What causes step offset bouncing the player up a gentle slope?

Your step-up routine triggers on any forward blocker shorter than the step height, including a sloped surface, so it lifts the player in discrete jumps instead of letting them walk up smoothly.

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 Step Offset Launching the Player Up Small Slopes

Quick answer: Only apply step-up when the blocking surface is near-vertical; if the hit normal indicates a walkable slope, let slope handling move the player instead.

Step offset is for stairs and small ledges, not ramps. When it fires on a slope the player visibly hops upward. Distinguish steps from slopes by the surface normal. Here is how.

How to fix it

1. Check the hit normal before stepping

Before performing a step-up, inspect the forward hit normal. If its angle from vertical is within the walkable slope limit, skip stepping and let normal slope movement carry the player up.

2. Reserve step-up for vertical faces

Apply step-up only when the obstacle is effectively a wall (normal close to horizontal) and shorter than the max step height. True stairs and curbs have near-vertical risers, so this still climbs them.

3. Smooth the vertical step

When you do step up, interpolate the height change over a few frames rather than snapping. This removes residual popping on legitimate stairs as well.

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.

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