Rope Physics Videos

[Dunedain]

Maybe the arrow with loose rope behind it would be lying there amidst the broken crate and you could pick it up then?

[New Horizon]

Rope arrows can be retrieved, but you can't pickup the end of the rope. There are far too many physics issues to contend with.

[Crispy]

Rope arrows can be retrieved, but you can pickup the end of the rope.

Typo alert!

 

That should be: Rope arrows can be retrieved, but you can't pickup the end of the rope.

[Dram]

It used to be you could, but as explained there were a few physics errors with it (for one if you stretched it too far it would start jittering like mad)

[Dunedain]

I didn't mean try to pick the arrow up by the rope. I just meant that when you looked at the rope arrow after the crate had smashed on the ground from falling that you would see the rope arrow lying there amidst the broken crate and perhaps see some of the rope still trailing out of the end of the arrow, since the crate smashed while the rope was still deployed. But you would still pick up the rope arrow by frobbing the actual arrow itself, as always in Thief.

[Fidcal]

Maybe the arrow with loose rope behind it would be lying there amidst the broken crate and you could pick it up then?

Just tried this and the crate wasn't smashed so the arrow was still stuck in it with its rope trailing along the ground in a loop where it fell. Frob the arrow and you get the arrow of course in the usual way. Not seen this yet with a smashed crate but I expect you'd see similar amongst the flinders of the crate.

[demagogue]

What I was thinking ... Well, first, I don't know exactly how smashing crates work in Doom 3. In dromed, a smash stim triggering the model's death actually changes the model. So then I imagined the rope arrow would just fall out of the old model.

 

And then what happened would depend on the floor surface, just like when you shoot an arrow. If it's a wooden floor, it sticks into the floor. But if it's a stone floor, or whatever, then it kills the arrow and it disappears. Anyway, that's what traditionally happened when you shot a rope arrow into anything that's not wood.

 

But maybe that's because it smashed into the wall with a big enough smash stim (because it's going so fast) that it shattered the arrow. As for a collision with a stone floor that's very slow (the rope arrow is basically settling a few inches), I don't know. Maybe it would just settle on the ground, like you say.

It all really depends on how you're handling rope arrow collisions; so I was just wondering.

[Ishtvan]

Some people have done smashing crates in Doom3 by creating a couple different moveable "crate pieces" at the time of breaking, and then letting them fall apart. We haven't adopted this system yet, but if we do, we could probably just bind the rope to the crate-piece it's closest to, so the rope arrow would still be sticking in a piece of a crate, and you could frob it back. No promises though, not sure how complicated our "breaking things" physics will be.

[Vadrosaul]

Do rope arrow shafts splinter if they are bent too hard? For instance, using your crates as an example, if a crate falls after being pulled down from a high shelf, and the side with the rope arrow falls face to the ground, shouldn't the shaft break in half? Is there collision detection like that?

[Fidcal]

This is the same principle as the crate. If collision damage is greater than a certain amount then switch in the corpse model which flinderizes and later times out and disappears if the software can't cope with excessive amounts of such. I guess it's the old question of feature versus time/labour/launch date. I've seen glass already do this in a test (can't recall if the glass shards disappeared later) so maybe it's just the time/labour of creating all the flinder models and setting them up with different items. So in competition with other models for development maybe.

[Ishtvan]

Do rope arrow shafts splinter if they are bent too hard? For instance, using your crates as an example, if a crate falls after being pulled down from a high shelf, and the side with the rope arrow falls face to the ground, shouldn't the shaft break in half? Is there collision detection like that?

Doom3 physics can't really handle doing force balances, like calculating all the forces that would cause an arrow to snap. It only really calculates collisions, so if you very slowly placed a very heavy object on something that would break under its weight, D3 physics wouldn't know that it was supposed to break.

 

You could set it up so that arrows would break off sometimes, but a lot of the time they wouldn't break off when they should, so I'm not sure it's worth the programming effort.

 

Let's just say the rope arrow supports the player jumping on a rope attached to it without breaking, so it is either made out of something very strong or magic.