Game Development Community

Physics for a pinball game

by baylor wetzel · in Torque Game Engine · 10/17/2006 (3:48 pm) · 4 replies

I've just been hired by a game school to teach AI. That part's fine but i'm also teaching one section of a class that teaches Torque. i've moved a fish and whacked some moles but that's about all i know how to do

Our syllabus this quarter calls for the students to make a 2D pinball game in TGB. The previous instructor planned for us to use collision mode Rigid but apparently that doesn't exist anymore. We're using Bounce but the physics looks really off

i hate to ask such a general question but does anyone have any pointers on how to make relatively realistic-looking pinball physics in TGB? Maybe a tutorial somewhere? An option i didn't notice? Maybe i have to bite the bullet and just write the physics code myself?

i promise to read all these forums and try all the tutorials, but for this quarter time is not on my side :(

-baylor

#1
10/17/2006 (4:30 pm)
Rigid exists in the engine just not in the game builder gui. You can give it a value of rigid in the script. I'm pretty sure they took it out because it requires more fine tunning to get it to behave the way people wanted it to (something like that... not sure exactly why). So if you go into the managed code and change the datablock to use rigid that might get you a step closer.

Community, correct me if im wrong.
#2
10/17/2006 (4:48 pm)
That's pretty much exactly why it was removed from the UI as far as I understand.

You basically want rigid + send on your balls and clamp + receive on everything else. You will have to tweak mass, friction, restitution, and all that stuff to get the feel you want. Make sure auto-calculate mass/inertia is turned off on your balls. You will also want a constant force on your balls to make them fall ("roll") down the face of the table.
#3
10/17/2006 (5:19 pm)
Thanks guys. i'm not sure what fields exist for rigid or what normal values would be. Is there a guide anywhere that might give me a starting point?

-baylor
#4
10/17/2006 (8:44 pm)
http://tdn.garagegames.com/wiki/TGB/Reference:_t2dSceneObject_Physics_Methods

And that should be in the docs that came with the engine as well. I do believe they are all also variables that exist on an object by default. Just do a .dump() on any t2dSceneObject and look at it's dynamic fields to find the physics related variables.