Physics has never been my strong subject, but I'd like to have a go at some physics scripting.

Would it be possible to use physics to simulate the small steel balls in a pachinko machine. There would be quite a lot of them boununcing around at one time.

aum 25

Wel, that's a good start for coding the ball behaviour. Thanks for pointing that out.

I'll still need a lot of balls though. Could the engine handle several hundred balls at a time?

Okay, thanks. I'm just in the very early design phase on this one. So if anyone has some experience with putting lots of bouncing balls in their game, please let me know what would be a realistic number to have going at one time.

Ideally I'd like every ball in the machine to have a physics action, but that could be thousands. If only the ones that are on the playing board at one time, then proabably less than 50. There would need to be quite a few pins on the board for them to bounce off as well. See illustration:

Really, just take the AUM25 example and change a couple of lines so that you can add more spheres at random times. This takes less than 30 minutes of coding and you can see if the results are okay or not (btw you also want to set friction to 0 and maybe lower ph_fps_max_lock to less than 70 for better performance).

Have you tried it ?

I just downloaded Newton Physics two days ago. Tuesday is my hell day at work when I have to work 12 hours, so I didn't get anything done today. I'm also being hounded to write a couple of tutorials.

Also, I'm considering using the pysics in the pro version of 3dgs. I was going to upgrade for some other features soon anyway. If anyone can shed some light on which way is the best to go right off the bat would be helpful (and if it even matters).

In physics class at school I spent more time staring at the walls than studying my books (so you see, these things really can turn out to be useful to you later in life).

I will try it very soon though, and post again.

<------Physics Professor at your disposal.

Honestly Russ, if I weren't so busy myself, I would whip this up for you.
This is really a trivial affair with the 3DGS PE and should be just as easy with the NGD.
In my MMO project, I had 100 physics objects running at the same time before things slowed down. I think this is plenty of Steel Balls to simulate what you want.

I'll be more than happy to help you with the 3DGS PE and with the RL PE.


"Ask Dr. Know. Theres nothing I don't!"
Robin Williams in "AI"

Thanks Fastlane. I will have a try myself first. I want to learn how physics works, and it will be very satisfying to do it myself. If I get stuck or you can improve on my bhest efforts, then I'll take you up on your offer.

I still have some research to do on this (i.e. I'm going to go and play some pachinko), but if the physics really isn't that hard (???), then I could get that part done then come back to the design of the board later.

I don't only want the balls on the playing field moving. One of the most exciting aspects of Pachinko is that when you start winning, you keep winning and balls start spewing out everywhere. (Funny thing is the Japanese one armed bandits do the same thing with coins, but that's another story). Eventually you have buckets of the things. I have to work out a way simulate that. ONce balls come to rest, they won't need a physics action applied to them, and the balls themselves could be represented by 2d sprites.

I put my order in for 3dgs pro this morning.