Can very thin stairs be ignored for stair step?

[Lamoot]

Hello, it's me again with another question. I was wondering whether it's possible to limit the stair step if the stair is too thin? In the following video I made very thin stairs and a very steep staircase. The player has no problem climbing the stairs.
The stairs are 0.5m tall and 0.2m thin

thin_stairs_movement.mov

Normally I wouldn't create such level geometry in the first place, the example in the video is exaggerated to more clearly show the effect. I noticed this behavior by accident when I walked near an edge of some random level geometry I placed in another scene. I think that thin steps like these would often appear unintentionally in levels and it would be useful to disregard such geometry for stair stepping.

[mrezai]

I have think about it and implement a prototype but it doesn't cover all cases.
I'll create a prototype git branch if I find a good solution for it.

[Lamoot]

Thank you for considering it.

[RisingThumb]

Hello, it's me again with another question. I was wondering whether it's possible to limit the stair step if the stair is too thin? In the following video I made very thin stairs and a very steep staircase. The player has no problem climbing the stairs. The stairs are 0.5m tall and 0.2m thin

thin_stairs_movement.mov
Normally I wouldn't create such level geometry in the first place, the example in the video is exaggerated to more clearly show the effect. I noticed this behavior by accident when I walked near an edge of some random level geometry I placed in another scene. I think that thin steps like these would often appear unintentionally in levels and it would be useful to disregard such geometry for stair stepping.

Just to add, this issue is present in Source(see this video for an example of this in the same way you show), and it's also present in all the Quake games(I think...). I don't know if Source 2 solved this issue(I suspect not). The way they work around this issue is using clip brushes to clip off geometry that people could get caught on(they also do this for most stairs to turn them into slopes). In my opinion, this is generally good practice for walls at least, because I think almost all player movement systems would get caught on random bits of geometry.

If it can't be solved programatically, you can at least work around it by baking it into your level design considerations
EDIT: Just in case it's useful to others, a clip brush is just an invisible bit of geometry you collide with, usually to prevent people colliding with complex geometry

[Lamoot]

@RisingThumb thanks for the extra information and the video. I wasn't aware Valve didn't solve the issue either, but fixed it through adjusting the level geometry. I wonder whether Unity or Unreal used an improved method and or they left like that as well.

This then gives me a way forward with using this stair step system and the issue isn't as big anymore. Would be useful to have it mentioned somewhere nonetheless.

[Lamoot]

@mrezai I'm now using your stair-stepping solution in my project and it's working very nicely.

The original issue of thin stairs is not such a problem anymore. I'll just use an invisible ramp workaround for rare cases where it occurs. Do you want me to keep this issue open anyway?

Otherwise I can close it and we let any future user of your stair step know that thin stairs are a corner case solved by extra colliders.

[mrezai]

Thanks for your tests.
I have an idea about how to solve this issue and I want to test it before closing the issue.
I'll share a prototype branch here if I implement it successfully.

[Skaruts]

I'm not sure this is an issue, though. I'm inclined to believe the reason Valve and id Software never removed this is because this was intended behavior, and it's trivial for mappers to add clips (assuming they're using a decent level editor).

I'm not sure if this is related, but it may the case that if a character controller can't climb thin steps (this one fails at very thin ones), that it may be the cause of a few problems: #15.