by Julio Jerez » Fri Dec 22, 2017 1:52 pm
nice!.
Regarding the car, yes i know, sorry about that.
i spent time trying get the generalization of the same feature that you are showing with your VR device.
the simple kinematic joint work fine on a single body and with some effort and tweaking of the friction, controlling a single joint, but once you try to make a complex contraction, there is not way to calculate the friction and the accelaration precisely on each joint so that they agree to a specified position. This takes some work, the like no one has ever, ever managed to do except on very special cases.
We now have a way to do is systematically by connecting bodies, joints and effectors.
Then a new solver calculates the friction and the acceleration simultaneously.
This is something I have been pursuing for many years, and I wanted to get the preliminary steps in before the year end.
The potential of this approach is immense, and this is not exaggeration, check out the thread where Sweeney, Joe and I are dicussing the progress.
The difference is that this is all based on rigurous mathematical and physical model, not on the invention of a new law that apply on a very narrow range, stuff like shape matching, verlet ragdoll, particle soft bodies, etc that you see in other competing libraries that make splash demo and quietly die out. This funtionality is meant to be a workhorse on realtime physic simulation.
This extend to anything that is physically possible and in fact things that can be plausible,
and that is my goal with the engine.
On the car, after I made the last release before year end, I will go and complete the model, right now I only added the ability to specified a user defined frame.
I stop there because I am thinking of making the contact joints to be user defined like the custom joints. I am not 100% decided yet, but it is becoming clear that a simple contact model is not adecuated to supports sophisticated functionality.
I saw this with soft bodies, the vehicle tire, and now with inverse dynamics.
in each case I had to add extra special high level code to deal with the case.
That's strong sign that rigid bodies contact are not adecuate for non rigid bodies.