Lucidity Log 3: The Annoying Pendulum

Since my last Lucidity related post Raid+ has moved on to sprint 2 for Lucidity and I have since joined a feature team working on the third and second floor clock tower puzzle. I am responsible for programming the puzzle though surprisingly the hardest part so far hasn't been the puzzle itself but has animating the pendulum part of the puzzle of unity. At first I thought that this was going to be something that the animators would take care of but I quickly realized that this was something that was probably going to need to be programmed since the player needed to be able to interact with the pendulum dynamically. It seemed simple but getting the pendulum to swing smoothly was quite a beast to conquer. At first I got the pendulum to swing but at the apex of the swing it would sharply start swinging the other way. To fix this I tried adding decay. It worked smoothing out before getting to the apex but for some reason it didn't want to work coming back down and would sharply go the other way. I tinkered at this for longer than it probably should have taken but eventually I had a pendulum that swung smoothly back and forth.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o315IIAo080