Dr Korovic's Flying Atomic Squid - Day 4

mauve on 2012/05/09 23:31 of Mauvesoft Wasabi

Not much visible progress today, but I've continued to add necessary features and the gameplay has therefore improved quite a bit.

You can now design quite weird and wonderful squid conveyance rigs, and the improved aerofoil physics makes tweaking the orientations of the parts relatively fun. However the gameplay really needs pitch control components to help players keep their squid straight and level in flight.



There was nearly a showstopper today with Pymunk. I wanted Pymunk to give me the coordinates of the insertion point for a component, as Box2D does. This is the point I draw the sprite and allows me to connect it in the right place in the hierarchy. But Pymunk only works on centres of gravity - you can't choose an arbitrary insertion point for a body. Therefore I'm constantly having to recompute the insertion point from the centre of gravity point and the body's rotation. It's an annoying omission that makes Pymunk just plain harder to use than Box2D. A few changes in my code could help relieve the omission but I don't think it's worth wasting the time on that during Pyweek.

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Comments

superjoe on 2012/05/10 00:09:

So what was the solution? Did you switch to Box2D?

mauve on 2012/05/10 06:27:

No, I just wrapped the Pymunk bodies with more vector maths.

mauve on 2012/05/10 06:28:

So wasn't really a showstopper. :)