Tinkering with Softbdy physics

[mikadou]

Hi all,

just wanted to share that I put together some (very ugly experimental) code for softbody simulation. This is a standalone demo, not inside the RoR codebase. The reason for this was that I wanted to play around with softbodies, euler integration etc., but quickly changing and testing this kind of stuff is painstaking in RoR.
The complexity of this demo is much lower than the RoR physics. No breaking or derforming beams, no shock beams and so on. Here is the result of dropping a cube of Jelly


BTW I rember there was some effort planned by someone on the forum to overhaul the current softbody physics in RoR. I think he made a prototype in Blender. Are there any updates on this?

 

[Disloyalpick]

snip

It was Adriansnetlis and the thing he was working on was "Project "NextSim" I believe he kind of gave up because he had literally no time to work on it.

 

[ohlidalp]

@mikadou: Tinkering is great. Thanks for posting this.

quickly changing and testing this kind of stuff is painstaking in RoR.... breaking or derforming beams, ... shock beams and so on.

It's true and it's not good. Softbodies are simple on it's own, but RoR mixes them with extra physics mechanisms (short/long bounds, plastic deform...) gameplay logic (hydros, commands, shocks, buoyancy...) and worse yet, gfx (particles). This is bad for both development (hard to see what's going on in the code) and performance (complex decision logic instead of straightforward number crunching). It doesn't have to be this way, though - all the extra logic could (and should!) be done as optional additional steps done in between the simple softbody logic. That's basically what I'm trying to archieve here: Developer suffering a "release block"

It was Adriansnetlis and the thing he was working on was "Project "NextSim" I believe he kind of gave up because he had literally no time to work on it.

Project "NextSim" was my idea, basically "let's create new physics while leaving the old one as-is, it will be messy but quick enough". Since Adriansnetlist really had little time, I told him "let me clean it up for you a bit first". But during the research (and fixing the matflares/videocameras/skinzips mess) I changed my mind - I figured how to basically transform the current physics into NextSim, step by step, keeping all existing functionality while preparing grounds for future extension. An up-to-date description of NextSim is the "my ideal concept" section in this post: https://forum.rigsofrods.org/development-discussion/159-enter-codebase.html#post1301