Bullet Physics Problems - physics

For those of you who have used bullet physics...
I read and ran the hello world example http://www.bulletphysics.org/mediawiki-1.5.8/index.php/Hello_World,
and I am confused where to go next.
The hello world tutorial consisted of a btStaticPlaneShape and a btSphereShape, both rigid bodies. The sphere bounced on the static plane shape no problem.
However, I when I make another sphere at a different position, Bullet does not record collisions between the two sphere shapes, but it both automatically bounce off of btStaticPlaneShape. What kind of internal magic causes the btStaticPlaneShape to automatically bounce objects that collide with it?
Is there a setting in Bullet that automatically bounces objects off of each other after colliding? Or do you have to manually test for collisions and apply the resulting forces yourself?
Thanks.

You may have inadvertently created the spheres in a state where Bullet doesn't think they're supposed to be able to collide with each other. If you stick mostly to the defaults, and just add another sphere to the Hello World program, Bullet should notice and react to their collisions. They won't actually bounce unless you also modify Hello World to set their restitution to something greater than zero, but they will collide. For example, I added a second sphere directly above the first (by putting a for loop around the code block that creates the sphere, and using the loop variable to determine the origin y value) and extended the simulation so it runs long enough for them both to reach the plane. The first lands on the plane and rests there, the second lands on the first and rests there.
If this doesn't help, then posting some of your code is probably a good next step.

Related

Make rectangle fall when being hit by ball (different outcomes depending on properties)

I've just got started with physics. I'm using Java, though language does not matter obviously. Now I though I'd do something like this:
A ball with a certain speed, radius and mass hits a rectangle with a certain mass, width and height. Depending on where the ball hits the rectangle (how high up), and all the properties the ball and the rectangle have that i just mentioned, there will be different outcomes of the situation.
These are the four possible outcomes:
The ball bounces back because the rectangle was too heavy
The rectangle starts to wobble, but then goes back to normal
The rectangle falls to the right
The ball strikes through making the rectangle fall to the left
Please note, I don't expect you to write a program for me. I understand it is a lot to think off. But I have no idea how to start. I would really appreciated some guide lines and links to further reading about this (I was not sure what to google to find info about this.)
And also, I'm doing this to learn, so don't tell me to use an engine or anything like that.
You are trying to build a simple physics simulator. This is a pretty involved problem, and you'll have to learn a certain amount of physics along the way.
I suggest you develop the simulator to handle these situations, roughly in this order:
An object moves through space (constant velocity, no gravity).
An object moves under the influence of a constant force (such as gravity).
An object moves with a constraint (e.g. a pendulum, a rolling square).
An object slides across a surface, with friction (both static and kinetic).
Two objects collide inelastically (they stick).
Two objects collide elastically (they bounce).
Once you have all of these, you will be able to simulate your ball and rectangle.

How to create the land (hills) like iOS game 'Contre Jour'?

How to create the land (hills) like iOS game Contre Jour? (Using Box2d and OpenGL)
My ideas:
Physics (Box2d)
I think we have array of bodies or fixture.
When we to touch screen, determine touch location.
If the touch location is not far from land, we begin to scan the array of bodies, and are looking for a body with coordinates closest to touch Location.
When case a touch Move, move the right body to a new coordinate (body->SetTransform(...)).
What do you think, efficient to use a large number of bodies? And find for the right body by coordinates?
Graphics (OpenGL)
There is an array of vertices and triangles created by drawing the land (hills)?
Is this true?
You can use the function b2World::QueryAABB to get a list of the fixtures in a given area, then check those for the best option. The Box2D testbed does this to find out which fixture to grab with the mouse so you could check out that source code. See also: http://www.iforce2d.net/b2dtut/world-querying
To move the body you can indeed use SetTransform, which would be good if the object does not need to interact with anything along the way. Another option might be to SetLinearVelocity to a velocity that will move the body to the dragged-to point in one time step. This is a better method if you want a continuous drag with the object being able to bump into things as it moves, because it does not teleport the body instantly to the finger position. If the body is a bullet body then it also prevents the user from dragging things through other objects, eg a static wall. Remember to set the velocity to zero when the finger is lifted :)

How to code a random movement in limited area

I have a limited area (screen) populated with a few moving objects (3-20 of them, so it's not like 10.000 :). Those objects should be moving with a constant speed and into random direction. But, there are a few limitation to it:
objects shouldn't exit the area - so if it's close to the edge, it should move away from it
objects shouldn't bump onto each other - so when one is close to another one it should move away (but not get too close to different one).
On the image below I have marked the allowed moves in this situation - for example object D shouldn't move straight up, as it would bring it to the "wall".
What I would like to have is a way to move them (one by one). Is there any simple way to achieve it, without too much calculations?
The density of objects in the area would be rather low.
There are a number of ways you might programmatically enforce your desired behavior, given that you have such a small number of objects. However, I'm going to suggest something slightly different.
What if you ran the whole thing as a physics simulation? For instance, you could set up a Box2D world with no gravity, no friction, and perfectly elastic collisions. You could model your enclosed region and populate it with objects that are proportionally larger than their on-screen counterparts so that the on-screen versions never get too close to each other (because the underlying objects in the physics simulation will collide and change direction before that can happen), and assign each object a random initial position and velocity.
Then all you have to do is step the physics simulation, and map its current state into your UI. All the tricky stuff is handled for you, and the result will probably be more believable/realistic than what you would get by trying to come up with your own movement algorithm (or if you wanted it to appear more random and less believable, you could also just periodically apply a random impulse to a random object to keep things changing unpredictably).
You can use the hitTest: method of UIView
UIView* touchedView=[self.superview hitTest:currentOrigin withEvent:nil];
In This method you have to pass the current origin of the ball and in second argument you can pass nil.
that method will return the view with which the ball is hited.
If there is any hit view you just change the direction of the ball.
for border you can set the condition for the frame of the ball if the ball go out of the boundary just change the direction of the ball.

On-the-fly Terrain Generation Based on An Existing Terrain

This question is very similar to that posed here.
My problem is that I have a map, something like this:
This map is made using 2D Perlin noise, and then running through the created heightmap assigning types and color values to each element in the terrain based on the height or the slope of the corresponding element, so pretty standard. The map array is two dimensional and the exact dimensions of the screen size (pixel-per-pixel), so at 1200 by 800 generation takes about 2 seconds on my rig.
Now zooming in on the highlighted rectangle:
Obviously with increased size comes lost detail. And herein lies the problem. I want to create additional detail on the fly, and then write it to disk as the player moves around (the player would simply be a dot restricted to movement along the grid). I see two approaches for doing this, and the first one that came to mind I quickly implemented:
This is a zoomed-in view of a new biased local terrain created from a sampled element of the old terrain, which is highlighted by the yellow grid space (to the left of center) in the previous image. However this system would require a great deal of modification, as, for example, if you move one unit left and up of the yellow grid space, onto the beach tile, the terrain changes completely:
So for that to work properly you'd need to do an excessive amount of, I guess the word would be interpolation, to create a smooth transition as the player moved the 40 or so grid-spaces in the local world required to reach the next tile over in the over world. That seems complicated and very inelegant.
The second approach would be to break up the grid of the original map into smaller bits, maybe dividing each square by 4? I haven't implemented this and I'm not sure how I would in a way that would actually increase detail, but I think that would probably end up being the best solution.
Any ideas on how I could approach this? Keep in mind it has to be local and on-the-fly. Just increasing the resolution of the map is something I want to avoid at all costs.
Rewrite your Perlin noise to be a function of position. Then you can increase the octaves (and thus the detail level) and resample the area at a higher resolution.

Objective-C draw a path and detect when it closes (forms a closed shape)

I'm fairly new to game programming (but not to programming) and I want to create a space ship which leaves a trail on the screen. Now my problem is to come up with a solution how to detect if the trail left from the ship forms a closed shape - eg. if the ship left a trail around an object, the object is caught inside its trail so to speak.
The direction I'm thinking is to draw the path of the trail on an image not visible on the screen and every now and then try to fill it with certain color and then check if fill is caught within the trail path. However it seems like a lot of overhead.
Any ideas how to do that? I'm using cocos2d if that's of any help
In game programming you often need to think more mathematically than visually.
First does your ship continuously leaves a trail on the screen? If yes, then it will be easier to know when the shape closes : you just have to remember the coordinate where your ship started to leave a trail, then wait for the trail to approach this coordinate another time (for example within a radius of 10 pixels, or else the user will need to be really accurate to hit exactly the same pixel to close the shape).
The visual representation of the trail is only here for the user, you'll never use it to compute anything. What you will do is to keep in memory the path followed by the ship's trail : a polygon, which is nothing else than the list of coordinates it followed.
Then after you know that your shape is closed, you have to determine if an object is inside your polygon or not. It's possible that objective-c or cocos2d (I don't know much about it) already contains a built-in function to know if a point is inside a polygon. In java there is the Polygon class which makes this really easy. If you don't find anything you can do it yourself, there are already great answers about this subject on SO, here is a nice one : How can I determine whether a 2D Point is within a Polygon?