Gliding is a “glitz” effect applied by BYOND to cover up the visual sins of tile-based movement, by making objects and the map appear to move smoothly from one tile to another instead of immediately jumping. It is also available to smooth over small jumps in pixel movement that might occur, for instance if the client FPS is set higher than the server’s.
To control the gliding speed of an atom, set glide_size to the value of your choice. If this is not set, the client will attempt to adjust the speed manually. glide_size is measured in server ticks, so if client.fps is set to a value greater than world.fps, it will be scaled appropriately.
Whether an object glides or jumps is based on how far it moves relative to its step_size value, which by default is a full tile width. If the movement goes too far past step_size in the X or Y directions, it’s no longer a glide.
The animate_movement var can be used to control the way in which an object glides, or suppress gliding altogether.
By using the LONG_GLIDE flag in appearance_flags, a diagonal glide will take just as long as a cardinal-direction glide by moving a fullt glide_size pixels in the dominant X or Y direction. Otherwise, gliding tries to move by that many pixels in strict Euclidean distance (a straight line) and diagonal glides take longer.
Note
In LEGACY_MOVEMENT_MODE, gliding is turned off if you set any of the bound or step vars for an atom to a non-default value. The only gliding that occurs in this case is when client.fps is higher than world.fps. All other movement modes base gliding on an atom’s
glide_sizevalue.
See also
- animate_movement var (movable atom)
- appearance_flags var (atom)
- glide_size var (movable atom)
- bound_x var (movable atom)
- bound_y var (movable atom)
- bound_width var (movable atom)
- bound_height var (movable atom)
- step_size var (movable atom)
- step_x var (movable atom)
- step_y var (movable atom)
- movement_mode var (world)
- fps var (client)