I continued improving the basic character controller and worked on turning into a reusable system. I separated character movement, physics, and the visual model into their own components and refactored input into a dedicated character input object so movement data can be passed through the system pretty simply and made it way easier to add other inputs in the future.
I added acceleration and deceleration, sprinting, and jumping, while also improving the existing movement to make the controller feel better and everything less floaty. I also fixed some movement related bugs like temporarily sticking to ceilings when jumping.
I also added the entire character state system. I created a state tracker that derives useful information from the character’s movement and physics, such as velocity, movement direction, speed, grounded/airborne state, landing, jumping, slopes, sliding, wall collisions, ceiling collisions, fall height among many more.
This is pretty much the foundation for the state machine and animation system by instead of making animations directly tied to physics or movement code they can be made to react to the character’s current state. This pretty much make it possible to build stuff like strafing blend trees, jump/fall transitions, landing reactions, and eventually more environment aware animations easily.
Next, I’ll start building crouch functionality before adding animation stuff.