The mystery of the unreliable kicker


We all know them, kickers that sometimes kick you way to far, or not far enough, and then again just right.
And this seems to be completely unpredictable, and there seem to be differences between online and offline,
and some players seem to be more affected by it than others.

I did a bit of research to find out why this happens, and more importantly to find a solution for it.
I discovered that there are in fact two different types of unreliable kickers, which I will now treat separately.

Type 1:
Kickers that do not kick you far enough, however high you set the KickVelocity.
It only seems to work properly sometimes, and for some people more frequently than others.
This applies to kicking in both the horizontal and vertical direction,
however, they are most often encountered hen kicking upwards, eg the kickers on BasicGayMap.

Cause: Each zoneinfo allows you to set a so called ZoneTerminalVelocity. This is the maximum velocity
that any object can travel in that zone. If you get over it, you are capped at this velocity. By default
it is set at 2500. This means that, if we take the velocity you have while walking/dodging, setting the
kickvelocity of a kicker higher than 3000 is completely useless in such a zone.
However, for some reason, you are sometimes able to go over the TerminalVelocity, meaning that
you will get kicked harder once in a while when the velocity is set very high.

Solution: Simply increase the ZoneTerminalVelocity. It is located at ZoneInfo properties > ZoneInfo > ZoneTerminalVelocity.

Open Question: Why are you sometimes able to go over the terminal velocity?

Type 2:
Kickers that sometimes kick you twice as hard.
This only applies to kickers that have an X and/or Y kick velocity.

Cause: For some reason, when you touch a kicker, sometimes the velocity is applied twice. Since
the velocity in the X and the Y direction is added to your current velocity, it will be added twice, making you fly twice as far.
Something similar happens with Triggers, when you touch a trigger, the event is sometimes fired twice (eg getting double the damage, or seeing a message twice).
It does not affect the vertical velocity, as the vertical velocity of the player is always neutralized by the kicker (which is why you always
get kicked the same height however fast you fall on a kicker).

On a more technical side, the Touch event, which is fired when you touch an actor, is sometimes fired twice at the same time. They seem to happen in nearly parallel,
as I tried to block the effect of one of the calls to Touch from within the Touch event of a kicker, without any effect.

Solution: One solution is to enable KillVelocity in the kicker properties. However, this means that dodging on a kicker will have
no effect on the distance you will fly, which may not be what you want.
I did a bit of experimentation myself and wrote this actor, which is still a bit experimental. However, I already used it while fixing XtremeWootabulous and so far it seems to do the trick.
What it does is disabling the kicker for a short period of time after it has been touched. However it will only disable for the same player, so if another player touches it
within that time it will work normally. This is inspired by the swJumpPad, as it uses a similar solution.

Open Question: Why is the Touch event sometimes fired twice?

I hope this will help some people having issues with kickers. As alternative
to kickers you can also use the swJumppad, which allows you to kick to a certain location precisely