Getting Started with this Moonballer Idea
Alright, so I decided to mess around with this concept I’ve been calling ‘moonballer’ in my head. Wasn’t really a big project, more like scratching an itch, you know? I wanted to see if I could get something, like a digital ball, to bounce ridiculously high, like those super bouncy ‘moon balls’ you see kids playing with. Just a simple physics experiment, really.
So, first thing, I fired up my usual coding environment. Nothing fancy. Just wanted a blank canvas to play on. I started by setting up a basic scene. Needed a ground plane, obviously, something for the ball to bounce off. Then I created a simple sphere object to act as our ‘moonballer’.
Making it Bounce (or Try To)
Dropped the sphere onto the ground. Added a standard physics component to it – you know, gravity, collision, the usual stuff. Ran it. And… plop. It just fell and sat there. Okay, expected that. Need bounce.
Next step was fiddling with the physics materials. Found the ‘bounciness’ setting, sometimes called restitution. Cranked it up. Ran it again. Boing! Okay, now we’re getting somewhere. It bounced, but like a regular tennis ball. Not quite the ‘moon’ effect I was after.
This is where the tweaking began. I spent a good chunk of time just playing with numbers:
- Increased the bounciness way beyond normal levels.
- Reduced the gravity effect significantly. Less gravity, higher bounce, right?
- Played with the mass of the ball, though that didn’t seem to have the crazy effect I wanted initially.
- Adjusted the physics engine’s global settings a bit, like friction.
Getting that Crazy High Bounce
Just tweaking the standard physics settings wasn’t quite getting that extreme, almost cartoonish bounce. The ball would go high, sure, but not moonballer high. So, I decided to cheat a little. Wrote a tiny script.
The idea was simple: detect when the ball hits the ground. When that collision happens, don’t just rely on the physics engine’s bounce calculation. Instead, manually apply a strong upward force. Like giving it an extra kick right at the moment of impact.
I attached this script to the ball object. Had to play around with the amount of force. Too little, and it was barely noticeable. Too much, and the ball shot off into digital space, never to be seen again. Took a few tries, running it over and over, adjusting the force value in the script until it felt right.
The Result? Kinda Fun!
Finally got it looking pretty decent. Now, when the ball hits the ground, it just rockets upwards, way higher than gravity and normal bounciness would allow. Then it hangs in the air for a bit before slowly arcing back down, thanks to the low gravity I set earlier. Hit, sproing, float, fall. Repeat.
It’s not a game, not really anything useful yet. But it was a fun little exercise. Got to mess with physics settings directly and then add a bit of custom script logic on top. Satisfying to see that little ball bounce ridiculously high, just like I pictured. That’s the moonballer effect I was chasing.
