[ODE] Hovercraft?

[Clay Larabie]

Chris

I don't have an answer for you, but I'm interested in the same thing, so I'd
like to hear any responses the ODE folks have, as well as any approaches you
end up taking.

I'm currently doing something quite simple - I'm using a single sphere that
rolls on the terrain. My "workaround" idea is to not render the sphere, set
the vehicle geometry at the sphere's position every update, and orient the
"hovercraft" to the ground below the vehicle. If I orient the vehicle over a
period of time instead using interpolation it'll smooth it out and not look
horrible, but I still don't like the workaround.

Clay
.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Chris Brodie" <gimp@pnc.com.au>
To: <ode@q12.org>
Sent: Thursday, August 29, 2002 12:50 AM
Subject: RE: [ODE] Hovercraft?


> Hello Guys,
>
> In a few days I'll be to adding vehicle support to my engine now that I
> have ODE up and bouncing stuff around (http://fourth.flipcode.com).
> Initially I'll just cut \ past a buggy from a sample but my goal is to
> add hovercraft to it. I posted Russ about a year ago when and he said
> that soft contacts needed to be added to ODE before this would really
> work. Is dContactSoftERP & dContactSoftCFM what I'm looking for?
>
> NOTE : Since this is a sci-fi game hovercraft is just the way to think
> about it. The affect I'm trying to achieve is along the lines of the
> hover vehicles in Star wars, they attempt float X distance from the
> ground.
>
> I was going to add this support by just using a Box(hull) with 4 Hinge2
> and 4 spheres(hover field). The spheres would be large and mostly
> overlapping. I was going to give a fair amount of travel to the hinges
> Axis1(how?) and make them quite squishy so that running it across a
> rough TriMesh would smooth the flight path out a lot(not sure about how
> to do this either).
>
> Is that the best way to go or is there a better way?
>
> Many thanks
>
> Chris
>
> _______________________________________________
> ODE mailing list
> ODE@q12.org
> http://q12.org/mailman/listinfo/ode
>