NewtonPlayGround 1.53 (Updated on 22.10.2006)

[Sascha Willems]

Oh my, I love this forum. Just woke up and theres plenty of usefull feedback

The mouse picking is a bit off when you move the mouse away from the center. In center it pics the exact point, but the more you move to the screen border, the more the picking errs toward the center.

Maybe it's also because you're using a different resolution than me. As I told above this happens noticeable in some widescreen resolutions, but at least in my default res (1280x960) I can't notice that problem. I'll look into it.

Second thing is, that the character controller doesn't feel like you are actually going by feet, but more as if you sit in a car or some other vehicle. Acceleration/Deccaleration could maybe a bit faster, letting controls feel more responsive.

That's true. The character controller is very basic and I'll improve it for the next release. Right now it feels a bit "detached" from the world, which could be changed.

- I can kind of see through some objects, a screeny will follow later

I see, the same happens on my system when loading your sample. Seems that I somewhere forget to switch culling back to it's default value which makes you (and me, and maybe others) see the innards of some primitives. Though I can clearly see it and will also fix it I'm kind of buffled why it never happened in the scenes I made.

- when setting up the joint, it would be nice to be able to move around with the camera like when adding a new object in the scene. Then you could see exaxtly where the joint attachment point will go.

True. But that's not working right now because the window for finishing the joint is modal to avoid the user doing something else than finishing the joint. But since that still should do no harm I'll change that so that you can still rotate and zoom the scene when finishing up joints.

- turning off the shadows doesn't seem to have any effect

Digged out again. Could you please tell me what you mean with this? I just tried and settings shadows on/off in the settings dialog works fine with me.

When loading "Human catapult" - throws an exception that is in german, but i guess i says "0,00001234 is not a valid floating point value"

Oh my, I wonder what I did there. It seems that the PlayGround used the "," as a decimal separator for saving the ragdolls. This was corrected long time ago (an older scene with ragdolls doesn't have that problem) but somehow I "reintroduced" that bug. I'll fix that. If you want to still see the scene, open up the XML in notepad and replace all commas with points, save and load it.

"Wheeled tank on terrain" cannot load the tank and states that it can't find a mesh with a message "TDirectXMesh->GetMeshByName->Mesh->Geosphare01 not found"

Well, seems like another lanugage-related bug. That mesh is spelled "Geosphäre1" (cause my 3D modeller app is german, so it names objects also german) and maybe other language OS'es have problems with the "Umlaut" in that. I'll change that too and hopefully remember it for the future.


P.S. : Thanks for all your feedback. I already have a list of things to fix/do and will start working on the update today.

[Sascha Willems]

So here is the first quick fix : http://newton.delphigl.de/files/playground15_scenefix.zip

It's no new exe, but it's related to some off the scenes not getting loaded on non-german OS'es (guess I'm gonna do coding with an english language setting from now on, or just stop coding too late ).

It'll fix the following scenes :

• (Joints, Compound Collisions) Catapults.xml
  Removed Umlaut from one of the loaded models (see rock.X, which is also replaced)
• (Vehicle Joint) Wheeled Tank on Terrain.xml
  Removed Umlaut from one of the loaded models (see rock.X, which is also replaced)
• (Springs) Human Cannon.xml
  Replaced commas with points, so ragdoll should load without problems.

Instructions :
Download the ZIP and extract into your installation directory for NewtonPlayGround, if necessary tell your unzipper to also extract directories. It should then overwrite the scenes and one of the models in a customdata folder.

So anyone wanting to see the above scenes please download this fix and try again.

Temporal fix for widescreen picking problem :
Seems that the problem only occurs when shadows are enabled, cause then I use an ifinite projection matrix which seems to be calculated wrong at ratios different then 1.333 (widescreen is 1.6 or more). So until the update is out and you want to use NPG with a widescreen resolution, please disable shadows.

[_Tux_]

sascha, have you tried.. DecimalSeparator := ','; ? that should allow non german users to load values of "1,00".

[Sascha Willems]

sascha, have you tried.. DecimalSeparator := ','; ? that should allow non german users to load values of "1,00".

Sadly it's not that easy. That's what I did first, but only changing the decimal separator doesn't really work on all occassions. So I wrote a function that checks for the decimal separator and "normalizes" it to be always a point and then uses Val for converting to single (Val doesn't care for the DecimalSeparator setting). This always works, but sometimes when loadging stuff from XML I tend to forget (mostly when coding late in the night) to use that function to get values from XML-Attributes and then I get bugs like the one with the ragdoll.

[kallaspriit]

Another thing is that I wanted to use a 3ds mesh in the scene but when loading the compund collision, it shows the preview and everything but when hitting create, it says that the file does not exist. Also there should be a scale possibility like Convex Hull does.

As for the shadows, I turned them off at the beginning (after installation) and they are all clearly False in the settings.xml but I'm still getting shadows. I would like to turn them off for better berformance since my computer is sh*t.


Keep up the good work

[Sascha Willems]

Another thing is that I wanted to use a 3ds mesh in the scene but when loading the compund collision, it shows the preview and everything but when hitting create, it says that the file does not exist. Also there should be a scale possibility like Convex Hull does.

Have you put the 3DS model in the correct directory? It's possible to select models outside of the customdata-directories, but loading them is not. You must put them there, see the manual for more info. As for the scaling : I'll look into it and maybe implement it.

As for the shadows, I turned them off at the beginning (after installation) and they are all clearly False in the settings.xml but I'm still getting shadows. I would like to turn them off for better berformance since my computer is sh*t.

That's odd. I just retried again and it works here. I'll have to take a closer look at this.

[walaber]

okay, here's the first user contributed scene



http://walaber.com/misc/Walaber_Buggy.xml

the only thing I can't add is proper suspension, because the Playground springs cause objects to attract, so the shocks compress instead of expand

but you can see the suspension parts moving around, they work really well!!

[Sascha Willems]

Oh man, that's insane (in a positive way)

That's looking fantastic. I think I'll implement some suspension-like thing in the next release of the NewtonPlayGround. I just fixed all the bugs that were reported and I'll soon start implementing new features and I'd really like to expand on what one can do with springs/dampers and stuff, and something like the buggy you've made would be the perfect "target" for such additions. Thx for posting this!

[walaber]

really all you need is to add a "distance" variable to the springs, where the spring force is only applied when the distance between the bodies is different than the set distance.

then I could set the desired distance for the shocks to something like 2.0, so the spring will always be pushing to reach that distance.

[edit] of course, adding the new spring settings to joints would work well too!! [/edit]

[Sury]

That's a really nice buggy walaber, really!

Two more bugs to report :
In the "create new physical object" dialog, the default value in the Scale edit box is 1,0 which causes the same floating point exception.It's not a big deal, as log as the user figures out where the problem is, but at first i thought it's in the .xml files somewhere.
When shadow volues are turned off, the "3ds max style axis" in the bottom left corner look a bit weird and striped, and the 'picked point sphere' is rendered in dark grey instead of white. Turning the debug display on, fixes that, so it's probably some light/material render state issue.

[Sascha Willems]

[edit] of course, adding the new spring settings to joints would work well too!! [/edit]

Ah, totally forgot about that one! With that one it should be easy to implement. I'll look into it!

In the "create new physical object" dialog, the default value in the Scale edit box is 1,0 which causes the same floating point exception.It's not a big deal, as log as the user figures out where the problem is, but at first i thought it's in the .xml files somewhere.

Thanks for pointing that out. Will be fixed.

When shadow volues are turned off, the "3ds max style axis" in the bottom left corner look a bit weird and striped, and the 'picked point sphere' is rendered in dark grey instead of white. Turning the debug display on, fixes that, so it's probably some light/material render state issue.

That's something I just noticed some hours ago while testing something with the shadows. It's just that I forget to reset color and disable texturing before rendering the axis helper, so that the last texture get's drawn over it which makes it look weird. That's already fixed.

[Julio Jerez]

Dam Walaber, can you do that? .
That should be illegal for a litle engine that could
if you guys keep doping this king of stuff the some expects might have to change their opinion in Newton and start believing it is real physics, hey they might even consider it for real projects .

[kallaspriit]

Tried again and this time the shadows are gone.. wierd

Little fun with fast moving objects and CC:

[Sascha Willems]

Oh boy, it's getting very late here and I'm struggling to not fall down from my chair, but I didn't want to go to bed before implementing the dampers with the custom joint interface using the new NewtonUserJointSetRowSpringDamperAcceleration, and so I did. Right now values are hard-coded, but tomorrow (I'd love to do it right now, but I'm falling almost asleep) I'll add the controls to set values for the damper by the user.


In the meantime enjoy this video : http://newton.delphigl.de/playground_buggy_walaber.wmv (~850 KBytes, WMV) which shows Walaber's buggy (I can't tell you how glad I am that you made this thing!) with the new damper addition for sliders.

[Julio Jerez]

Just when I was thinking the suspension was just an idea. And just like magic Ban Da Bin Ba Da Bum you got suspension