New parts

Since the last update that introduced the new part pairing system, I’ve been creating new types of parts that take advantage of this, including new connectors (ball and socket, CV joint, etc.) and specialised suspension parts.  These new parts allow for fully independent suspension with steering and front / rear / four wheel drive (even four wheel steering if you want!)  I’ve also added other new parts with new behaviours – a stepper motor and hydraulic actuators whose linear movement can be controlled by the player.

I’m keeping these new parts under wraps for now, but I can show some others that I’ve also added which are variations of existing parts – a new large spring damper, new gear sizes, new motors of different sizes, and more wheel variations.  I got tired of the old motor and wheel models so I spent some time brushing up on my 3D modelling skills and made some new ones!  I’m pretty happy how they turned out although they still need tweaking and UV mapping at some point.  I plan on adding many more variations for wheels, seats, lights etc.

Note that no additional parts are in the demo, but I have updated all the existing demo parts with their new versions.

Part alignment

I’ve also been working on how parts align together during construction, so that this system works better with the new parts I added.  This was mainly to prevent axles penetrating through parts, and to make the alignment behaviour a bit more intuitive.  Some parts (such as motors) are now slightly more restrictive in how they can attach to other parts.  On the other hand, the spring damper barrel and piston parts are now less restrictive in that they can now be attached together at several different alignment points, which allows for different “default” spring extensions when the construction is frozen.

Other changes

I’ve changed the underlying physics implementation of rotary attachments (hinges) to be in line with all the other jointed attachments.  Among other things, this allowed me to add a configurable torque value to the servo motor part behaviour.  Finally, a bunch of other things have been tweaked, including new UI elements, SFX and so on.