Well, I’ve almost completed the small gameplay tutorial code now, it’s in the Flow3D SVN. Last night I took some time to add a couple of sounds and somewhere along the way I figured I’d see just how much of an improvement Newton Game Dynamics 2 is over its predecessor.

The video below is the result- with Newton Game Dynamics 1, my system - an Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 at 3ghz CPU with an Nvidia Geforce 8800 graphics chip, would struggle with 200 blocks, achieving a very stuttery 2-10fps. with Newton Game Dynamics 2, I managed 600! blocks at nearly 30fps- and in all honestly it seemed even smoother than that!

Note that stacking a wall the way I have done in this video really stresses Newton too, where if I was to simply stack the blocks in columns it would be even quicker!

Today will just be a quick update that expresses a few key additions to the Flow3D package as of late:

We have recently updated the Ogre3D rendering engine in Flow3D to use the latest production version, 1.6.0 (Shoggoth)! With this comes things like better script compiling and more effective memory allocation, amongst other things.

Along with the Ogre engine update, we have gotten some soft (texture) shadow demos working and simplified the implementation a bit with fG. With properly setup .material files to allow the shadows to be received, all you must call to get nice, soft shadows is this:

fG.enableSoftShadows()

Ah, fluffy shadows, the 16,720th wonder of the world.

On to physics! We will be updating to Newton 2 within the next few days, so make sure to look out for a few videos within the week! While the update to Newton 2 is not yet complete, we have added simple ball/socket joint creation in fP with a small demo to go along with it. Have another screen shot!

The code for creating a basic Ball-Socket joint works a bit like this (taken from the demo):

'Create the socket from Socket.mesh
Local Socket:TEntity = fG.LoadMesh("Socket" , "Socket.mesh")
fG.PositionEntity(Socket, 0, 2, 0)
fG.getNode(Socket).Roll(90)
Local SocketBody:TBody = fP.addPhysics(Socket)
 
'Create the ball from Ball.mesh
Local Ball:TEntity = fG.LoadMesh("Ball" + String(i), "Ball.mesh")
fG.getNode(Ball).Roll(- 90)
fG.PositionEntity(Ball, 0, 2, 0)
Local BallBody:TBody = fP.addPhysics(Ball)
 
'Create the socket joint specifying the parent and the child.
'By using the defaults here we ensure that the joint bodies won't collide with one another.
'We also ensure that the joints position is the midway point betweent he two bodies' positions.
Local joint:TBallAndSocket = fP.addBallSocket(SocketBody, BallBody)
 
'Here we set the rotation limits of the joint by specifying the direction of the joint pin.
'We also allow 80 degrees of "swing" space and 45 degrees of "twist" space in the joint.
joint.setLimits(Vec3(1.0, 0.0, 0.0) , Radians(Deg2Rad(80)) , Radians(Deg2Rad(45)))

And there you have it! Get those ragdolls crackin’!

I hope you’ve enjoyed this preview!,

Lina