Welcome back, Chefs! 👨🍳
While testing Road Diner in co-op, we came across a rather strange problem with the fly swatter. One player could pick it up while another player was already holding it. The swatter would disappear from the first player’s perspective and appear floating in the other player’s hands, even though the original player was still technically holding it.
The culprit was our interaction system. It checks several conditions before allowing an interaction, including global restrictions, the state of the object, and what the individual player is currently holding.
However, we were missing one important check: whether the object was already being used by another player.
Adding that check stopped other players from picking up an occupied swatter but it also created a new problem… The player who was actually holding the swatter could no longer use it, because the system saw the swatter as “already in use” and blocked the interaction.
The final fix was to make the system distinguish between another player using the swatter and the current player already holding it. Now the interaction remains available for the player who picked it up, while everyone else has to wait their turn.
One small missing condition, two unexpected problems, and a lot of debugging later and the fly swatter is finally staying in the right hands.
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