That happens here. If you think about it, the physics engine has to simulate a huge amount of collisions. it has to calculate how much energy an object has, what direction it is traveling, and has to calculate the objects collision results in less than a second. now imagine that, but with 500+ entities. These are cylinders, which have a slightly complicated mesh. this is also hard on the engine.

It just depends on the axis of the object. play around with the axis until you get it right.

You can do this by creating an object. make it something that is easy to find the exact midpoint in. copy that to both the front and back of your character, and make sure they have a nice long distance between each other. make sure they are both the same distances from the character, otherwise it could topple over. rename the object behind the character follow. the do the same for the front one, but name it track. now group the character with a mechanism that will keep the camera system objects from straying away from their position after some hard bump or fall. i like to use two joints positioned, one on each camera system object. then connect the camera system objects to BOTH joints so they don't move at all. now use the 'position camera' tool(man standing on red X) and find the midpoint of the object behind the character. you can simply hide(don't delete, that will mess it up) the top half of the object(have to divide it first, then draw a line between the endpoints of the object. You should have the midpoint. i use a sphere, then i turn on hidden geometry, hide the top half, draw a line between the outermost nodes(points), and then use the position tool and position the first part on the midpoint of the line you just drew, and then position the other part along the axis you want it to be constrained on. now the camera will relocate itself. don't orbit the camera! add a scene. then go to scene manager(hover the mouse over the new scene) and type in exactly: camera follow follow. camera track track : now update the scene. hide the camera system objects and update it again. by now the objects should be connected to the character. press play. the camera should work. if the character is already controllable, control it. the camera should follow it. There you have it! If you want to make a camera that follows from an angle, just find the midpoint of the object behind the character, then find the midpoint of the object in front and position the camera on the midpoints of the objects. then just finish it off. Hope this helps!

I think you mean like static, freeze and ignore. I will go with that. a body with the status Ignore, when in a group with another body(not ignore)will just be registered as mass. the ignored entity will not collide with any other entity during simulation. you can change the size of the ignored body to increase mass. It can be used for bullets to help maintain momentum after collision with it's target. if you mean the states like convex hull that wouldn't really affect anything that you need to achieve your goal. hope this helps! tell me if i didn't get what you needed, i'll repost.

Here i have a machine like phonic's.

machine3.skp

here is the final result. use joystick to fire

antiaircraft.skp

Thanks!

I found something else. Although i am not sure if i am missing something in the [(frame/250)%7] part, i found a glitch. the rotation is set to span over a lapse of 250 frames, and elevation is set for 25. so i calculated that, since 250 % 25 = 10, the the elevation would cycle through all the specified movements 10 times before 1 cycle with rotation. The elevation ended up cycling 10 times, but the rotation cycle quit halfway through and restarted. i then projected it would be 20 cycles for elev. if the rot. worked correctly. That isn't right! What happened?

antiaircraft.skp

Hey Chris, this attached model has some problems. i have the rotation servo for the turret set to rotate at intervals of 0.05 over 25 frames, but it suddenly moves back to the origin halfway through! I can't figure it out. I want to build an automatic turret that can fire without control while flying a plane through the stream of projectiles and trying to blow up a target near it. Do you know the reason for this? The elevation for the turret works as i specified. What is the reason for the inconsistency? Help!

Help!

Will the beta version have the copy function?