Plan for Melv May

Wow, such a long time since I've done a plan!

Well, as you may or may not know, T2D has been a big success so far. Not only have we got a thriving community with lots of projects on the go, there are lots of avenues opening-up for T2D (say no more) and although we're still trying to catch-up with all the features we want to get into T2D, we're pretty happy with the way it's panning out.

After a small period of time away from T2D because of back problems, I'm back with a vengeance! The good thing about me being ill was that it forced me to take a break, something that I'm pretty bad at doing. Josh regularly tells me to slow down and I say okay and then get straight back to it. A kind of self destruction I guess but the illness helped me recuperate.

After two weeks back I've finally managed to get a new file-format for T2D ready that'll help make version-control for serialised objects real easy. This means that we can finally make all those changes to objects without breaking what's gone before.

Now that this work was complete, I went and finished the collision model for T2D which allows each object to select from a set of stock collision responses and even allow more to be created if necessary. You can now get two objects to collide and have one respond in a rigid-body manner and the other to do a simplistic "bounce" response, all without having to write any callback code. The great thing here is that existing code works without modification, there's just an extra call to set the collision response. Collision Modes can also be changed in realtime if needed.

This'll help people who are not interested in the rigid-body stuff for their game. A bonus is that you can still have some objects that do respond using rigid-body if they need that realism. There are a few platform style games being created at the moment that'll probably use the "bounce" or "clamp" modes instead of the "rigid" mode. Specifically, collision interaction with tile-layers becomes easy to control.

The new stock modes now become RIGID, BOUNCE, CLAMP, STICKY and KILL.

Some of the other useful things that'll be going in soon will be more mounting features and small but useful things like arbitrary rotation points for objects.

Well you can't do a plan without an image/movie so here's a demonstration (albeit not too flash to look at) of 100 rigid-body objects colliding within 50 "bouncy" objects. This was setup using only a handful of calls and no scripts to handle the collision responses at all. The frame-rate hardly moves from 300fps on my machine which is pretty impressive if I do say so myself. The movie is lower quality and affects the framerate unfortunately.

EDIT: Added some more interesting piccies and movies...

Lots of Object Collision Modes

Bounce Mode

Rigid Body Mode

Clamp Mode

Sticky Mode

Kill Mode

Movies...
Lots of Object Collision Modes Movie
Bounce Mode Movie
Rigid-Body Mode Movie
Clamp Mode Movie
Sticky Mode Movie
KillMode Movie

- Melv.