What causes a bouncy ball gaining energy and bouncing higher?

The combined restitution exceeds one, or deep penetration on contact adds a separating impulse, so each bounce returns more energy than it arrived with and the ball climbs.

How do I catch this when it only happens for some players?

Capture it automatically from the player's device with the full stack trace, the device and OS, the build, and a breadcrumb trail of what they did. That turns a vague complaint into a specific, reproducible issue you can fix without owning the hardware it happens on.

How to Fix a Bouncy Ball Gaining Energy and Bouncing Higher

Quick answer: Keep combined restitution at or below one, reduce penetration with smaller timesteps or continuous detection, and tune contact correction so bounces never add energy.

A ball that bounces higher each time it lands is violating conservation of energy, usually from restitution over one or the solver pushing it out of a deep penetration with extra impulse. Here is how to fix it.

How to fix it

1. Keep restitution at most one

Ensure the combined restitution of ball and floor is <= 1 (perfectly elastic). Values above 1, or a combine mode that sums them, add energy and make the ball climb.

2. Reduce penetration impulses

Deep interpenetration at high speed makes the solver apply a large separation impulse that can read as extra bounce energy. Use continuous collision detection or a smaller timestep so contacts are shallow.

3. Tune contact correction

Lower the contact bias / Baumgarte correction factor (or use the engine's soft-contact settings) so position correction does not inject velocity into the bounce.

Catching the ones you can't reproduce

The hardest version of this to fix is the one you can't reproduce — it only happens on a player's hardware, OS, driver, or save state, under conditions that simply aren't present on your machine. A report that says “it crashed” or “it froze” gives you nothing to act on, so the bug survives release after release while quietly costing you players.

Automatic error capture closes that gap. Each failure arrives with its full stack trace, the device and OS, the build number, and a breadcrumb trail of what the player did right before it broke, so even a failure you have never seen becomes a specific, reproducible issue. Fold identical failures into one signature ranked by how many players each hits, and your worklist sorts itself worst-first instead of arriving as a stream of vague complaints.

This is where a tool like Bugnet earns its place. Its SDK captures every error automatically with the full stack trace plus device, OS, memory, build, and game-state context, folds duplicates into one grouped issue with an occurrence count, and ties each to the build it first appeared on — so you fix the problem that hurts the most players first and confirm it is gone when its signature disappears from the next release.

Reproduce it once with full context and the fix writes itself. The hunt is the expensive part.