How to Fix Buoyant Debris Not Bobbing on the Animated Water Surface

Crates meant to float bob at a fixed level while the waves roll under them, clipping and hovering. The physics must query the real, displaced surface height, not a flat plane.

How to fix it

1. Share the wave function

Expose the same Gerstner/sine wave height (and time) the water shader uses to the CPU so buoyancy can evaluate the true surface height at any XZ position.

2. Apply force at sample points

Place a few buoyancy probes on the object, and for each one below the sampled surface apply upward force proportional to submerged depth so the object rights itself and rides the waves.

3. Add drag for stability

Apply water drag and angular damping at the submerged probes so debris settles into the wave motion instead of bouncing or spinning, matching the visual sway.

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.