Hey there Engineers!
It’s already been 2 months since the Early Access release, it has been amazing to see what the community is coming up with and the creativity and ingenuity shown by creators on the Workshop. On our end we’ve been hard at work fixing bugs and closely following the community’s needs, and today we’re happy to finally reach our first milestone: Closed Loops!
One of the unique aspects of Plasma is its physics engine, which uses articulated bodies to simulate joint movement - a technology normally used in robotics simulations due to its accuracy and rigidity.
One of the downsides however is the inherent inability to form closed mechanical loops - until now! By making use of a rigid body constraint between the articulated bodies we can form closed loops, these won’t be as rigid as the rest of the Device but work very well in most scenarios.
When two Joiners belong to the same group and are overlapping, a temporary mechanical join can be formed.
When the Joiners belong to the same Device, mechanical loops become possible.
Joins can also be made between separate devices!
A Separator works a bit differently from a Joiner, it is designed to split off parts of a Device during simulation, think along the lines of a rocket shedding its boosters.
Or a drone separating from another vehicle.
Force/Torque Outputs
All mechanical components with an internal link (ex: Hinges, Motors, Extenders) now output their applied force at the last simulation step, a very useful piece of information in robotics applications and a prerequisite for self-balancing robots.
Linear and Angular Drag Fix
The kind folk over at Unity 3D (the game engine we use) fixed a bug that caused linear and angular drag values to be applied incorrectly to articulation bodies during simulation.
This update includes the fix, but we had to revert linear drag values to the default in your saved Devices so you might need to re-adjust the value if you had previously changed it.
Showcase World
We also published the world containing all the devices you see here, so you can try them out yourself. The world is called "Closed Loops Showcase" and its ID is 2988402150.
Roadmap Updated
Since we reached our first milestone, we've also updated our roadmap to show you what we have in store!
That's it for our first milestone!
We hope you'll enjoy this update and we can't wait to see what you'll come up with!
- Marco, Patrick, Jói, Javier, Michele, and Merlo