The Solidarity Engine
Added 2020-06-22 17:31:30 +0000 UTCI forced myself to take a break to work on the lightweight dynamics engine I've been tinkering with. I am very pleased with how the refactoring has gone.
First versions relied on individual actors to predict and resolve their own collisions. This proved to be very unstable and resulted in a lot of interpenetration.
I knew I wanted the system to be as simple as possible, and overseen by a single entity. That entity would know every object in the scene, their properties, trajectories and velocity (if moving) and would be able to take all of that information to predict and resolve collisions robustly.
Without any worst-case-scenario interpenetration testing, I can proudly say that the engine is resolving motion and collisions for multiple static and dynamic actors, with very few failures.
It's not 100% without problems yet, but they are very rare at this point. I think a single step of interpenetration testing and adjustment will make the system near flawless. Some features I am quite pleased with include moving platforms and treadmills, which tended to fail miserably before refactoring.
I'm pleased with the feel of it. The engine is snappy in a way I appreciate, snappier than the more "physics-based" tools I used to develop Antifa. I may port that game's dynamics to this engine in the future.
One thing is for sure, I will definitely be authoring The Conquest of Bread with this engine and using it as a test bed for improvements.
I will make the package available for anyone who uses Unity soon, when I feel it's up to snuff for beta testing.
