumping, since you're technically colliding with a surface from above while climbing anything that's not vertical or backwards-sloping. This would obviously be terrible for many many games, but it opens up a ton of freedom of movement, without making things overly complicated (no dedicated "mantle" button), while creating synchronization between the act of climbing a sheer surface and the inputs needed to do it.

Pretty funny stalker anomaly mod's in there, it has some of the worst stair walking in gaming tbh

Or you use a pillbox collision and let the force push the object up the stairs purely in physics. As long as you are locked on X/Z rotation, if you push hard enough your character will 'slide' up the stair via the slope of the bottom sphere of the pill collision. Not only is it essentially code-less (if you're using a physics engine), it also gives stairs some heft. You can change how the sliding feels by adjusting the friction of the stairs or player collision object.

My favorite "exploit" is the crouch jumping feature in the goldsource engine. The feet come up to meet the player's butt and then the model falls down when you crouch, so if you are holding forward you can "jump" over small ledges just by holding forward and crouching. This is easy to do in Day of Defeat and I assume it works the same way in HL, TFC, CS 1.6 etc...

I am pretty sure this is how the original Doom duology did ladders.

Garbaj is back! Yaaaaay!

I like the floating capsule solution that the devs from "very very vallet" came up with, since is less prone to exploits and it is easier for level design.

she's back yay

2:40 - Or you can keep track of how fast you're going up vertically and then stop stair stepping for a set time frame, or until you return to the level before the "rapid stepping" happened.