I really dislike the current popular method of melee combat/interactions; most objects don’t feel like they have any weight and they can move as easily and as quickly as the controller can. They also pass through most objects in an environment instead of receiving force based on object size and weight. This would be solved with force feedback if it were widely available and safe, as that much force to stop a sword could easily break an arm if done wrong.
I wanted to bring a realer sense of combat and logic to my game and not just have someone flailing their arms around to sporadically move their weapon. I ended up finding this: https://evanfletcher42.com/2018/12/29/sword-mechanics-for-vr/.
Evan Fletcher devises a way to create a more realistic feeling of feedback from an object with the current limitations of VR. He doesn’t show any of the set up he did except for the settings on a configurable joint. The rest he vaguely mentions as bullet points for what needs to be done, leaving me to figure out what he means and recreate to the best of my ability. Weeks later after ignoring this for some time trying to find an alternative, I finally sat down and had a think. First I tried to interpret the referencing of his Unity scene setup, before then creating a C# script to crudely run through the bullet points presented by Mr. Fletcher. These are what I came up with:
The wrist prefab has the configurable joint on it and is instantiated by the script when you pick up a weapon. The wrist object becomes a parent to the weapon object and a child to your xr rig hand/controller. When you drop the weapon the wrist prefab is destroyed, but the weapon stays.
This worked, somewhat surprisingly, but I know there’s things I haven’t thought of when deciphering Mr. Fletcher’s notes.