Start date: November 2017
This game has similar building mechanics as Minecraft. The only difference is that it is not as large and the player can destroy their buildings with a cannon.
There were a couple problems that I encountered. The first was that because I was rounding the value of the raycast hit position, the blocks were often placed inside of each other. I corrected for this by shifting the placement position slightly so that the rounding itself was shifted.
Vector3 backup = ray.GetPoint (hitInfo.distance - 0.2f);
The second problem was that after a certain height that the blocks were placed at, the tower of blocks would fall over due to the instability of the structure. To fix this problem, I made each block kinematic (static) until the cannon was fired. In addition, I added a fixed joint to each block that would join it to the block that was clicked. These fixed joints only broke if a force greater than the predetermined force acted upon it. This stabilized each structure further, even after the cannon was fired.
As I specified before, each block is placed at a position determined by a raycast from the camera (more specifically: where the player clicks). When a block is placed, its data is added to an array with the tag “Instantiated”. This becomes important when the game sets the kinematic value of each block to false.
Removing a block is a little more complicated. When a block is removed, the actual block gameobject is destroyed from the game. But this poses a problem: because the block gameobject is destroyed from the game, it can’t be accessed when the game tries to set its kinematic value to false, thus throwing an error. Every time a block is removed, the game goes through the block array to identify the block and removes it from the array. While it is slightly slow, it reduces memory usage.
Finally, the actual destruction:
