But drawing these vector lines helped a lot.

I spent today trying get the physics for the unicycle's forwards-backwards rotation to work right. As I suck at maths this has proved to be a lot more difficult than I anticipated (damn you, third dimension!!) This has involved a lot of random sign flipping and constant changing and most of the code has been hacked to pieces in the process. Oh well.

The aim is to have it so you can lean forwards and backwards with your mouse and control the wheel with the keyboard. At the moment this is incredibly difficult to control, so we may have to tweak it to make it a bit easier, maybe by giving the player less control over the wheel.

You will also be able to turn by tilting left and right, which should be fairly straightforward to implement as I probably won't make it realistic.


Here the rider (white line) is leaning backwards and the unicycle is about to tip over.

We have a lot to do before this playable and I don't know if we will be able to finish it on time, but we're going to meet to work on it tomorrow so hopefully we will be able to get a lot of it done then. Cav is also working on some music so we should be able to up the production values a bit by sunday.

Here is a graph to prove I did originally have a plan for this:

http://media.pyweek.org/dl/10/dcent/unicycling-1.0.zip

It's not at all finished. This was the first 3D stuff that we've done and it was a lot harder than we expected (not just the drawing, but getting the unicycle physics to work well enough as well)

It's probably not playable with a touchpad, as it requires quite fine control of the mouse to keep yourself balanced while on the unicycle.

Firstly I would like to apologise for how difficult it is to play our "game". This is totally my fault - I had intended to tweak the physics code a bit more towards the end of the challenge, but I haven't been able to do any testing for the last couple of days as I was away from my pc and my laptop can't run the game for some reason.

However! I do have some advice on how to stay balanced, and I think that compared to riding a real unicycle, it's not so wibbly wobbly after all :P

Here's how you can avoid falling over:

Redefine the laws of physics.
Since the default values for most of the constants are a bit iffy, you may you want to adjust them yourself before playing. The values are all stored in constants.py. I recommend decreasing g - so the unicycle is slower to respond to changes in how much you lean backwards and forwards - and increasing the mass of the unicycle (this makes your overall acceleration influence the wobbliness more).

Try not to tilt too much, and pay attention to your acceleration
If you lean over too much, the orientation of the unicycle will change very quickly, making it very easy to fall off. Your acceleration also affects the orientation of the unicycle, so it's possible to stay balanced without jerking the mouse about too much.

There is a very simple algorithm I was taught when I learned unicycle for real - if you're tilting too far forwards, pedal harder; if you're tilting too far backwards, lean forwards. This works suprisingly well, and using this technique I was able to stay on my virtual unicycle a lot easier too.


I hope this helps, and that you like our game, even though it's nowhere near as complete as we would have liked. If you have feedback of any kind, please leave a comment.

See you next pyweek! :)