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Very cool stuff! Does this work at all with models with movable joints? I suppose you would do a separate convex decomp for each model child in the heirachy?

Very cool stuff! Does this work at all with models with movable joints? I suppose you would do a separate convex decomp for each model child in the heirachy?

In LE2 we followed a rule that only top-level entities should be physically active. This is because when a parent moves, the child moves with it, and that would override the physics behavior. I am toying with the idea of allowing physics at any stage in the hierarchy, in which case the parent motion would get ignored by the child.

so no more saving OBJ's if i follow correctly? this creates the physics shape from the MDL mesh? if so, thats great since that was always annoying to have to create OBJ's and GMF's.

 

Can you explain what you mean by "attach that shape to the model and save it as a prefab"? How is the shape attached to the model? And how is it being saved as a prefab? Is a prefab a separate file type?

 

Also, was there not a plan at one point to have some sort of visual physics editor to allow for easy construction of joints? Is this still a possibility? Or has this already been included into the editor?

so no more saving OBJ's if i follow correctly? this creates the physics shape from the MDL mesh? if so, thats great since that was always annoying to have to create OBJ's and GMF's.

You can still model a separate physics model and convert it into a convex hull shape, but you can just create a convex decomposition on the original visual model. A hand-made collision shape will be more accurate, but it's not always needed. We can probably also make them out of brushes and save them in the editor.

 

Can you explain what you mean by "attach that shape to the model and save it as a prefab"? How is the shape attached to the model? And how is it being saved as a prefab? Is a prefab a separate file type?

There's a property in the physics settings that lets you choose a *.phy file. This overrides the auto-generated shape, if one is chosen in the drop-down box above that. If you want to reuse the model + physics, just save it as a *.pfb (prefab) file. Like 3D World Studio, these can be reused and carry more information than just a dumb model file. In fact, you'll probably be using prefabs when you build a scene more than plain models (since a prefab is a model + extra info like physics). This is better than resaving the model from the editor, because you can still update the model in Blender or whatever, and the extra info you add won't get overwritten by your modeling program.

 

Also, was there not a plan at one point to have some sort of visual physics editor to allow for easy construction of joints? Is this still a possibility? Or has this already been included into the editor?

You're looking at the beginning of that. I haven't actually implemented joints yet, but I'm thinking about making them an entity. That way they can have scripts attached to them, and they can be displayed in the editor with the regular rendering routine.

Looks nice XD

I am toying with the idea of allowing physics at any stage in the hierarchy, in which case the parent motion would get ignored by the child.

I hope it can be disabled to ignore the child, because I would really like that if someone pulls on an arm, the whole body would follow the movement.

There shouldn't be a problem when multiple force sources affect a body, because naturally all the forces just add/substract on the body.

This is great! :-)

Thanks for the explanation of the prefab - makes sense. I assume the prefab also stores scripts that have been attached as well?

 

Yes, several times I had wished the joints in LE2 were entities. That would be great to be able to use the standard entity commands on them as well as be able to see them. I think we would have alot more complex physics setups with some sort of visual representation of where the joints (and PINS!) are located in regards to the physics bodies.

We could make a great ragdoll editor this way.

 

I hope it can be disabled to ignore the child, because I would really like that if someone pulls on an arm, the whole body would follow the movement.

There shouldn't be a problem when multiple force sources affect a body, because naturally all the forces just add/substract on the body.

That happens right now if you connect two bodies with a joint. It sounds like you are describing a mixture of forward kinematics (animation) and inverse kinematics (physics), which actually doesn't sound unrealistic. We already have code to move and rotate a physics body where we want it to be. Maybe animation can use this when the child entity has mass.

Make sure the collision mesh is always slightly bigger then the model, in the picture of the teapot, some parts of the collision mesh are smaller then the teapot, which could look weird when it actually collides with something.

@Benton, I do not think you would be able to see any problem with anything intersecting with the teapot because, there is probably less than one cm in difference. I do not think you could see a sword,gun,finger,ect,ect... intersecting with the pot. If the difference was alot larger I would agree with you.

Maybe but the code should still work to make sure there is no intersecting. Because it might be only an inch with the teapot, but with other models it might be more...

You can get away with quite a rough approximation of physics geometry.