Hey, everyone.
I'm trying to create a platformer (seems popular) that animates characters based on physics and primitive inverse kinematics. First I made a biped ragdoll, but that was useless, because the physics did not obey my set-force-to-angle commands 100%; the best I got was a limp zombie-looking thing, whose feet fell through the floor, limbs spinning.
Today I realized I needed invisible objects to just nail the jointed biped graphics onto. So I created a player object, and two feet, and am trying to animate them with cycles of "set force towards position" and velocity added to the player body, a la deadeye's kickit.
I'm not really a programmer, just an artist, but like messing with stuff like this. As a result, however, there are a bunch of problems I cannot seem to overcome. For one, the feet are colliding with each other, and that is not what I want. Can I make them pass through each other but still collide with the environment?
Additionally, they tend to drag behind the player. Is there any way to restrict physics movement within a hard radius, dramatically without elasticity? I tried hinge, but it lagged the program horribly. I already have one of the feet set to animate with a force when its position reaches certain coordinates, resulting in forward and backward cycling while the control is held down, but it's difficult to balance masses, forces and everything. And the collisions with pfoot2 are not helping.
Finally... I can't seem to figure out how to add the ? to a condition, like I see in others' projects. <img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_confused.gif" alt=":?" title="Confused" /> It would be useful to use in a manner similar to kickit, as well. Is there some secret way?