Physic's Game Ideas

[endless_dark]

I have an application that uses opengl for rendering and chipmunk for physics, statically linked and included with the executable, I think I could make a physics game from it since I have learned a lot of things from this, but I don't have any good idea, can you help me?

This is what I have, I have made a car test, but I can do anything. I thought that maybe I could do a "physics minigame challenge" copying some good flash games ideas and mixing it together in a game or something.
Anyway, if someone has a good idea that want me to do post it.

 

[lulzfish]

Make a castle siege game.
The player has to break apart a wall and touch a goal to clear each level.
There would be different kinds of guns, and maybe tanks or walking mechs. Make the terrain interesting, too.

How are you liking Chipmunk? I've only used a few of the 3D physics engines, no 2D-specific ones, and they're all a bit lacking in documentation, and each one has some oddity in their API.

 

[bzar]

Make a wrecking ball game, with a heavy ball connected to the cursor with a chain. The objective would be either wrecking some special item each level or just leveling a house (or castle) below a certain height limit.

 

[mcobit]

I had an idea some time ago:
You start out with only one pixel, that you can move around the screen in jump&run style. You can jump very high with it, cause it is small an light.
Then you can touch other pixels, that are laying around and add them to your pixel. So if you attached more pixels to your playerpixel they gather around it and form some kind of bigger player-character, that has a form, that is determined by the kind of pixels that are attached. They can be held together with some kind of gravityfield, where pixels can be flying out by force (from projectiles or too high falls or something).
When you have enough pixels you can shoot out some to defend enemies. The more pixels you gather around your pixel, the bigger the structure becomes, the less high it can jump and the slower it moves.
Everytime an enemy attacks you with a projectile, the pixels, that are hit fly out of your player and can be either go offscreen or can be recollected.
There are a lot of things you can do to make it a tactical game, as you could pass some passages only with a max. amount of pixels or you could split your pixels to put some of the opposite of a scale to move on and so on.

Maybe that gives an idea of my idea

Edit: typos

 

[dflemstr]

Isn't Box2D "better" than Chipmunk? I've at least had better experiences with it, especially performance-wise.

 

[Trevsweb]

something like boom blox on the wii would be cool.

 

[kuru]

Maybe something like the incredible machine. I loved that as a kid.

Can those physics engines simulate liquids? You could go through pipes, funnels and freeze or heat and vaporize them.

 

[JayFoxRox]

I'm also using Chipmunk for MogsVsDogs (http://pandorawiki.org/MogsVsDogs) and its working great so far. Its entirely in C which is why I like it more than Box2D. Its been easier to compile and implement into my existing code. The documentation (http://code.google.com/p/chipmunk-physics/wiki/Documentation) is also fine and the samples are great (better than those in Box2D if you ask me).

I didn't compare the performance of both though but thats not a huge factor for me anyways because 2D physics are not that CPU heavy (unless you have a lot more objects than I do). Chipmunk also does a great job putting objects into the sleep mode and the spatial hash is also doing a nice job it seems.

Besides that Chipmunk seems to be more stable than Box2D (both ran with a fixed timestep) - Chipmunk gives the same result in all my test cases, while Box2D failed in one or two tries. This might be because I didn't use constraints but forces to shoot my objects, but I expect the shot to be the same after resetting the forces before each shot. Maybe some problem with Box2Ds verlet integration or something similar

The only thing I had problems with in Chipmunk was making a trampoline as I would love to have one in MogsVsDogs.




Maybe some sort of god game to destroy people by creating tornados, fire meteors from the sky, raising water level, make drivers mad, ... ?

 

[Xenu]

I remember I played a type of trial bike game alot when I was younger. It was extremely fun and addictive, but I can't remember it's name. I tried to google it and I found a game called "bike or die" that looks somewhat similar. The basic idea is that you drove a motorcycle to the end of the course without hitting any obstacles. There were ramps and bars on the course were the bike could jump on to and if there was a thin bar you could make a precise jump to catch the bar with one wheel and the rest of the bike would hang under it - so you would drive up-side-down. I don't know if I explain it so you understand but I'm telling you the game was so simple yet extremely entertaining. Does anyone know the game I'm talking about? The game must be at least ten years old. It also had a level editor and me and my friends made theese extremely hard and crazy courses for each other to complete. Damn I wish I remember the name of the game. I'd love to play it again.

 

[torpor]

Was it linerider?

 

[crow_riot]

Isn't Box2D "better" than Chipmunk? I've at least had better experiences with it, especially performance-wise.

i think so, too. at least box2d works with fixedpoint math (even on the NDS). chipmunk doesnt as it IMO relies on some floating-point math behaviour (which i dont think is portable to all platforms?)

 

[endless_dark]

Wops, so maybe I should change? What a pity because I was enjoying Chipmunk a lot.
Anyway, being the pandora wifi capable wouldn't be better a multiplayer game?
I am having a lot of fun playing around with this 2 wheel car, maybe is not a bad idea for a game despite there are a lot of similar games.

 

[lulzfish]

and if there was a thin bar you could make a precise jump to catch the bar with one wheel and the rest of the bike would hang under it - so you would drive up-side-down.

That definitely sounds like X-moto.
http://xmoto.tuxfamily.org/

Here's some YouTube video of gameplay with the menu music:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Oin_fCmJDk&feature=related

Edit: Yeah, floating-point. It's kind of a weird thing, it means all your precision is near the origin and you can have objects at greater distances, but with less precision. It's good for general math, but I don't know why they'd use it in games.

The Pandora doesn't technically have floating-point in the CPU, but the NEON bit does. So floating-point is possible, but still a pretty bad idea. If Box2D has a fixed-point option and Chipmunk doesn't, I would definitely want to use Box2D.

That being said, I wonder if Open Dynamics Engine (the 3D one I'm trying) can use fixed-point math.

 

[jasay]

I had an idea some time ago:
You start out with only one pixel, that you can move around the screen in jump&run style. You can jump very high with it, cause it is small an light.
Then you can touch other pixels, that are laying around and add them to your pixel. So if you attached more pixels to your playerpixel they gather around it and form some kind of bigger player-character, that has a form, that is determined by the kind of pixels that are attached. They can be held together with some kind of gravityfield, where pixels can be flying out by force (from projectiles or too high falls or something).
When you have enough pixels you can shoot out some to defend enemies. The more pixels you gather around your pixel, the bigger the structure becomes, the less high it can jump and the slower it moves.
Everytime an enemy attacks you with a projectile, the pixels, that are hit fly out of your player and can be either go offscreen or can be recollected.
There are a lot of things you can do to make it a tactical game, as you could pass some passages only with a max. amount of pixels or you could split your pixels to put some of the opposite of a scale to move on and so on.

Maybe that gives an idea of my idea

Edit: typos

Sounds like you would like Osmos. A little different than your description, but still fun.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mc88ti3WbfY&feature=related

 

[dflemstr]

That being said, I wonder if Open Dynamics Engine (the 3D one I'm trying) can use fixed-point math.

The Bullet physics engine (which has more features than ODE which is why I use it ) can be reconfigured to use fixed-point arithmetic (with some quirks) by modifying the "LinearMath/btScalar.h" file. Dunno about ODE, though.

Fixed point arithmetic seems to be largely unsupported in most engines.

 

[Username]

I had an idea some time ago:
You start out with only one pixel, that you can move around the screen in jump&run style. You can jump very high with it, cause it is small an light.
Then you can touch other pixels, that are laying around and add them to your pixel. So if you attached more pixels to your playerpixel they gather around it and form some kind of bigger player-character, that has a form, that is determined by the kind of pixels that are attached. They can be held together with some kind of gravityfield, where pixels can be flying out by force (from projectiles or too high falls or something).
When you have enough pixels you can shoot out some to defend enemies. The more pixels you gather around your pixel, the bigger the structure becomes, the less high it can jump and the slower it moves.
Everytime an enemy attacks you with a projectile, the pixels, that are hit fly out of your player and can be either go offscreen or can be recollected.
There are a lot of things you can do to make it a tactical game, as you could pass some passages only with a max. amount of pixels or you could split your pixels to put some of the opposite of a scale to move on and so on.

Maybe that gives an idea of my idea

Why you would want to defend enemies is mind-boggling. Please, someone make this game.

 

[endless_dark]

Ok then, so moving to box2D.
Downloading and compiling - [Done]
Now I have tested box2D using fixed-point, the next thing I have to do is to translate all the rendering stuff I had on the Chipmunk app to C++ and mix it with the box2D test

 

[Xenu]

and if there was a thin bar you could make a precise jump to catch the bar with one wheel and the rest of the bike would hang under it - so you would drive up-side-down.

That definitely sounds like X-moto.
http://xmoto.tuxfamily.org/

Thank you! That wasn't the game I've played, but after some digging it seems like "X-moto" is based on "Elasto Mania" which is a continuation from "Action SuperCross" from 1997 - which is the game I thought of. And since X-Moto is open source, hopefully someone will port it to Pandora.

 

[mcobit]

I had an idea some time ago:
You start out with only one pixel, that you can move around the screen in jump&run style. You can jump very high with it, cause it is small an light.
Then you can touch other pixels, that are laying around and add them to your pixel. So if you attached more pixels to your playerpixel they gather around it and form some kind of bigger player-character, that has a form, that is determined by the kind of pixels that are attached. They can be held together with some kind of gravityfield, where pixels can be flying out by force (from projectiles or too high falls or something).
When you have enough pixels you can shoot out some to defend enemies. The more pixels you gather around your pixel, the bigger the structure becomes, the less high it can jump and the slower it moves.
Everytime an enemy attacks you with a projectile, the pixels, that are hit fly out of your player and can be either go offscreen or can be recollected.
There are a lot of things you can do to make it a tactical game, as you could pass some passages only with a max. amount of pixels or you could split your pixels to put some of the opposite of a scale to move on and so on.

Maybe that gives an idea of my idea

Why you would want to defend enemies is mind-boggling. Please, someone make this game.

Well, it should be defeat, sorry.

 

[Username]

Well, it should be defeat, sorry.

It takes a big man to defeat enemies, but it takes a bigger man to defend enemies. I think that this could be going somewhere.