Characters and physics

[Chris]

Another issue with "characters and physics" is those infernal bounding boxes. My god those things are annoying. Is it just a .NIF model issue? I don't think it entirely is because Oblivion and Skyrim use the NIF model and I can't recall any times I've been stuck.

I think that's more the physics engine than anything else. Morrowind's physics doesn't exactly win any accolades. We shouldn't have that problem if done correctly.

[psi29a]

Speaking of which, how is our bullet "issues" coming along? Did we ever work around the problem, or did the problem get fixed?

If it isn't fixed, did we ever right that test for the bullet guys?

[MacKom]

Death to bounding boxes!

also

Death to scripted animations!

And one other question that`s been bugging me - nav meshing. Will something like this be implemented? Will NPC`s FINALLY be able to roam instead of being stuck on trajectory paths?

[SquireNed]

Probably NPC's won't have nav meshing by default in 1.0.0, but it wouldn't be an impossible feature to add. The main problems with it come from methodology and processing power, and OpenMW is being made a long time after MW was.

[Mistahtokyo]

Speaking of which, how is our bullet "issues" coming along? Did we ever work around the problem, or did the problem get fixed?

If it isn't fixed, did we ever right that test for the bullet guys?

It seems that every time I see this question asked the question goes unanswered. Not sure why, really.

[Chris]

Speaking of which, how is our bullet "issues" coming along? Did we ever work around the problem, or did the problem get fixed?

The problem with the scaled triangle meshes was worked around, as I've mentioned before. The remaining problems I'm not sure are a fault of Bullet, or if I'm just doing it wrong. But given that Bullet has next to no documentation (and what documentation exists is poor), and the examples can't really be learned from (I've seen it said that the example code is not designed for use outside of the examples), and other projects that use Bullet all have specialized code with different needs than ours so it doesn't directly apply... I'm really not sure where to go with it.

[psi29a]

Do we need a reach out? A few pleas for help during the weeklies to have people with more bullet experience to help out? Is there something here than PR can help out with?

[cc9cii]

What was the issue, anyway?

[Chris]

Do we need a reach out? A few pleas for help during the weeklies to have people with more bullet experience to help out?

If you know anyone with enough Bullet experience that's willing to learn openmw's code base and help out, that would be great. My physics branch was updated to master yesterday: https://github.com/kcat/openmw/tree/physics (the main physics stuff is moved into the mwphysics subsystem).

What was the issue, anyway?

There's problems with (mis)detection of collisions (particularly on triangle meshes) -- there'll be an occasional frame where an NPC is thought to be in the air. And performance is not that great. There's other issues, but they're more due to incomplete code than bugs (third person camera goes through objects, some geometry doesn't block item selection, no swimming, and my merge yesterday accidentally broke the collision debug rendering).

[cc9cii]

I'm new around here and don't know openmw's history very well so with that in mind:

I've wondered if we're better off with something like havok. Or even ogrebullet. There seems to be ogrebullet demos that do interesting things (can't find the links right now, darn it).

Or is the work already put in to support morrowind nif too much to ignore?

Some of our physics code seems quite old. Was there a reason why we didn't make our collision objects dynamic? They seem to have zero weight which might have something to do with our collision glitches (just guessing).