Angry bird Physic impact/collision - physics

How do I create a motion impact/collision like angry bird. When the object hit the box and wood, their interaction and the flow of the animation will to the right position. I need to learn from scratch how to build it. I need the basic of physic and concept
Example image:
So far, What i think so far is. Upon impact, I will apply
Law of Restitution
object 1 velocity = e(ball velocity)
I will take the direction of the ball and make the object 1 to rotation 90% against the ball.
if ball ---> direction. my end result for object 1 will be 90 degree against it. so it will become
|____| it will turn into this.
So far it seen right. But I am unsure how to interact with object 2. Do I repeat step and 2. Whereby I passed the velocity and direction to object 2. so it will rotation 90 degree again?
This is what I have gather so far. Any suggest that I am moving to right direction will be good.
For collision part. I intend to use AABB. and rotation AABB.

AngryBirds used Box2D physics when I opened About page inside game.
Box2D is open source physics engine.
Most physics engines are based on impulses. They sum impulses and re-calculate velocities.
The most complex and import part is what happens when collision occur.
Physic Engine detect all collisions and use Solver function. Solver is heart and sole of phsyics engine. Solve adds additional impulses to "solve" collision.
Solver usually has form of function that takes collision island (list of colliding objects: often 2 objects) and return force or impulse to be applied to each object.
Most modern engines are impulse based.
So most important part of physics engine to learn and understand is Solver function. But solver could be more complex entity then function.

Related

SKAction forces nodes through each other after collision

This issue has been discussed here somewhat, but I would like to hear other people experience with physics world forcing nodes to pass through each other unpredictably.
I am using a SKAction to move one node. This node needs to slide at constant speed through the scene until it reaches a certain position. A 2nd node is falling through gravity until it touches the scene frame.
When the two nodes collide, I would assume the falling node is lifted against the gravity. Instead, occasionally, the 2nd node is repositioned on the opposite side of the first node. The collision is properly detected in the didBeginContact.
This seems to depend on the speed of the SKAction. If I slow down the SKAction that makes the 1st node slide by as little as 20%, the collision lift the 2nd node as expected.
What is the best way to work around this kind of behaviors?
Everything is pretty much explained in that link. If you are interested in physics simulation the only sanctioned way is to move all bodies through physics by applying forces or impulses, or by directly changing velocity vector.
If you look how each frame is processed in SpriteKit, you will se that :
actions are executed first
physics is simulated after
So, if you move a node manually, you are not letting the physics simulation to move it where it thinks it should be appropriate. You are pulling the object out of sync with an actual physics simulation. Also, this way, the node will be moved by both - the action and the physics engine, thus the unexpected result.
Contact detection will work though. But don't confuse terms "contact" and "collision" . Contacts will be trigered properly even if you use SKActions to move bodies. But, collisions may not be properly simulated etc . So as long as you are interested in contacts, you are good to go. If interested in any kind of physics similation, then use appropriate ways to interact with physics world.

SKPhysicsBody optimization

I have a 2D sidescrolling game. Right now, in order to jump, the player must be touching the ground. Therefor, I have a boolean, isOnGround, that is set to YES when the player collides with a tile object, and no when the player jumps. This generates a LOT of calls to didBeginContact method, slowing down the game.
Firstly, how can I optimise this by using one big physics body for the tiles on the floor (for example clustering multiple adjacent tiles into one single physics body)?
Secondly, is this even efficient? Is there a better way to detect if the play is on the ground? My current method opens up a lot of bugs, for example wall jumping. If a player collides with a wall, isOnGround becomes YES and allows the player to jump.
Having didBeginContact called numerous times should in no way slow down your game. If you are having performance issues, I suspect the problem is probably elsewhere. Are you testing on device or simulator?
If you are using the Tiled app to create your game map, you can use the Objects Layer to create a individual objects in your map which your code can translate into physics bodies later on.
Using physics and collisions is probably the easiest way for you to determine your player's state in relation to ground contact. To solve your wall issue, you simply make a wall contact a different category than your ground. This will prevent the isOnGround to be set to YES.
You could use the physics engine to detect when jumping is enabled, (and this is what I used to do in my game). However I too have noticed significant overhead using the physics engine to detect when a unit was on a surface and that is because contact detection in sprite kit for whatever reason is expensive, even when collisions are already enabled. Even the documentation notes:
For best performance, only set bits in the contacts mask for
interactions you are interested in.
So I found a better solution for my game (which has 25+ simultaneous units that all need surface detection). Instead of going through the physics engine, I just did my own surface calculation and cache the result each game update. Something like this:
final class func getSurfaceID(nodePosition: CGPoint) -> SurfaceID {
//Loop through surface rects and see if position is inside.
}
What I ended up doing was handling my own surface detection by checking if the bottom point of my unit was inside any of the surface frames. And if your frames are axis-aligned (your rectangles are not rotated) you can perform even faster checks to see if the point is inside the frame.
This is more work in terms of level design because you will need to build an array of surface frames either dynamically from your tiles or manually place surface frames in your world (this is what I did).
Making this change reduced the cpu time spent on surface detection from over 20% to 0.1%. It also allows me to check if any arbitrary point lies on a surface rather than needing to create a physics body (which is unnecessary overhead). However this solution obviously won't work for you if you need to use contact detection.
Now regarding your point about creating one large physics body from smaller ones. You could group adjacent floor tiles using a container node and recreate a physics body that fits the nodes that are grouped. Depending on how your nodes are grouped and how you recycle tiles this can get complicated. A better solution would be to create large physics bodies that just overlap your tiles. This would reduce the number of total physics bodies, as well as the number of detections. And if used in combination with the surface frames solution you could really reduce your overhead.
I'm not sure how your game is designed and what its requirements are. I'm just giving you some possible solutions I looked at when developing surface detection in my game. If you haven't already you should definitely profile your game in instruments to see if contact detection is indeed the source of your overhead. If you game doesn't have a lot of contacts I doubt that this is where the overhead is coming from.

Using Pathfinding, such as A*, for NPC's & character without Tiles

I've been reading a book called "iOS Games by Tutorials" (recommend it to anyone interested in making iPhone games) & I'm learning how to make Tiled Maps with Sprite Kit with an overhead view (like the legend of zelda link's awakening). So far, I have made a tiled map using tiles that are 32x32, placed the player character & several NPC's into the world. Even made the NPC's randomly move around the map, though the way it teaches in the book is having them move from tile to tile (any of the 8 tiles surrounding the NPC at any time - if a tile has some property such as categoryBitMask then it won't move to that tile).
I am going to change NPC movement to physics-based (which is its own problem) just like the player character has right now (which means NPC's will collide with objects that have a physicsBody like the player character does). It's more fluid & dynamic.
But here is where the question begins. I want to implement Pathfinding (such as the A* algorithm) into the NPC & player character movement due to the map containing buildings, water, trees, etc. with their own physicsBodies. It's one thing to limit NPC's random movement or to force them to walk a predetermined path (which will kill the point of this game), but it's another to have to tap the screen very often to have the player character avoid all the buildings/trees he has to walk past. I don't want to use a grid system. Is it possible to implement some pathfinding algorithm into x,y coordinates? Is this more resource intensive? Could you share your thoughts about this?
Thank you.
This is a very interesting topic.
There are algorithms for finding paths in continuous spaces. For example, you can use a potential based method with the objective having a very low potential and obstacles being "hills" (perhaps infinitely high, although this requires a bit of care). The downside of potential methods is that you have to take special precautions to keep them from getting stuck at a local minimum. Situations like this
P
+----+
| M|
| |
+ ---+
Where M is a monster trying to get to the player, P can occur. In the example, the monster is at a local minimum, and it would have to go to a higher potential in order to get out the door at the lower left of the building. A variant of potential algorithms (in fact, it's often useful to reduce it to one), is to assign anti-gravity to obstacles and gravity to objectives. This is also somewhat non-deterministic and requires special precautions to avoid getting "stuck".
As #rickster points out, SpriteKit provides an SKFieldNode class that can help you implement a potential based solution.
Other approaches include "wall following" (for example, Pledge's algorithm) and are useful for finding your way around in a maze like environment.
One drawback to continuous methods is that NPC movement will often seem a bit unnatural -- for example, even if our monster in the example above is able to decide that it's at a local minimum and increase the "temperature" of it's search (that is, make larger moves, perhaps at random, against the potential gradient), it will bounce around instead of going straight for the door.
An alternative to searching in continuous spaces is to quantize the space. A simple method is to tile it, cover it with polygons, or represent it as a quadtree. Essentially, you want to have a way of mapping every point in the continuous space to a vertex on a graph representing the quantized space. At this point, graph search algorithms like A* and friends are applicable.
Graph search is somewhat resource intensive, but for a 2d zelda like game, it should be doable on a mobile device, especially with various optimizations like only "waking up" NPCs that are within a certain distance of the player (think aggro).
This page is a bit thin on implementation details, but it'll give you the right terms to google.
As always, start simple and iterate. Tiling is incredibly easy, and will let you experiment with the graph search method before optimizing.

How do I calculate the location of an object that is both turning, and accelerating?

I am trying to write a simple game, but I'm stuck on what I think is simple physics. I have an object that at point 0,0,0 and is travelling at say 1 unit per second. If I give an instruction, that the object must turn 15 degrees per second , for 6 seconds (so it ends up 90 degrees right of it's starting position), and accelerate at 1 unit per second for 4 seconds (so it's final speed is 5 units per second), how do I calculate it's end point?
I think I know how to answer this for an object that isn't accelerating, because it's just a circle. In the example above, I know that the circumference of the circle is 4 * distance (because it is traversing 1/4 of a circle), and from that I can calculate the radius and angles and use simple trig to solve the answer.
However, because at any given moment in time the object is travelling slightly faster than it was in the previous moment, my end result wouldn't be a circle, it would be some sort of arc. I suppose I could estimate the end point by looping through each step (say 60 steps per second), but this sounds error prone and inefficient.
Could anybody point me in the right direction?
Your notion of stepping through is exactly what you do.
Almost all games operate under what's known as a "game tick". There are actually a number of different ticks that could be going on.
"Game tick" - each game tick, a set of requests are fired, AI is re-evaluated, and overall the game state has changed.
"physics tick" - each physics tick, each physical object is subject to a state change based on its current physical state.
"graphics tick" - also known as a rendering loop, this is simply drawing the game state to the screen.
The game tick and physics tick often, but do not need to, coincide with each other. You could have a physics tick that moves objects at their current speed along their current movement vector, and also applied gravity to it if necessary (altering its speed,) while adding additional acceleration (perhaps via rocket boosters?) in a completely separate loop. With proper multi-threading care, it would fit together nicely. The more de-coupled they are, the easier it will be to swap them out with better implementations later anyway.
Simulating via a time-step is how almost all physics are done in real-time gaming. I even used to do thermal modeling for the department of defense, and that's how we did our physics modelling there too (we just got to use bigger computers :-) )
Also, this allows you to implement complex rotations in your physics engine. The less special cases you have in your physics engine, the less things will break.
What you're asking is actually a Mathematical Rate of change question. Every object that is in motion has position locations of (x,y,z). If you are able to break down the component velocity and accelerations into their individual planes, your final end point would be (x1, y1, z1) which is the respective outcome of your equations in that plane.
Hope it helps (:

Impulse based physics - Stacking heavy object on light object

I'm developing an impulse based physics engine, but I have a problem with objects of large mass difference.
At each frame the engine applies impulses to handle collisions. The impulses are applied over a number of iterations, between each pair of colliding objects. This works well if the objects are about the same mass.
But the problem is, that when placing a heavy object, on top of a light object, the heavy object will force then light object into the ground.
The cause of the problem is, that the impulses applied between the two objects is too small, so even over a number of iterations, it will not be enough to counter the gravity on the heavy object.
I believe there are ways to accurately calculate the needed impulses, but I fear it's too complicated? So mostly I'm looking for some tricks to counter this problem, but not changing the way the engine works.
Thanks for any ideas!
Google for 'Shock propagation', the basic idea is that you sort your contacts in the direction of gravity (usually along the 'y' axis) and during contact resolution you freeze the lower bodies (assign to them infinite mass, that is, invMass = 0.0f and invInertiaTensor should be a zero matrix) so that they don't 'sink'. I haven't implemented that, i'm struggling with my own crappy physics engine.