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!

This video demonstrates the link and unlink tools on some robots.

Shift clone was used to clone/instance the robots in the scene.

Linking works by activating the link button. At which point the transform gizmo disappears.
When you mouse over a object it’s bounding box appears indicating your selection.
Left click + drag from the child mesh over to your parent object (again Bounding box will appear).
When you let go of the mouse button the new hierarchy is established.

At the end of the video is a short section on rotate snaps. Which shows how setting a ° Degree angle will constrain the rotation gizmo to increments of th value you set.

This Video shows the scale function in Flowed, and how it works with gameplay objects including those simple heirarchy (note the wheels).

Scale along an axis is performed using the transform gizmo with the scale button enabled
Uniform Scale is performed by by dragging on the actual object with the scale button enabled.

This video demonstrates the snap to grid function along with:

Selection
CTRL Add to selection (multiple selection)
SHIFT drag instancing,
Right click 90° rotation.

NOTE: Remember many functions can be combined, you can drag and clone and rotate multiple selections, so long as you hold down the CTRL key whilst doing them.

Here’s an older video of Flow in action recorded by Cygnus back in July earlier this year.

Managed to embed high quality youtube… Yay!