For the first attempt at a fun prop to toy with, I tried adding a bungie cord to Quix. Some searching led to this article on spring systems. Implementation was nice and easy, but it isn’t half unstable. :-[ While I can just about get a bungie cord out of it, no amount of tinkering with k, gravity, damping, mass or rest distance seems to yeild a simple rope.
Springs it seems aren’t too hot for simulating something which is effectivly rigid 90% of the time, so I’m wondering about switching to something more suitable. Jakobsen’s caught my eye as being slightly more possible to implement than any other method, and being more suitable.
Has anyone tried any other methods for simple, ‘fun’ physics? I’m tempted just to hack out something simple and specific for the circumstances, but that has a tendancy of leaving me with ugly code thats only semi-believable.
I vaugly remember Jeff implementing this method, but can’t remember seeing any of the results. How are people handling physic-y stuff at the moment?
Edit: from the paper - “Strong springs leads to stiff systems of equations that lead to instability if only simple integration techniques are used, or at least bad performance – which leads to pain. Conversely, weak springs lead to elastically looking cloth.”
Ha, exactly my problem in a nutshell. :-[