Monster Mechanics - Day 3

mauve on 2011/09/14 00:06 of Perceptibly Sideways
— edited on 2011/09/14 00:06

A few things came together today. After I added the ability to connect additional parts to your mutant I soon added rescaling of parts. This allows body parts to grow into place, and it also allows lungs to breathe and hearts to beat.

The first grotesequely pulsating monster was this armoured slug thing:



Then I implemented some of the other body parts on the drawing board:



The framerate is lower than I would have expected. Possibly Box2D doesn't like me scaling dozens of shapes every frame, but I haven't investigated further.

Finally I wasted a good hour trying to make the mutant stand more gracefully. In fairness, Honda spent years making ASIMO walk, so I should have expected to fail in an evening. Making the creature walk is going to be an exercise in physics hacks.

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Comments

bitcraft on 2011/09/14 00:38:

when i was working with box2d, i also had a framerate issue, but i got up to a reasonable framerate by adjusting the scale of all the objects.  when building physics bodies, i would divide each point by 10 so that engine wouldn't have to manage massive objects.

this looks amazing, btw, and in a way, what i would be doing if i had any programming skills.

mauve on 2011/09/14 00:45:

That had occurred to me. I think I heard about it in an previous Pyweek. I'm connecting to the physics through an abstraction layer so that I can plug in pymunk or newer Box2D if I get reports of compatibility problems, so the coordinate transformation can just go into that.

mauve on 2011/09/16 19:49:

Having eventually gotten round to that, it has fixed all kinds of problems. Thanks, bitcraft!