At the moment all we can do is add more weight to a brick/grid. As people build more gamemodes that require better mass tuning (thinking of cars, anything involving grabbing items, etc) it would be great to have a more in depth way of changing the mass of bricks/entities.
We should be able to set center of mass for a brick or an entire entity, and set mass for individual bricks/entities. I assume setting mass to 0 may cause issues so having a minimum of 1 (or whatever a 2x micro weighs) should be fine but having 0 and/or negative mass (balloons?) in the future would be awesome if possible.
#Fully editable mass
woeful glen
flat vortex
fully agree that negative mass would be awesome, also zero mass would result in an object that is ignorant to gravity, i.e. it is EXCLUSIVELY reliant on forces applied to it
prime rock
Mass should never be zero or negative in a physics context. That nearly always breaks the energy transfer equation in collisions.
If you want buoyancy like balloons, you'd want that being done through a force, not through mass. This would be better facilitated through some sort of buoyancy component or just via a Force Gate.
There's a common confusion (not helped by the naming of the component in-game) between mass and weight. Weight is a result of mass and gravity producing a force. The Weight Component only adds Mass to the grid it's placed on at an offset and size. It has minimal relevance to Weight.
Mass itself is only actually relevant to collisions, if you have two objects colliding and one has zero mass, that one's contribution to the collision will be ignored and the other object will act like an unstoppable object plowing it out of the way. If it instead had negative mass, I'm actually not sure what'd happen since that's not a physically possible thing. I'd guess the negative-mass object would either glue itself to the other one and gain infinite velocity or it would ping off in an unintuitive way. Either way, it'd destroy the object with negative mass in the context of the game.
TLDR:
Negative mass breaks physics, use forces instead.
Maybe a component to modify gravity's effect on an grid instead, that'd achieve the same effect, letting you multiply gravity by a factor to make it zero or negative.
woeful glen
True true. A set gravity gate that works on grids would be nice (assuming it could also set strength)
Although I suppose that buoyancy (in air) will get worked on whenever we get flying vehicles. Being able to set grid gravity might give them additional headaches.
prime rock
Generally a good flight physics system won't care about what forces, gravitational or otherwise, are being applied to the object. Otherwise they'd get glitchy if you ran into something, and I doubt they'd build it in a way where that's a problem ;P
Creating a gravity component or similar and just exposing a multiplier would probably be the simplest and most effective method, then either multiply the gravitational force by that value, or if using physx's internal gravity solver you could apply an opposite force to negate gravity or altogether disable it for the body and apply a modified gravity force.
turbid turret
fully agree that negative mass would be awesome, also zero mass would result in ...
ALCUBIERRE DRIVE WHEN
flat vortex
what's that?
turbid turret
what's that?
Someone called miguel alcubierre wrote a formula for a technically mathematically possible warp drive and it uses both negative and positive mass to warp space around it
flat vortex
interesting.
turbid turret
There's a common confusion (not helped by the naming of the component in-game) b...
My hypothesis is collisions of objects with negative mass would make objects accelerate (and phase) through them rather than bounce off