What causes diagonal movement being faster?

Horizontal and vertical input are added without normalizing, so moving diagonally combines both at full magnitude, producing a vector about 1.4 times longer than a single axis.

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 Diagonal Movement Being Faster Than Straight

Quick answer: Normalize the movement input vector (or clamp its magnitude to one) before applying speed, so diagonal movement is the same speed as straight movement.

Faster diagonal movement is an unnormalized input vector. Normalizing it fixes it. Here is how.

How to fix it

1. Normalize the input vector

Combine the horizontal and vertical input into a vector and normalize it before multiplying by speed. Adding both axes at full value makes the diagonal magnitude about 1.4, so diagonals move faster.

2. Clamp magnitude for analog

For analog sticks where you want partial input, clamp the vector's magnitude to a maximum of one rather than normalizing (which would force full speed). This keeps diagonals correct while preserving partial input.

3. Apply speed after

Multiply by movement speed only after normalizing or clamping, so speed is applied to a unit-length direction. Applying speed to the raw summed input is what produces the diagonal discrepancy.

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.

The errors you never hear about are the ones quietly costing you players. Visibility turns them into a worklist.