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Object Movement/Manipulation

by Martin Wareham · in Torque Game Engine · 04/25/2005 (4:03 pm) · 5 replies

I'm relatively new to the Torque Game Engine, but have been writing C++/DirectX/OpenGL applications for quite a while now, loading and controlling models, with skeletal animation.

I came to the point where my programming skills pailed in comparison with the mammoth (to my mind) task of implementing collision detection and physics in my applications.

My end game is to take one of my models, a manipulator (7 function mechanical arm) and control it using skeletal animation (i.e. not animation from Milkshape or 3DS, but rotation and translation of object bones in real time) and pick things up (i.e. other models) with it, applying translations and rotations to those models accurately, once they become part of the manipulator model by virtue of them being held. I believe that collision detection and friction may play a part in this.

Am I barking up the right tree with Torque (i.e. with enough time and patience will I be able to do this ?)

Thanks.

Martin
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Torque Owner Bucko
#1
04/25/2005 (4:23 pm)
You could do it in stock TGE with some additions but better yet would be to look into adding ODE (a good free physics engine, Google it) support for TGE.
I think someone tried integrating ODE into TGE but failed halfway through (80 20 rule?).

Torque Owner Martin Wareham
#2
04/26/2005 (5:58 am)
Hello Bucko,

Thanks for the heads up on ODE, I'd seen it mentioned a few times in the forums, i'll take a look.

It would have been nice to just use just TGE though. Where does TGE lack features that I seem to require ? Is there any talk of these features being implemented in the future ? I'm looking at another game engine called Novodex which may be more suitable. Only time will tell I guess.

Once again, thanks for the help.

Martin

Torque 3D Owner Sean H.
#3
04/26/2005 (7:02 am)
Martin you can perform basic movement transformations on all objects. at the most fundamental level, this should be all you need. torque also has built-in support for "mounting" or attaching one object to another which would probably come in handy for what you want to do. torque will handle the rigid body physics automatically and collision detection through a callback function so you dont have to worry about writing code to find out when a collision happened, you just need to figure out what kind and what to do when it does.

so the answer is yes you can definitely do this in torque, with ALOT of time and patience you can do just about anything.

Torque Owner Dreamer
Default Studio Name
#4
04/26/2005 (7:24 am)
Torque is a really good, simulation engine and not just a game engine, something similar to what you are speaking of has already been done (but it was with exported animations), however if you want to custom animate on the fly, that WOULD take some work, we have a resource which allows for on the fly scaling of bones though, and I'm pretty sure you could use that as a base and modify from there to get the result you are seeking, really should only require addition of a rotation vector to the particular bone, since it already features a scaling vector on the bone.

Torque Owner Martin Wareham
#5
04/26/2005 (9:33 am)
Thanks for the feedback guys.

I'm starting to feel pretty good about this engine's capabilities and the quality of the feedback in this forum :-)

B.T.W. is there any info. around on producing bounding volumes AABBs, OBBs or maybe something better. I'm using Milkshape and 3DS. I wrote a program to produce bounding boxes when models load, but it wasn't very accurate when doing collision detection with non-rectangular shaped objects.

Martin