Re: [TuxKart-devel] Little Tutorial on vehicle physics

[Ingo R. <gr...@gm...>]

Steve Baker <sjb...@ai...> writes:

> ODE would give us things like animation of suspension parts and
> convincing animation of things like crashes, jumps and stuff like
> tipping up on two wheels. Once you've gone through the pain of
> making it work, ODE gives you a lot of cool/unplanned effects 'for
> free'.

The question is if we actually want these effects. Its after all a
gokart simulation and gokarts in general don't do much jumps and stuff
in real life, neither is it much common that they roll-over (could end
up a little bit ugly for the driver) and stuff like that.

In my view the gokart should basically just basically have three
states:

1) its on the road with all four weels

2) its in the air doing a jump

3) it got hit by a weapon and does some kind of 'rotation' animation

The transition between those stages shouldn't be physically accurate,
it should basically all be hard wired stuff. I don't want a kart to
tipping on two wheels or collide realistically with some object and
land on the side. If it collides it should bounce of the target in a
way that makes most sense from a gameplay point of view, ie.
automatically position the kart in the right direction so that the
driver doesn't lose too much time. Same with a jump, if I for example
jump onto another kart, I want the kart to be simply displaced a bit,
not have a physical accurate collision where both karts start to roll
over and such.

Its after all a fun game, so collision handling should be more based
on comic-physics (having characters flap with there arms a bit before
starting to fall into a pit) than on real life ones.

Beside that having convincing collisions would get extremly throuble
some with real life physics, since the karts consists to 80% out of
characters and are not solid objects like a char. So unless there is a
whole bunch of rag-doll physics involved it won't look much convincing
even if the kart itself behaves more or less correctly.

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