what I worked on
Adding the balancing of the boat, so when players stand on one side of the boat it starts to flip towards that.
On the boat we have buoyancy points that make the object float in the ocean. We have a trigger collider that checks if a player is on the boat or not. This is updated on the server side for each player. If a player is on the boat we apply a downward force on the buoyancy points.
So in essence we have a box around the ship, check if the player enters that.
challenges
I spent a lot of time tuning different parameters and Zenkai's floating script which is just 4 floating points to get the boat stable and make the balancing work with players on the boat.
Before, the boat was very jittery in the water, both because we had the physics calculations running on both the server side and the client. Also because parameters were weird, it applied too much buoyancy too quickly so it was very unstable and springy, which led to the boat flying away if players jumped onto it.
what I learned
After moving down the floating points, making the buoyancy apply more smoothly and fixing some other parameters we had a decently stable boat that players could jump on and it could flip/sink.
All of this turned into a great demo at the end, felt like people enjoyed it.