Week three is a thing of the past! If nothing more, it was another stressful week.

Water

Jonathan and I went back and forth about the water physics. Mostly balancing the technical features with the aesthetics that we could pull off. Originally, we leaned towards scrapping the surface tension effects that I had been programming so that we could make ‘plain water’ look more appealing, artistically. I spent a day tinkering with it and now we’re capable of warping the water’s surface while animating it and other things. So…happy medium, I guess. It still needs some refining, but it’s headed in the right direction! The effects are there, but the math needs to be played with.

Ropes

More technical issues. I am using Game Maker’s implementation of Box2D physics to simulate our ropes. I use rope joints and I have them working well…to a point. Ropes longer than ten or so joints tend to get this elastic feel to them. I have tried everything to minimize that- setting restitution low, changing the mass and density of the segments, playing with the damping, etc. Nothing seems to fix this!

I ended up kind of…hacking it myself. The rope joints have a maxLength component, but it doesn’t seem very strict, so I enforce it myself. When a rope attempts to stretch, I do some lengthdir_x/y magic to lock in back in place. This is just duct tape for now, but it gives me the correct outcome.

Bow

I added the bow. It’s super cool.

I have a much needed weekend ahead, but I’m sure you’ll see a CATAM gif or two, anyway.
More coming next week,

-Z