programming

wheels again

i finally can build a car again. i have only had contacts and pins ported over to the new solver api. today i got the wheeljoint over today. i think it took me longer to port the damn thing than it did to write it in the first place. properly honoring local joint coordinate systems makes things much more complicated.

my goal is to be able to build a little car from scratch in under 20 seconds. the steps would be..

add a box and size it
add the 4 wheel joints
add 4 spheres for wheels and hook them to the joints

that might not seem like much, but to do it in 20 seconds is pretty hard and requires a pretty nice ui to do it. i could have a magical button that builds a car in 0 seconds, but that is not the point. you should be able to build what you want with minimal pain.

right now it takes me about 40 seconds to build the car because i have to be careful. i think i was able to build the car in 30 seconds in the older version of the builder.

another goal i have is to build the claw from bziotd in under a minute (without binding the controls), that might be pushing it. there are a ton of parts and joints in that. i guess a better goal might be to build it and bind the controls in under 5 minutes. that seems reasonable.