What causes a hover vehicle bouncing on uneven ground?

The hover force is a pure spring proportional to the ride-height error with no damping, so the craft oscillates and bounces as it tries to correct its height over bumps.

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 Hover Vehicle That Bounces on Uneven Ground

Quick answer: Make the hover thrust a damped spring (PD controller) that subtracts a term proportional to vertical velocity, so the craft settles to ride height smoothly instead of bouncing.

A hover vehicle that only pushes harder the lower it gets will oscillate forever over bumps. Adding a damping term that opposes vertical velocity turns the bounce into a smooth, settled hover.

How to fix it

1. Raycast ride height per hover point

Cast down from several hover points to measure the gap to the ground, giving the craft stable multi-point support and natural pitch/roll over terrain.

2. Use a damped spring force

Compute thrust as k * (targetHeight - currentHeight) - c * verticalVelocity at each point, so the damping term c kills the oscillation.

3. Clamp thrust and add gravity

Limit the maximum upward force so a deep dip does not launch the craft, and apply gravity so it falls naturally over edges and cliffs.

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 Unreal Engine 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.

Most of the time the fix is small. Seeing the failure clearly is the part that actually costs you.