Demo with Ammo.js Physics Engine

[Wingnut]

(Wingy waves to everyone and hugs @Raggar for all the good physics info/tips.)

Anyone ever fiddle-with Rigs of Rods?  Or maybe its latest incarnation... BeamNG.drive? 

I got Beam the other day... and have been wrecking some vehicles and marveling at the crumpled metal and flying parts.

Pretty nice vehicle physics.  Eventually it will merge with Mudrunner, which has darned good physics itself, but better mud options than BeamNG.

I love it when my big log truck trailer is teetering on the edge, at a road switchback... slipping a little on the mud, Wingnut panicking to get a winch line run, before my $60,000 load of logs tumbles down the mountain.  Mudrunner butt-clench, baby!!! 

Ahh... Tonka trucks on my puter screen, I just LOVE it!

BeamNG.drive and Rigs of Rods... were actually the 2nd and 3rd time that I had seen physics-crumpled metal/skins.  The first time... Space Engineers.  It uses a crumpling/tessellating skin thing... when things collide.  It makes you WELD the crumples out-of the skinning material.  As you weld, you see the mesh... reduce tessellation/subdivs/rez... until it is a "flat panel" once-again.

This means... yep... for max performance, a good physics-skinning "engine"... needs to quickly increase skin tessellation/subdivs... at collision time, and only in the needed crumpling-area.

Ow!  That sounds like lots of work.  Anyway, I'm just rambling-on and on, pondering the webGL physics future... the p-future. 

I suppose I need to go learn what a "rod" or "beam" IS.  I wonder if these rods/beams... are essentially "bones" for physics engines.  hmm.

And then, what?  Something similar to BJS "weightedVertices"... connects the metal (mesh) "skin"... to the physics-bones?  (p-bones?). 

I dunno.  Hey Rags... got some quick and easy info/links about rods/beams?  Tell us whatever ya know, eh?  Everyone else, too. 

I'll go reading/searching, too, though.  Here's a link to some BeamNG vids.   Crazy.  My CPU fan speeds-up just LOADING a map/truck... and I have quality set to low (but not super-low).  A guy needs a smokin' puter... to play with this junk at full rez.  Careful  -  crumpling vehicles, (without the costs of high-risk insurance and costly hospital bills)... is pretty addictive.

I wonder if Ammo will do basic rods/beams.  Somewhere (on-web), I saw mention of "cables", too.  A soft-rod?    

hmm.  I'm scared.   So is my dog.  I think these "rods" might be better known as "Kirchhoff Rods" or "Cosserat Rods".  Still learning.

[Raggar]

To my knowledge, cosserat rods are not supported out-of-the-box in Bullet Physics/AmmoJS. However, it seems like someone tried implementing it at some point:https://pybullet.org/Bullet/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?t=11242

Here's an Elastic Rod implementation as well: https://pybullet.org/Bullet/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=10993&p=36852

But these are all new concepts to me.

If you want vehicle micro-destruction, Bullet provides you everything from the contact pairs, points, normals, applied impulses etc. So a vehicle-bone-rig would be cool with some swapping of models as well. You can create your vehicle body out of smaller shapes and use hinges on doors etc. Or you can simply use a model as cosmetics. You'll most likely use a compound body anyway, since it's the easiest way to create an artificially lowered center of mass. Would be cool to see a game like that.