What can we do with physics?

[Whilyam]

There was a discussion about fly-mode in MORE once. In that, Chogon replied he'd rather see an Age that used the physics engine to do that (as in some Age with anti-gravity where you can fly up shafts and things like that). Ever since then I've wondered just what we could do in terms of weird physics with PyPRP. I've never seen anything in the Wiki or elsewhere that talked about this. So, does anyone know what sort of weird physics could be used? Preferably with a walk-through for those like me who have difficulty figuring this stuff out.

[D'Lanor]

I don't think we can do much with physics. An age cannot access the physics engine directly. We have to work with what Cyan has implemented.

If you want weird effects you can use subworlds, since anything that happens to the subworld will happen to the avatar inside. I can see a bunch of Alice in wonderland ages coming up once we can use scaling animations.

[Lontahv]

D'Lanor, hehehe... that's the first thing I thought when I saw that with the subworlds.

I was thinking... maybe it's possible to set gravity as an engine command issued though the fni. I dunno, I probably would have heard about this before if it was a possibility. The .dat files that rM have are VERY similar to the fni files (engine commands). I'm going to have a look at if this could work.

Edit: Bah. I don't see a variable for something like this in Uru.

[Grogyan]

it appears that gravity is hard coded into the engine.

Maybe send and email to Cyan to tell them to put in a gravity vector in their engine which an be accessed outside, like in an SDL variable or built into their prp format

however if you have seen the movie Labyrinth, you can theoretically achieve the same effect that was done in the movie when David Bowie did a full 360 from underneath a platform to its top.
I did that once by accident with the ladder in my shell, and it was hilarious seeing my avatar walk around upside down

[Nadnerb]

Gravity appears to be local to the avatar, so if you rotate the avatar, (by having a rotated spawnpoint, or manually doing it with something like python) the avatar will fall in the direction that his feet are pointing. This could be used to create some interesting effects without too much trouble, I would think.

[Aloys]

Anyone remember the DRC site mentionning the Rebek(?) Age and how it was supposed to have some weird gravity environment?
There really wasn't any detail other than that, but it still suggests that Cyan could (or wanted to) play with the gravity somehow. (that or it was just some random fancy from whoever updated the DRC site that day)
Also at some point there was such a rotated spawnpoint in Garrison. In the prison cell. It was in Uru ABM, not sure if it's still in CC.. If there's a way to access random spawnpoints (UruConsole?) it's easy to check ingame. It was pretty fun to play with, you could walk on the wall just above the ladder. That totally cracked me up the first time.. I kept singing "dancing on the ceiiiiling"..

[D'Lanor]

Gravity appears to be local to the avatar, so if you rotate the avatar, (by having a rotated spawnpoint, or manually doing it with something like python) the avatar will fall in the direction that his feet are pointing. This could be used to create some interesting effects without too much trouble, I would think.

Having often used the rotational functions of the adminKI on avatars I know that this is not correct. The avatar still falls in the normal gravitational direction of the age. The avatar camera also tries to conform to the main age coordinates... and fails miserably.
Only if you place the avatar in a subworld with the same skewed coordinates will this work.

[Aloys]

So that means we could theoretically produce an 'Escher-style' gameplay?
If so I totally place dibs on it..

[D'Lanor]

Hehe, that was the exact image I had in mind.

[Grogyan]

Actually this is what I had in mind