Tank Pawn floats when spawned from PlayerStart actor

[Razgulu]

I’m at chapter “The Game Mode Class” of ToonTanks.

I removed the BP_Pawn_Tank instance from the level and set up the GameMode as described in the Video. The Pawn spawns and works fine, but I noticed that the tank is floating in the air.

Left is manually placed in the level, right is spawned from PlayerStart.

I checked the CollisionCapsules of both my BP_Pawn_Tank and the PlayerStart and their half heights are 60 and 92 respectively. I guess the reason for the floating tank is that the center of the player start CollisionCapsule is higher up than the center of the BP_Pawn_Tank CollisionCapsule. The only way I found to make it spawn closer to the ground is to scale down the PlayerStart Actor. The CollisionCapsule extents cannot be changed. But this seems like a hack to me, and if I use the Right Click → Play from here function, the Tank is floating.

For reference the same scene in the editor before starting the game.

Is there a better way to solve this?

[DanM]

Some have had success using no collision for the two meshes however I never had any success with that.

I had done some testing and there seems to be a magic value of -90. That is what the character mesh for the third person template project uses and it seems to work here. I tested that with the Stack-o-Bot project with the animations disabled and it worked there too .

[Nahor]

I believe that usually a player pawn uses UCharacterMovementComponent to handle player movements, which takes care of dropping the player to the ground if needed.

The alternative is to scale the pawns to be 180cm tall (standard character height). “Play from here” would still have problem next to walls (PlayerStart expects 60cm-wide characters), but that at least can be managed just by choosing a location farther away from walls and other obstructions.

I’m not sure how big characters (height > 180cml) are supposed to be handled. PlayerStart can be made to float, that’s a way to fix it, but I can’t think of a solution for “Play from here”