NewtonPlayGround

[Sascha Willems]

Shots from initial release :

Shots from current version (1.2) :

(Click for bigger view)

Download Version 1.2 (ZIP, 1.3 MBytes)

Description :
This one sat around on my HD for some time now, so I finally decided to polish it a bit and then release it. As you can guess from the name, it's some demo you can play around with. It let's you spawn all kind of primitives newton has to offer (no joints or vehicles) and you can drag them around or do wathever you want. The demo also has an advanced editing mode (see screenshot 2) that can be used after the editor UI has benn opened by pressing F2. You can also export the scenes you've built to XML to later load them or pass them around to others.

Note :
Please read the included readme.html, which contains some additional informations as well as the controls of the demo. And also please note that this should be considered beta, since I haven't really had the time (and motivation) to totally test everything that is possible. And the demo also let's you push Newton to it's limits, so that the demo may seem to have crashed (i.e. stacking >10 ragdolls above each other), so if you find bugs and think it's a bug of the demo itself, please report it.
I also plan (if I find the time) to add new features and functions as newton advances, maybe even a separate interface for putting joints into the scene, but that requires some work, so it may never come.


So feel free to enjoy this demo and tell me what you think of it!

[walaber]

excellent work, as always! I'm glad you got around to releasing the final version, this is a really cool app!

I noticed one problem. when dragging objects, the drag force is only updated if the mouse is moving. if you drag an object, and then stop moving the mouse (but keep the button held down), the object keeps sliding away, presumably using the last drag force before the mouse stopped.

it's a little hard to explain... I think you need to update the drag force every loop, regardless of whether the mouse has moved, because the body will have moved, and therefore the drag force will change...

[Sascha Willems]

Thanks for pointing that out Walaber! It was amongst the things I really wanted to fix, but I totally forgot about it (it's always the same : You release something and forget to incorporate all the stuff you wanted to).

I've changed it, and now it should work much better. Please redownload the demo.

[bal]

Hmm it's still the same here. When you stop moving the mouse the object keeps on sliding, then when you start moving the mouse again the object gets an extremely high velocity and it's gone in notime .

[Sascha Willems]

That's weird, maybe you downloaded it too early (I was just updating the archive). After the change I made, I had no more such problems. If I drag an object and don't move the mouse, it hangs by the point where I picked it, and if I move the mouse again it slowly moves with the mouse.

[bal]

You're right, I redownloaded it and it's all OK now.
I like the fading-part of the GUI. Looks very nice. The program itself is brilliant. It'll be very usefull for testing etc .

[Julio Jerez]

Wow, I only have one word. Awesome

[krtecek]

wow

[Sascha Willems]

I've just updated the NewtonPlayground to use the latest version of the SDK, the link stays the same. The only new feature I included is that you now can set the friction and solver model on the fly (there is a new button below the material settings button). I'll maybe add some new features in the future.

[Sascha Willems]

Still working on this thing. I've just added vehicles. And some other minor features, like the possibility to spawn bodies freezed (so you can e.g. hang ragdolls in front of something), and some additional scenes to watch and play.

Here are some new screenshots :


I plan to release this new version very soon (maybe the coming weekend) and then I'll try to implement joints, so that the playground will then contain (almost) everything newton has to offer. I already have some ideas on how to go about the user letting build his own joint configurations, but I think that this feature will require some work and some hours of testing.

[Assembler]

Great game!
I like it very much!
Anyone should stop me playing Newton Physics games...

[Assembler]

It's a bug-report:

Often when I play with Ragdolls, an arm or leg stuck in the enviorment.
I'd just say that! But it's very good!

[Sascha Willems]

That usually happens when the ragdoll is moved at high speed. That's due to newton's working and not a bug in the program itself. But it should help to set newton's FPS to a higher value to avoid such things, which will be done in the next release.

[Sascha Willems]

I've started implementing the features to connect rigid bodies using newton's joint types. It is in it's very early stages and I still need to put much work into it before I'll release a new version with it.

But if you're interested you can download a sample video (3.4 MBytes, WMV-format, ~40sec) that demonstrates how joints are made in my current version of this demo.

[walaber]

that is really, really cool!!! very intuitive!!

the only thing I nocited is that there's no visual confirmation of what body you selected... so perhaps making the body flash red or something when you click it would help confirm what bodies you are connecting.

I'd also like to see how you are letting the user set pin directions for hinges, sliders, etc