What I've been up to lately:
- I've been pitching a concept for a tree-top city builder game, that's too large for me to self fund.
- I shifted house.
- I added ramps to Pinballesque. This turned out to be circuitous. I figured that moving from a 2D to a 3D physics engine would be the simplest way to achieve it, and might get me more realism.
- After the reimplementation I wasn't very impressed with PhysX. It had trouble with really fast rotation which I ended hacking by making the ball slide instead of roll (And yes, I did crank the max angular velocity). The continuous collision detection in the version I was using wasn't reliable, which is bad news for something as fast as a pinball. Initially I tried to implement habitrails as extruded tubes of collision, but a mess of thin collision geo seemed like a far worse solution that just hacking it with a spline.
- After I wrote my custom physics for rolling along a spline, I went back to Box2D. Now I have a 2D table surface with 3D ramps and rails, and rail visuals courtesy of Curvy. It works well.
I'll have a new build up after I've built a table that does a decent job of showing off ramps.