NewtonPlayGround

[Sascha Willems]

As some of you asked for, vehicle-steering has recently been implemented. See this screenshot :
(Clicky)


So you can now together with the Vehicle Container and Joints built the weirdest kind of car-configuarions and drive them around .In the picture above I connected a trailer to the car (via a hinge joint) and that trailer has a backdoor that swings around the x-axis. So if you drive fast enough that door opens due to the load in the trailer (spheres) pushing it and they fall out of it.

Besides this there were some other changes. You e.g. now have a context-menu (right-click) for every body that contains the most common actions for a body (like jointing, deleting, properties, etc.) and you can now also set linear and angular damping for every body. So the changelog for 1.3 is growing and growing and growing

[walaber]

this is looking fantastic!! I can imagine many users will play around with attaching ragdolls to various contraptions.. I for one would like to try making a 4-wheel ATV, and attaching a ragdoll's feet to the pedals, and hands to the handlebars

[Assembler]

What's a ATV?

[Sascha Willems]

All Terrain Vehicle
http://images.google.de/images?q=atv&hl ... ogle-Suche

[Assembler]

Ahh! Thanks! My English mark gets better and better!

[Julio Jerez]

I remember seeing a reconstruction programme on BBC about Trebuchets. In it they found that letting the trebuchet move (i.e. wheels, no block) made the projectile go further than a model with no wheels.

Any thoughts on the discrepancy?

Joe

Nice demo btw

Well it seems I have to retract from my interpretation of the trebuchet simulation and my intuition, yes I am wrong from time to time, I am not afraid to admit it,

After seen the later previews of the trebuchet, I have to say the that BBC documentary, JoeRight, this http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/lostempire ... heels.html The Newton engine, and many other observation of trebuchet, were all right and I was wrong.

I based my assessment on my intuition of conservation of momentum and energy, I assumed that not energy is lost during the firing and therefore a trebuchets that is not allow to move will transfer more kinetic energy to the bullet.
However this is not correct, there is lot of energy lost in the process and it appears the wheels allowed for a more effective transfer of kinetic energy to the ball.
Here is a video showing this in Newton where it clearly shows the counterintuitive result.
http://newtondynamics.com/downloads/Catapult.mpg

Had I not read Joe Wright Observation and base on my intuition I would had spend lots of time trying to find if there was a bug on the formulation of the equations in Newton.
I guest that if the BBC people had Newton and Sascha's Playground they would not had to build the real model to confirm the fact.
These subtle things are important to me, because I do not like inconsistencies.

[Sascha Willems]

And developement goes on. I already released a developer-preview in the SDK-forums and the change-log is growing and growing. See the following screenshot for what can be put together with about three or four clicks (anyone remember where the track comes from ? ) :

(clicky)


And if you btw. have any feature-requests for the next version of the playground, just post them here. One of the recently added things is that RagDolls can now be spawned in different stances, either standing or sitting. So you can e.g. create a vehicle and spawn an already sitting ragdoll on it.

[Stucuk]

Have u tryed implementing rope? One of the things that rearly made me think wow about hl2 (apart from the discs u could throw into zombies n walls and about 10000 other things) was the rope in hl2.

In the level where ur in a mainly zombie bit and that wierd guy with a sniper rifles goes from roof to roof, right at the start there is half a person hanging by a rope from a tree, when when hit it swings about realisticaly.

[Sascha Willems]

A rope can easily be implemented by using several smaller capsules connected via ball-and-socket joints. I did this once in another demo and it's very easy. The only "difficult" part was to render the skinned mesh for the rope, since rendering just the capsules wouldn't look much like a rope. But right now I don't see how I could implement skinnable meshes (that have their vertices changed depending on joint positions) into NewtonPlayGround without implementin an editor to assign vertices to a joint. But maybe such stuff will be implemented (together with a material-system) in one of the future releases.

[Sascha Willems]

I finally got around implementing a material-system :

(clicky)


Small movie (WMV, ~270 KBytes)

As you can see you now have a material-manager window that allows you to add new materials and set all parameters for the different material-pairs. Materials themselves can be applied to each body using the body's context menu. And also note that you can change every material-parameter in realtime, so you'll instantly see the changes.

[bal]

Impressive.

[MatAllum]

I say the exact same thing:

Impressive.

Say, I know this is irrelevant to NewtonPlayGround, but where did you get that new WinXP skin color? All I get when I look in the list is green, blue, or silver.

[Sascha Willems]

Well, I was very bored this sunday and wanted to put together something more complex again with my current NewtonPlayGround and thought "hey, almost every competing physics-engine has some demo with dominos, and newton not". So I started puting some domino stones side by side but found them boring, so I decided to put together some different things and make a more interesting domino track with moving parts, jointed stuff, etc. So after some hours of work this is what I came up with (maybe I'll even put some other stuff in for release, dunno) :

(clicky for bigger view)


And since static screenshots don't do it justice and look boring, click here for a video that shows the whole chain-reaction from start to end (around 1 and a half minute, ~3 MBytes big, WMV format).

@MatAllum : You need to modify the skin-dll for WindowsXP (Search for "Theme Multipatcher") and then get some skins from sites like themexp.org, etc.

[registration information]

Cool !

about 225 +/- 1 dominos ^_^

[_Tux_]

rofl. how long did that take to setup?