Polygon Mesh
In this section, a Polygon Mesh refers to all vertices, edges, and triangles of the instanced geometry imported from external 3D tools in COLLADA format.
Scenes and Actors
The most important physics objects are scenes and actors. A scene is a PhysX's representation of the world, and actors are individual elements of the world. To simulate physical world, Vanda Engine creates a PhysX scene and populates it with actors.
· Static Actor
static actor always stays at the same place and never moves around.
· Dynamic Actor
A dynamic actor will be affected by gravity and collide with other actors in the world. The dynamic actor can receive and apply forces and torque to make your instanced geometries move in a realistic way. You use dynamic actors for things that the player can push around. When you create a dynamic actor for an instanced geometry, the translation and rotation of instanced geometry is controlled by physics engine.
· Kinematic Actor
A kinematic actor is not affected by forces, gravity, or collisions. It's driven explicitly by the translation and rotation of animated instanced geometry. Yet a kinematic actor can interact with dynamic actors.
Shapes
Physics shapes describe the spatial extent and collision properties of actors. In this section, 'shape' refers to physics shapes
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Shape
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Description
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Box
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The Box shape is a basic cube-shaped primitive. It works great for doors, platforms, walls, etc.
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Sphere
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The Sphere shape is a basic sphere-shaped primitive. It works great for balls, marbles, etc.
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Capsule
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The Capsule shape is a basic capsule-shaped primitive.
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Convex Hull
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A Convex Hull has no dents or indentations in it and contains all of the vertices of the polygon mesh.
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Triangulated Mesh
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Triangulated Mesh shape takes the polygon mesh and builds its shape based on that mesh. It's far more accurate than using primitives for complicated instanced geometries.
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Triggers
Triggers are not affected by gravity and can't receive or apply forces and torque. Triggers have a unique set of three trigger messages (Enter, Stay, Leave) that are sent out when collision with a trigger occurs:
· Enter event is called when an actor enters the trigger.
· Stay event is called whilst an actor is inside the trigger.
· Leave event is called on leaving contact with the trigger.
Triggers in Vanda Engine are useful for triggering other actions such as activating the animation of an instanced geometry or loading another scene.
Vanda Engine supports static box-shaped triggers.
Character Controller
A character controller in Vanda Engine is used for third player controller. It's simply a capsule-shaped primitive which can be told to move in different directions. The character controller witl then carry out the movement but be constrained by collisions. It will slide along walls, walk up the stairs, and push dynamic actors. See also this section.
