2/11/2019
This is the first of many blogs to come, hence the poorly translated Latin above meaning “more to come”. At least the internet told me that is what it means.
Moving on, lets talk about the project. Up until now, most of the accomplishments made have either been planning or throwaways. As you may have seen in the gallery section on the right hand side, there are two pictures.(hopefully more than two reading this at a later date). Those pictures contain my first workings on a landscape for the grass and plans for the physics behind the lawn mower.
I have encountered two problems:
- The first issue comes with the landscape, which is not changeable at runtime. It is changeable at runtime given some changes to the engine. I found that this has been done by mainstream game studios who required it on a project, but alas, I don’t have time to change engine source code. My solution is create tiles that contain static meshes that can be changed upon collision with the lawnmower. This of course leads to other problems such as how big tiles are and how to determine how far the lawnmower has traveled in terms of distance. I have some theories on how to work that out but that will be for another blog.
- Second is the problem of the physics behind the lawn mower. This of course also has mini issues to it. A breakdown of the idea first may help the reader understand the issue. The lawn mower operates with two handles each of which control the motion of one of the wheels (forward, backward, and how fast). The first problem is realizing that the lawn mower realistically has pivot points about which it turns. Calculating turn radius on the lawnmower via multiple pivots is not ideal. A solution to simulate this effect is to turn the object in relation to its velocity simulating a pivot. The coalescing vectors in a direction and in rotation should amount out to the proper feeling of the lawn mower if they are balanced on a solid ratio of speed vs. turn. Finding the right balance is one of the tasks at hand. The other task is to find out how to make the arms appropriate with joysticks on a controller. I would like the two joysticks on a controller to act as the arms of the zero turn lawn mower. This would give off a more realistic effect. That said, I need to find out how to use the percent threshhold on the controller to find out how much “force” someone has applied to either joystick. This in-turn would relate to what each arm of the lawn mower would be doing in game. I have a few ideas how to cheat this problem should I not be able to access the percent yield of the joysticks.
These are the current tasks and their worries on the project.
