As a follow-up to my last post where I showed you a first version of a more complex walker I was building using the newly implemented features for my PlayGround I now have a video (WMV, 2.7 MBytes) of a more simple walker walking around.
Due to a bug in the current beta of Newton, the legs of the other more complex walker won’t work as supposed, so I just created this more simple walker and will start getting the other one to walk as soon as this bug is corrected (Julio, the main head behind NGD already is working on it. He is usually fast as a lightning in fixing bugs).
One thing I noticed on the rather tedious process of creating this walker is the fact that the user interface of my PlayGround should get some overhaul and additions, so that it won’t take hours of learning before new users can use the PlayGround to create such complex objects. So that’s what’s next on my list : After implementing another set of new features I always wanted to have in, like importing a scene into the existing one, so you can make e.g. a template for a catapult and put multiples of them into one scene and a feature that let’s the camera follow a selected body (this is great fun if you e.g. follow the bullet of a catapult in first-person mode), I started to make the user interface of the PlayGround more beginner friendly (but also powerfull for more advanced users).
And another thing that’ll take much time is the manual. I already had written one some months ago, but since then so much stuff has changed that I’ll just totally redo it after the features are finished.
So hopefully I’ll be getting this one out in the near future without too much bugs (it’s complex and users can do stuff I maybe never could imagine, so I bet there will be bugs in it), so that I can finally start working on some other stuff. I have nothing bigger planned, but rather like to put out some smaller demos with source code (like the SDL demos in my newton page). One demo I’m thinking of is a 2D platformer using Newton for physics and OpenGL for rendering it in 3D (maybe I’ll also use some kind of skeletal animation for the characters), and the other one is the tank demo I posted on the newton forums recently.