Monday, February 22, 2010

Landing gear

I've been working through the math for landing leg shock absorbers. Given the worst-case situation that it must handle (initial contact velocity, maximum acceleration, and surface gravity), the program should determine the dimensions of the legs and the constants for the springs and damping. I'm midway through though so I don't have anything to show.

One thing's surprised me so far, if I've done the math right. If the shock absorber is a critically-damped spring, the deceleration is maximum at the moment of first contact and tails off rapidly thereafter. With an undamped spring the maximum deceleration occurs at the point of maximum compression; an underdamped shock absorber would presumably fall between these two extremes. It seems to me that the ideal landing gear would just decelerate at a constant rate, to maximize the amount of deceleration relative to the length of the shock absorber, but I don't know that any landing gear actually works that way.

Saturday, February 13, 2010

Combating comment spam

The quantity of comment spam has been steadily increasing. I'm now disallowing anonymous comments; we'll see if that changes things appreciably.

Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Hull damage

Continuing to work on my lunar-lander-on-a-disc, I finally got a basic damage model implemented. After the physics system has solved for a set of impulses to satisfy contact constraints, any impulses against the hull that exceed a threshold are scaled and applied as damage. There isn't yet any visible damage; it's just hit points. But the introduction of mortality takes this a step toward being a game.

I'm still trying to come to a big-picture understanding of damage, though. It seems like, in an inelastic collision, kinetic energy is being converted to heat (or some other deformation). I think a more accurate model might decide (based on the properties of the colliders) how to divide up the energy to be absorbed by each; and that the damage would be proportional to the energy absorbed. If this is the case it seems like the damage would be proportional to the square of the relative velocity, where in my current model it's a linear relationship.

Also this week I have begun to make a parametric hull design to allow for a range of rocket shapes and sizes. Time for a product plug:



This is the Lift-Off Rocket Playset and children love it. Buy one, invite them over, and watch the fights!

A few things you can't see in the photo: The nose has a hatch that opens to reveal seats for the two astronauts. The bed is a Murphy bed; it folds up to reveal the toilet. Beside the toilet is a roll of toilet paper and some reading material. In the back is a kitchenette with microwave and coffee maker. The top and bottom doors are designed to break away under stress to avoid permanent damage. Oh, and it has a button you can press to get noise and flashing lights out of the thrusters. This toy is an almost ideal marriage of stuff boys and girls like, which means none of them will want to be left out of the struggle over it. Which is where the breakaway doors come into their own!

Here's my rough likeness:



I got myself in over my head math-wise with the parametric model and ended up backing out slightly; you don't specify the height exactly from nose to base, instead specifying it from the top to bottom of the middle section before it's beveled by the round nose and the cropped bottom.

Monday, February 1, 2010

Upgrading the physics engine

I'm continuing to work on my lunar-lander-on-a-disc game.

This week I started updating my physics engine to match the latest version of Chipmunk. My physics library is basically a C++ translation of Chipmunk, so it's easiest to just look at the diffs in the source library and make equivalent changes to mine. I also took the opportunity to replace uses of cpHashSet with more idiomatic C++ (std::set and std::map). This reduces the amount of code in the library and makes it more type-safe.

Upgrading the library is my way of re-familiarizing myself with the code since I have a set of high-priority physics-related things to do:
  • Detect impact damage
  • Finish landing gear: absorb shock in all directions, have a proper foot, and break if stressed too hard
  • Add hydraulic entry ramps that fold down when landed
I'm also interested to examine the new constraint model to see how things are arranged. It strikes me that you might be able to unify contact constraints and joint constraints into a single set of constraints; I'd have to look at things some more to decide if that would be worthwhile though.