Character bouncing off ground due to gravity

Question

Implementing gravity in the game, the character keeps bouncing up and down slightly when he hits the ground, upon debugging the character is essentially bouncing on and off the ground. Not quite sure how to iron out the issue any help here would be greatly appreciated.

The constant value

private float gravity = 0.09f;

adding to the velocity if the character is on the ground

if (!isOnGround)
 velocity.Y += gravity;

adding the characters overall velocity to the overall position.

position += velocity * (float)gameTime.ElapsedGameTime.TotalSeconds;

Part of the collision method which determines if the character is on the ground or not.

for (int y = topTile; y <= bottomTile; ++y)
            {
                for (int x = leftTile; x <= rightTile; ++x)
                {
                    // If this tile is collidable,
                    TileCollision collision = Level.GetCollision(x, y, tileMap);
                    if (collision != TileCollision.Passable)
                    {
                        // Determine collision depth (with direction) and magnitude.
                        Rectangle tileBounds = Level.GetBounds(x, y);
                        Vector2 depth = RectangleExtensions.GetIntersectionDepth(bounds, tileBounds);
                        float elapsed = (float)gameTime.ElapsedGameTime.TotalSeconds;

                        if (depth != Vector2.Zero)
                        {
                            float absDepthX = Math.Abs(depth.X);
                            float absDepthY = Math.Abs(depth.Y);

                            // Resolve the collision along the shallow axis.
                            if (absDepthY <= absDepthX || collision == TileCollision.Platform)
                            {
                                // If we crossed the top of a tile, we are on the ground.
                                if (previousBottom <= tileBounds.Top)
                                    isOnGround = true;

Answer 1

I am afraid I do not fully understand your collision code yet: if there is an off-by-one-pixel error somewhere, it will be hard to spot. But your physics code needs a few fixes already:

• velocity updates should depend on the timestep, even if gravity is a constant
• vertical velocity should be set to zero if on the ground
• adding the “overall velocity” is incorrect; it’s the average velocity for the duration of the last frame that needs to be added. This article should explain why.

Leading to the following code:

Vector2 oldvelocity = velocity;

if (!isOnGround)
    // This will require tweaking the gravity value
    velocity.Y += gravity * (float)gameTime.ElapsedGameTime.TotalSeconds;
else
    velocity.Y = 0.0;

position += 0.5 * (oldvelocity + velocity)
                * (float)gameTime.ElapsedGameTime.TotalSeconds;