Test Stage
Everything has been more or less working according to plan. I have a fully skinned Felix model running and jumping around on a death trap level for my favorite collision detection errors. Some sound is even in place. It might not seem like I’m not doing much at this point, but that’s only because I haven’t added the glitter yet. I’m likely to do all that in one artsy burst.
Right now I’m trying to figure out how deep I want to get with the physics system. It’s poison to think about having just created a system without errors, but interaction has pretty much been my key goal for the project. I really shouldn’t try to do too much here, but you can expect moving platforms, pushable objects, and dynamic level geometry. The question is, how deep will I go physics wise…
Looks great! From a programmer’s view. Ahh I know the feeling of getting things playable!
I have an opinion about physics, only because I burnt myself on physics code. I did three different attempts on 3D physics, a couple of full weeks on each, and each of my approaches failed on one point: 3D “angular momentum” on resting objects <– it is crazy! My mistake was I used scientific calculations but they become unstable when applied in steps of an update loop – Commercial physics o.t.o. use "hacks" that smooths out calculations in various ways. So basically I got air collisions and bouncing objects working, but they never reached rest on ground, not even acceptably.
So I personally believe simple stuff like interaction with rocks'n blocks is best coded with custom logic, I believe "scientific" physics is overkill there – I dunno, it killed my motivation at least. Hey, that's why I was pretty impressed by your crates moving perfectly acceptable from a players view.
Ah I forgot to ask… about collision detection! I have tried some 3D “partitioning” lately, do you do that? E.g. sorting the surfaces into a grid, tree or rooms maybe.
Well I don’t want to dwell TOO deep into physics. A lot of it I won’t even need and I’m pretty much ignoring the actual sciences and just eyeballing it. I would like objects to tip over though.
As for 3D partitioning, I sorta forgot to do it, so at the last second I auto generated my level into a 3d large grid at loading time.
Cool! I knew you did partitioning somehow, because of the relatively large levels.
Good to know even a grid works for levels like those, I think I’ll go with something like that too, possibly having several, smaller grids, one over each “island” in the level.