Gyro Physics - 1.0 Release

Quake Matt · Post by **Quake Matt** » Thu Jun 30, 2005 2:19 am

Hmm, coding board seems a tad slow as of late. Let's see if I can speed things up a bit by releasing something!

http://homepages.nildram.co.uk/~moonrise/matt/gyro.zip

So, what's this? It's Gyro, a little something I've been working on for the past few days. It's not actually a full mod, but rather a plugin for existing mods, that I hope should help the makers add some nice physics without having to mess around with piles of code.

It runs on a simple activation system so, let's say you want grenades to float - you'd add a line like "P_ActivateBouyancy (missile, 500)". Your grenades would then float, providing they're lighter than 500 weight units. Everything works like this, even forces (like explosions), so there's rarely any need to change existing code.

Although you only really need the "physics.qc" file, I've built a quick mod around it to show you what can be done. Mostly simple stuff like floating objects and explosion blasts, but you can try typing impulse 101 or 102 to see something a little more exciting! The 101-bound HoverBombs (or BlimpBombs, whatever floats your boat) are controlled almost entirely by Gyro, although I'm not sure how useful they'd be in a real game!

Next version should be coming sooner or later, so feedback is welcome!

Post by **scar3crow** » Thu Jun 30, 2005 6:35 am

I dunno how I missed this post, but Im definitely gonna dl this and give it a go... Im not really a coder, but this sounds awesome, and I love to see such things that are modular like this, being released to the community for development. Thanks!

r00k · Post by **r00k** » Thu Jun 30, 2005 9:42 pm

This would be cool for mods with alot of water...
Where bombs could float to the waterline..

pud · Post by **pud** » Thu Jun 30, 2005 10:56 pm

would this work in quakeworld?

Quake Matt · Post by **Quake Matt** » Thu Jun 30, 2005 11:27 pm

I don't really know - I've never coded for QuakeWorld. I guess it can't be too dissimilar, though, and since it only takes a couple of minutes to get something up and running, you could always try it and find out!

pud · Post by **pud** » Fri Jul 01, 2005 12:49 am

no compile errors or warnings when I add it to my qw mod source. THANKS!

Quake Matt · Post by **Quake Matt** » Sun Jul 03, 2005 1:04 am

Does it run properly in-game, though? Don't know how QW works, so the physics code might go bonkers!

Spike · Post by **Spike** » Sun Jul 03, 2005 12:15 pm

So long as you don't do self.nextthink = time; ...
That's a cardinal sin in QW, generally resulting in infinate loops in many engines. Setting nextthink too low will cause an entity to catch up any missing thinks. Which is always wierd.

the newmis global entity names an entity to have a think after the current entity, so avoid using that too.
So long as you don't require a string entity thinking order (which is bad in nq too due to order of spawning), there's no difference.

Post by **Dr. Shadowborg** » Sun Jul 03, 2005 3:10 pm

Pretty neat little package, I can't wait to see the next version!

Quake Matt · Post by **Quake Matt** » Sun Jul 03, 2005 3:30 pm

Ah, that's good to hear - it should work nicely in QW then. Maybe a little bit of whackyness when it gets laggy, but that's better than nothing!

Quake Matt · Post by **Quake Matt** » Fri Jul 29, 2005 5:17 pm

Okay, I've got a new version up:

http://www.quakedev.com/forums/index.php?topic=421.0

Sorry to just link to a different forum, but otherwise I'd just be repeating everything I said there! Anyway, it's only a beta version, so it's not massively important yet - I'd just like to find out from anyone using it whether or not the upgrade works.

Oh, and thanks for all the interest! I'd never had gotten past 1.0 without it!