Feb/103
Little progress update!
Between times full of study and work I found some time again to work on a few projects. But first I want to apologize to the people who commented on articles here in the period of about May – December 2009, due to the crapload of spam I recieved in the comments I wasn’t able to filter out spam from my readers. And have thus removed all the pending comments from that period. Now back to where I started, the projects I’m working on at the moment… Recently I made a mock up for a collaberative multi user chat/drawing application meant for sharing ideas, sketches, links and possibly files. Unfortunately I can’t share this with you now for technical and financial reasons. What I can share with you is the progress I made when I recently returned to my particle and constraint engine! Having learned a few more fundamental mathematical skills I found it worth looking at Thomas Jakobsen’s article ‘Advanced Character Physics’ again. And a few day’s later we have the beginnings of a very scalable and probably efficient physics engine (see it in action after the read more link). In the coming weeks I will refine the engine, rewrite ponstructor, release ponstructor and possibly the physics engine as well!
There were a few people impressed and interested in the 3D engine, currently it is not high on my to do-list since there are many better and more efficient offerings out there like Papervision 3D, Away 3D and Sandy. But as soon as I release Ponstructor and the physics engine I might find time to revisit the 3D engine since there is room for a lot of improvement and rewriting.
Jan/0910
Ponstructor beta release!
Since the last post I’ve been quietly working on a real good version of the bridge builder game for flash. Take a look at the result after the ‘Continue Reading’ link and tell me what you think, (or if you spotted a bug) in the comments.
Dec/082
Bridge Builder Game! (Concept)
Constraint based bridge simulator
Some of you might remember a game called pontifex or bridge builder if you don’t; it’s a game in which you construct a bridge with beams and than let a train or car drive over it to see whether it holds. It is really fun and quite educational at the same time (equals morally appropriate right?). After some more research into rigid body constraints I found out that pontifex probably used the same stuff like I used in the 2D constraint based rope. So with some minor modifications it was easy to create a bridge simulator and with a littlebit more code even a bridge builder. It is still far from a game suitable for release and profit but it is definatly a playable minigame. Take a look at the working example by clicking the ‘Continue Reading’ link.
Dec/0819
2D Constraint based rope
Constraint based rope simulation
So I was looking into some cool stuff to do with my 3D engine when I came across this. I’ve always been a fan of physics simulation based realism so I began to work this out in 2D. The first demo was using elastic constraints between particles but that made a very instable system. It can be improved with better integrators like RK4 but that still didn’t result in the desired result. I might have other plans for these elastic constraints later though. You can read more about elastic constraints here [Gaffer's tutorial on spring physics] and here [Gamasutra's "Exploring spring models"]. So I went on with inelastic infinitely ’stiff’ constraints which were mentioned in this ["Advanced Character Physics" by Thomas Jakobsen] great resource on computer physics simulation. The result worked out pretty well and will be easy to port to 3D. Which will happen when I’m done with a little (very interesting) side project using the same code. More about that later… Check out the working demo after the ‘Continue Reading’ link.