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Dark Physics & Dark A.I. & Dark Dynamix / Vehicles?

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VRMan3D
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Location: New England
Posted: 3rd Nov 2006 21:35 Edited at: 15th Nov 2006 19:30
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I am about to turn my back on the free Newton physics engine and buy DarkPhysics (I am impressed with the performance).

I noticed though that the vehicle simulation commands listed in the demo seem to be very few. None of them work in the demo, but does anyone have a good sample .exe I could try showing off the vehicle physics simulation? Is suspension modelled realistically? Drift?

Thanks much,
-=VRMan=-

NOTE>> Check below for a DarkPhysics vehicle demo I made which does prove DarkPhysics is quite impressive in it's ability to handle a vehicle (minus drifting/powerslides which the advert page says it can do) on a gigantic terrain (and fun things like physics thrusting missles and a physics geyser ha ha)

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CTF Freak
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Joined: 27th Oct 2005
Location: In your base
Posted: 7th Nov 2006 05:24
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I can't get any drifting to work and alot of the commands don't seem to do anything to the vehicles. I think I'll look at making a vehicle manually that way I can control everything.
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VRMan3D
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Location: New England
Posted: 11th Nov 2006 11:10
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Dark Physics Vehicles:

Yeah now that I have the actual product I'm pretty disappointed with the vehicle commands. Newton seems a lot more robust.

Doesn't the advert pages for DarkPhysics talk a lot about drifting? I still have to try messing with the materials in relation to the vehicles and the terrain (another annoyance is they require you to use a single object with limbs, so the tires and the vehicle itself have to have the same material=very limited), but you can see from their vehicle arena demos some glaring problems - most noticibly in my mind is the fact that when you rub up against the 'walls' around the arena, the vehicle just stops dead instead of sliding. It seems like this should be a very basic thing. Guard rails in a driving game and you go from 150mph to 0? Geesh.

Also, the command for applying brakes is in the help file but is unrecognized by the compiler. Please fix this, I've got a really nice vehicle demo running with a huge terrain but it's kind of stinky you can't do braking. Can someone from the TGC staff please comment on this?

Thanks,
-=VRMan=-

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dark coder
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Joined: 6th Oct 2002
Location: Japan
Posted: 11th Nov 2006 11:36
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I loooked at the vehicle commands and had a breif attempt at making one, and IMO they are utterly terrible, as the wheels must use fixed limb numbers, why isn't there some simple commands to just create a vehicle, such as you load a chassie model, and make that into a dynamic rigid body, and call some make vehicle command, then make wheels from other rigid bodies, by first placing them relative to the chassie, then calling some sort of a attach wheel command, where you only specify variables such as the suspension, turning angles etc, that would make things alot easier.

Hallowed are the ori.
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DTsine
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Posted: 12th Nov 2006 22:45
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Perhaps someone from the from the team or someone on here could post a demo showing all the things that dark phy vehicle commands claim to do actually working.

I am inclined to believe and I own the product my self and cant get it to do these things that if it cant then saying it can on the web site would be classed as false advertising?

Even if in future updates they get this working all the people that have purchased the product for this expecting to be able to create these vehicles with ease have been tricked.
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ESP
17
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Joined: 2nd Aug 2006
Location: London, England, U.K.
Posted: 13th Nov 2006 22:54
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Hi DTsine,

We know the feeling....

As a company we have been stung so many times after buying software that turned out to be beta that we ditched our main development language (Clarion) after YEARS of being fobbed off with beta versions that did not work. Lo and behold it looks like we are doing it again

Robin
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Mike Johnson
TGC Developer
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Joined: 13th Sep 2002
Location: United Kingdom
Posted: 14th Nov 2006 09:20
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You can get good results with Dark Physics however, I believe the main reason why people aren't getting very far is because of needing more information on how to get results. I am going to create some new demos that focus on vehicles and specifically highlight more advanced things than simple driving around.
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DTsine
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Posted: 14th Nov 2006 20:50
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Mike,

Thanks for the responce we all look forward to this

I dont deny that its there just how do you do it !!!!!!!!!
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VRMan3D
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Location: New England
Posted: 15th Nov 2006 07:41 Edited at: 15th Nov 2006 08:07
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Hi folks,

Take a look at the phunny PhysX 'ExtremelyLovingMissles' demo I made. It is a snapshot of a program I'm working on that has a very uncanny missle behaviour so I thought I'd share it for the fun of it.

Download it here:
http://www.vrman3d.com

It shows off the DarkPhysics engine's vehicle dynamics capabilities on a large terrain (I tried everything and still couldn't get any drifting to happen - even though the huge terrain has a friction value of 0.01?!?) and a few other things.

As soon as you hit the control key a few times to launch missles (the missles are actually thrusting around using physics) you will see where the name came from hehheh.

Also if you can find it (press R to reset to different positions) you can drive the vehicle onto a geyser using the DarkPhysics particles. Very impressive effect that could be used in all sorts of nifty game situations.

Have phun,
-=VRMan=-


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ESP
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Posted: 15th Nov 2006 09:24
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Hi VRMan3D,

what resolution are you running at? Computer says no

Robin
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VRMan3D
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Posted: 15th Nov 2006 19:28 Edited at: 15th Nov 2006 20:27
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Oh dang let me check that...

My display on this laptop runs at a very high 1920x1200 widescreen (xps gen2) but I thought for sure I had it set to run as Desktop Fullscreen or Desktop Windowed so that it would work on anyone's display.

Was anyone else able to run it successfully and get some missile lovin? Yeah checking it now and it is not specifying a resolution but rather using the project settings of "Windowed Desktop" which should just spread out a window above your taskbar to the top. Also make sure that you have the latest Ageia drivers installed...

I will just go ahead and post another executable to the site in a few minutes which will run in 'Fullscreen exclusive 1024x768x32'. It will be on the same page (http://www.vrman3d.com) next to the original one. I just need to hop out of Vista to get at FrontPage and then it will be there. (yes DBPro works great under Vista thankfully!)

-=VRman=--

EDIT> There I just replaced the zip file on the site with an updated version that defaults to 1024x768x32 and lets you change the res by changing the content of a file named 'screenres.txt' which is self explanitory (double click it to edit with notepad). Perhaps there is some sort of bug with DBPro - even though I did have the project set to run at 'Windowed Desktop' I had the other settings (which shouldn't have been used) like fullscreen exclusive mode (which wasn't selected) set to 1920x1200x32. It shouldn't have even bothered with those settings since I had 'Windowed Desktop' checked off, but who knows... The new version on my site should fix it anyway.

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VRMan3D
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Posted: 19th Nov 2006 04:23 Edited at: 19th Nov 2006 04:26
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So has anyone tried it?

Does it run on your machines ok? (That was my main purpose behind posting it - to find out if it runs as well on other machines as it does on mine....) It cranks along at (the sync rate) 60fps for me constant (without sync I get around 350fps - very impressive)

Suspension is very un-noticible though (I've tried lots of different ways), and still no powersliding. I should post my Newton r/c truck demo I made for comparison perhaps - very long throw cushy suspension (like a real TMAXX r/c truck) and plenty of powersliding available. I'm very much looking forward to updates to DarkPhysics to address these issues and some others (like revolute joints not working the same way when you create them the build joint method vs the single command method. I need the other params like limits and springs, but can't get the joint to work right that way. You get completely different results even though they should be the same and ... uh I'll make this another post heh) I've run into, because I really like DP better than Newton - performance is 10x better and it integrates so nicely with DarkBasicPro.

Please post and let me know how it worked on your machines please if you tried it out.

-VRMan

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