Yeah that’s perfect- exactly what I was thinking.
Just so we are clear, this will work with gradually building the limbs as well, or not? As we won’t be having parts in our editor, instead gradually making changes and growing tissues.
When i talked about viscosity i was refering to how much force the push in/against that medium will generate. Especially in different atmospheres and at different creature sizes.
(walking = ground , swimming = water, flying = atmosphere, etc)
Why not swimming efficiency?
Why not delete the joint entirely then if its not bending?
Also now that i saw some replies here, why reduce the locomotion system to fish accordion model instead of normal bone-joint-muscle model?
yes. That’s the idea.
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as long as folks can get by only placing basic tissues I don’t see the issue. Sometimes our players struggle with as easy as the game is now, we shouldn’t make any of our tools too intimidating.
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That reminds me of the multiple people who didn’t realize how reproduction worked in the multicellular prototype…
or that thylakoids don’t work at the bottom of the sea
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Swimming efficiency would be given by multiplying muscle efficiency by any drag.
having multiple joints with 0 flexibility allows static but curved bones, and also allows the width & height of the segment to be used for the model.
I was trying to recreate a bone-joint-muscle model, without needing to simulate the forces applied to each bone. A bone-joint-muscle model would probably be more accurate, but I don’t think it’s necessary.
I’m trying to make it so the player doesn’t have to be aware of the specifics of each segment, but can still go in-depth if they want. That’s why I’m talking about having archetypes of different segments. The player could choose flexible muscles, bone-reinforced muscle, flexible segments with no muscles, or stiff segments with no muscles.
You should probably add a tutorial for it hh
I like this idea more than my own which was to straight up just have people draw lines / bones. I like the idea of have all that stiffness and flex business kept hidden / out the way as something experienced players can tweak to really find some nasty builds. Ultimatley, for me it would come down to interface.
The issue with that is it would make implementing animation harder- atleast I would think
So you dont consider the contact surface with that medium?
Why not just curve bones then? In my mind this would need alot of joints to make a proper curved bone. Wouldnt a bone tool do that too?
This model seems like that model itself just with minor diffs.
What do you mean with forces applied to the bones?? It could mean many things.
I haven’t some up with an equation to determine the surface area of the entire creature.
because a lot of what I’m doing here is supposed to fit into graphics and animation. The segments have a certain width & height which can be used to construct a mesh. Then, the bones can be animated using a sine wave based on where they lie on the anguiliform to thuniform spectrum. Curved bones would certainly be possible, it’s just not really a priority in my mind.
Yeah. it is. The only reason I call it a ‘fish accordion’ model is because it’s a fun name for it.
When I say forces applied to bones, I’m talking about the muscles that span from one rib to the next. The force applied to each rib would be proportional to the width of the rib, the stiffness of the joint, and the flexibility of the rib itself. It would be possible to add all the forces applying to that rib, but it doesn’t have a good simulation complexity to simulation accuracy ratio.
It would make animating fish much easier. In simple fish, their movements tend to fit into a spectrum between anguiliform, and thunniform, which can be easily animated with sine waves.
here’s an example:
https://oceantracks.org/sites/oceansofdata.org/files/Thunniform.png
There are some more difficult animations, though. In Stultus Douspedes, It’s not entirely clear whether it would swim like an octopus / jelly fish, a frog, or a regular fish.
Going back to this, I was actually imagining a metaball-esque system for constructing the mesh. Each segment would have a height and width, which would ‘wrap around’ the bone, and act as a layer of soft tissue. Then, you use the metaball algorithm to connect the sperate spheres together to form a mesh which would be the model of the creature.
Curved bones can also be used to construct a mesh tho.(width+section surface+radius)
And in my opinion we shouldnt limit ourselves to known swimming methods in animals. We should let the randomness and players try new ways.
Uhm why couldnt this model be applied to normal bone-joint-muscle model??
I know. They’re just difficult. like I said,
That was my description of the bone-joint-muscle model. Like I already said,
It is essentially just the bone-muscle-joint model.
with this only bare in mind we would eventually move onto a polygonal skeleton based system known as Convolution Surfaces. Reason being, metaballs are fantastic for multicell, horrible for larger animals who aren’t blobby and round. Basically, just keep things ordered and structured enough to where we can abstract things in terms of points and lines (with each point having a weight, or radius if that helps you picture it) and we’ll be good.
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Kind of offtopic…
I’m not going to add any tutorials to any prototypes. Tutorials are the thing you should do last to polish things up when game mechanics aren’t very much a work in progress.