Can i use b2MouseJoint on a kinematic body - cocos2d-iphone

I can't find any documentation on the b2MouseJoint..
Is it only for dynamic bodies? Or can i use it on kinematic?
And if not, how else can i move kinematic other than applying a force?

You can think of kinematic bodies as having an infinite mass, so they do not respond to forces or impulses. Usually the whole point of using them is because they do not get pushed or bumped around by other things in the world, so a mouse joint will have no effect.
You can move them with SetLinearVelocity and SetAngularVelocity.

Related

Rotation and Movement with rigid body in Bullet Physics

I have made a rigid body for the player and have been trying to get the rigid body moving along with the player's controls.
What I mean is that whenever I press forward I want the rigid body to move forward in the direction the player is facing, same with back, left, right. So far I'm able to use apply force to move the rigid body in static directions.
My straight question is how do I move the player's rigid body in the direction the player is facing.
Other Details:
I don't really want to use kinematic bodies if not necessary mostly because their very fiddly at the moment
I'm using glfw3 for input
This is quite amazing that you would not see how to do that after you actually managed to apply forces in static directions to something you configured over bullet.
Come on, you HAVE the skill to figure it out.
Here, just a push in the direction (hehe), hem. Just take the vector of the facing direction (which could be determined by camera, 1st or 3rd view, or even something else...).
Congrats, this vector is your force by a k factor.
You should also modulate this force according to speed, you don't need to accelerate to infinite speed, just accelerate lots at first and then regulate force to tend to desired walk speed.
Then, the side directions are obtained by rotating the facing vector by 90 degrees around the standing axis (most surely the vertical). You can obtain that by simply swapping components and multiplying by -1 one of them. x,y,z becomes y,-x,z
To go backward, its just -x, -y, -z on the facing vector.
So your up key is not bound to 0,1,0 but to facing_dir actually. This facing dir can change with mouse or some other view controls, like numeric keys 2,6,8,4 for example. Or you could drop up,left,right,down for movement and use w,a,s,d like everybody else, and use direction keys to rotate facing direction. (+mouse)
It is much more difficult to obtain the facing vector from mouse movement or direction keys than finding out how to apply the force, so if you already have the facing vector I'm puzzled that you even have a problem.

Simulating black hole / whirpool behaviour for sprites

One of the powerups in my game is a vortex that attracts all coins. I know I have any cocos2d's moveto/bezierto methods available, but I don't know how to make them have tangential and radial speed.
The extra difficulty is that the vortex center can change in every step, so all movement has to be readjusted.
One way to achieve this without a physics engine is to use the rotation around point algorithm.
That covers the rotation around the vortex center. Once an object is rotation around the vortex, all you need to do is to reduce that object's distance from the center by a certain amount every frame. That way it will continue to move inwards.
The only tricky part then is to get the object from its initial position being "sucked into" the vortex. There's going to be a lot of tweaking needed. With a physics engine, that part would come natural from the physics itself and it would always look right.
This is not guaranteed for the manual solution and definitely not for actions, which aren't designed to track moving targets. For example, if you change a move action every frame by replacing the existing one with a new one, your object won't move at all. Every time you do that, there's a 1-frame delay before the new action does its work.

Prevent collisions applying impulse in Bullet physics

I am developing third-person shooting game using Bullet and Ogre. When the character model collides with an object in the world, such as a power-up, the collision applies a force to the character and causes them to spin. How can I prevent the collision applying a force to the character?
I have set a method for btDynamicsWorld::setInternalTickCallback and so I know which bodies are colliding and the btManifoldPoint.
Note that I applyTorque to the body in order to rotate them smoothly so I cannot simply prevent rotation.
Thanks for your help.
I am unfamiliar with the physics engines you mentioned, but I know a thing or two about real physics...
Basically if you draw a free body diagram and arrows that represent the forces, you can determine the net effect. Or if you know the desired net effect, you can figure out where you need to add forces or remove forces.
You could add an equal and opposite force/torque at the time of impact. This would make the net forces on your object zero.
Or you could take the elements that are causing the forces and make them massless. Force = mass * acceleration. If the mass is zero and your physics engine is based on real world physics, then it shouldn't cause any net forces on collision.
Hope that helps.

box2d ship-game beginner questions: applyForce, gravity + water

I'm just starting with cocos2d + box2d.
I would love to create a simple 2d ship game where you look from top(from the sky) down at the sea with the ships.
Could someone give me a very very basic example, how to apply wind to my world? Do I have to applyForce to each ship body?
And what about the gravity? Since it goes straight down, should I set it to 0? gravity.Set(0.0f, 0.0f)? It actually would pull down the ship..
Should I somehow deal with the water? e.g with density of it?
you would probably have to detect where the ships are and then apply force on them somehow.
and yes set gravity to 0.
and water wouldn't have to be an object at all. just like a background image.
If you are looking from the top and want to apply wind force to all your ships you can use gravity vector. In this case wind force will be applied to your objects automatically.
If there are other dynamic objects on the scene then it's a good idea to keep the list (std::list or NSMutableArray) of pointers to all your ships. Notice, that by default box2D is clearing all the forces each simulation step. You can disable this property or apply forces manually each simulation step

How to make a moving object "stick" to a stationary object in box2D

I have been experimenting with the box2D sample project within cocos2D for the iPhone and am wondering if box2D is the appropriate engine to use to make a moving object "stick" to a stationary object when the moving object is finished moving in a certain direction.
Here is a simplification of what I am trying to achieve: I have MovingObject, a dynamic rigid body, that moves vertically against gravity when enough force is applied to it. As MovingObject moves, it may overlap a static object, StationaryObject. When gravity diminishes MovingObject's velocity to zero such that it is no longer moving, I would like to have MovingObject remain where it is ONLY if it overlaps StationaryObject. If the object's do not overlap, MovingObject should start to move back down towards the ground per the force of gravity. During that descent, if MovingObject at any time overlaps StationaryObject, it should stop its descent and remain in that location as if it is stuck on StationaryObject.
I am able to get MovingObject to move per the forces I am applying to it, but not really sure how to make it stop and stay there once it reaches the top of its ascent, assuming it is overlapping StationaryObject.
Currently, I am experimenting with simple square/box objects but eventually both MovingObject StationaryObject will be defined as very different complex polygon shapes.
Thanks in advance for any insights and/or suggestions for achieving this.
Sounds like you'll want to change the type of fixture used for "MovingObject" while it "ascending" and then change it when it is "descending" so that it reacts differently (to overlaps).
by "overlap" it sounds like you want to achieve something similar to "one sided platforms" in a platform game (ie; Mario Bros.) - I would recommend looking into the solutions for one-sided platforms for starters.