Fun with Physics in Second Life

[Gopi Passiflora]

What are some fun things to do or stuff that you've seen done with the Physics engine in Second Life? (I don't just mean breast physics of course!)

[Frionil Fang]

A double pendulum that successfully ran for about 2 days until it exploded. A pendulum with the components set to 0 friction should theoretically run forever since there's no air drag or anything, but the physics engine doesn't have that kind of theoretical perfection so it'll lose energy. A double pendulum's chaotic behavior can offset that and hit a seemingly stable resonance where it keeps going much longer than expected, until it gets a momentary impulse so hard that the joints clip through each other and fly apart.

Too bad we don't have ragdoll body physics, I'd spend most of my time just falling down a set of stairs over and over...

[Gopi Passiflora]

1 minute ago, Frionil Fang said:

A double pendulum that successfully ran for about 2 days until it exploded. A pendulum with the components set to 0 friction should theoretically run forever since there's no air drag or anything, but the physics engine doesn't have that kind of theoretical perfection so it'll lose energy. A double pendulum's chaotic behavior can offset that and hit a seemingly stable resonance where it keeps going much longer than expected, until it gets a momentary impulse so hard that the joints clip through each other and fly apart.

Too bad we don't have ragdoll body physics, I'd spend most of my time just falling down a set of stairs over and over...

Wow that's cool! I actually didn't know that tidbit about double pendulums!

[Ceka Cianci]

There was a neat video  that someone posted up, I wanna say last summer with someone playing with physics.. It was really neat too.

[Arduenn Schwartzman]

Long ago, in a sandbox far far away, I linked 10 plywood boxes together, all placed inside each other, then set to physical and then applied the script function llBreakAllLinks( );

This got me banned from the sandbox instantly with the message "We know your kind. We don't want you here."

Edited April 7, 2023 by Arduenn Schwartzman

[Scylla Rhiadra]

54 minutes ago, Arduenn Schwartzman said:

"We know your kind. We don't want you here."

How often have I said this about you, Arduenn?

[Love Zhaoying]

I recently, because I needed to (for reasons), put a number of small physical prims in a physical prim "box".  (Think, like a gumball machine.)

Getting the prims in the box is only a little challenging, if I did something wrong they rolled down the incline off my property. 

Getting a lid on the box wasn't too hard..(the box did not essplode as predicted by some)..

The end of the 'spearmint (so far was), I learned that you can attach the "box" but the physical prims that were inside the box go everywhere. Darn it!

 

[KT Kingsley]

A long time I was given a completely unscripted physical clock when I came across its builder in a sandbox. It usually seems to run for a few minutes before something breaks it.

[Love Zhaoying]

5 hours ago, Arduenn Schwartzman said:

Long ago, in a sandbox far far away, I linked 10 plywood boxes together, all placed inside each other, then set to physical and then applied the script function llBreakAllLinks( );

This got me banned from the sandbox instantly with the message "We know your kind. We don't want you here."

I suppose they assumed you were working on making a "continuous esssploding prim-fountain".  Griffer!!!

[Arduenn Schwartzman]

1 hour ago, Love Zhaoying said:

I suppose they assumed you were working on making a "continuous esssploding prim-fountain".

I actually made a prim egg too, once - a hollow elongated, physical sphere with a smaller, solid, physical, elongated sphere inside. The inner egg was not linked to the outer. The inner was also constantly spinning, making the outer egg wobble and move around in an unpredictable manner.

Edited April 7, 2023 by Arduenn Schwartzman

[Love Zhaoying]

9 minutes ago, Arduenn Schwartzman said:

The inner was also constantly spinning, making the outer egg wobble and move around in an unpredictable manner.

Like a Weeble! You know, "Weebles Wobble, but they Don't Fall Down!"

[StarlanderGoods]

Unlinking and enabling physics on a 250+ prims building I had. Made a party out of it, invited a couple of friends, it was great.  The thing collapsed and exploded like it was fireworks.

Since the whole thing was contained in my plot of land, it ended like a ball pit, but made of prims, and we dived in and played around until things got too clippy and it started flooding the neighbors with sharpnel, so I cleaned the thing up.

[Bree Giffen]

Many years ago I tried making a large amount of torus prims and then set them to physical. The mayhem was about as much as I expected. 

I was wondering where you wandered off to Gopi. 

[Frionil Fang]

The prim trampoline: 2 prims with their bounciness (restitution) set to 1 can bounce against each other for minutes, longer with lower gravity because high velocities cause more imprecisions and loss of energy. One of the prims is invisible here, I'm sitting on it, and it's locked to not rotate too much with llSetStatus(STATUS_ROTATE_X|STATUS_ROTATE_Y, FALSE) so it doesn't land on a corner and bounce off the trampoline. Unfortunately the avatar's innate restitution is low and can't be changed so you can't bounce very much without the helper prim.

For a different take, make the prim you sit on have zero gravity instead of just low, allow rotation, put it inside a large hollow, translucent bouncy sphere and give it a strong push. Use mouselook at your own risk of nausea.

[Kimmi Zehetbauer]

I like to have fun imploding things.  I grab a fair size item, unlink, tick Physical and Temporary, and watch the fun!

[benchthis]

6 hours ago, Arduenn Schwartzman said:

I actually made a prim egg too, once - a hollow elongated, physical sphere with a smaller, solid, physical, elongated sphere inside. The inner egg was not linked to the outer. The inner was also constantly spinning, making the outer egg wobble and move around in an unpredictable manner.

This brought up a memory of a cool thing i'd used to do with physics. I'd take a sphere make it about 2x2x2 hollow it out, make it slightly transparent, I'd move it about 3 meters off the ground. I would select the object, hold control or shift (cant remember which off hand) move any axis arrow slightly to make a copy of the sphere. Select copy decrease scale to about .5 and move this copy inside the larger sphere. I would then select the smaller sphere, edit. find the physics settings and reduce gravity for this to about -.01 something like that just a little less gravity so object will float before exiting build tools make another copy of the smaller sphere make this a bit heavier for physics, make another copy. for the 3rd one give little less gravity than the first. all 3 objects should behave differently inside the larger sphere. Select the larger sphere and reduce gravity slightly and it will attempt to float with all 3 objects inside a few pressing down on it 1 pressing up. These are fun to play with. They are like beach balls, but funner. Sometimes they glitch out and shoot spheres out but they return to the larger sphere. 

Edited April 7, 2023 by benchthis

[Persephone Emerald]

A easy trick that people who aren't used to building like is to make hollow, semi-transparent spheres about 3m x 3m x 3m. Have them and you go inside. Then make them physical. This makes giant hamster balls you can roll around inside.

I also enjoy making physical balls on a sky platform, especially if you can make them rubber. Then either push them off or make the platform phantom. This can of course seem like griefing to neighbors, so be careful where you do this. Objects falling from the sky and rolling about can be fun to some, but annoying to others.

Edited April 7, 2023 by Persephone Emerald

[Gopi Passiflora]

5 hours ago, Bree Giffen said:

Many years ago I tried making a large amount of torus prims and then set them to physical. The mayhem was about as much as I expected. 

I was wondering where you wandered off to Gopi. 

I just decided to take a break from the forums, is all. Thanks for noticing my absence though!

These are all fun ideas, everyone!

[Love Zhaoying]

Trampolines are fun, I've not made one but played with them. I THINK they were using some physics (not just thrusting you up with a BOING!!).

[Caeruleiae]

I've been messing about with physics lately in some things I've been building thanks to a friend who helped me work on a couple scripts and understanding how physics work in sl. My builds I've used for it are all just basic prims. I've had to learn my lesson a few times on going a little bit too far with my experiments and the potential effects. 

I did accidentally drop a bunch of blinking physical  egg prims that changed color and made a noise every time they hit something-on someone's head the other day though. That wouldn't have happened if I hadn't accidentally removed the prim I was standing on. I'm really glad the guy didn't get mad and took it in stride while I rained down a whole mess of ridiculousness on him. That took a bit to clean up too because rogue eggs are insane. 

[Rick Nightingale]

5 hours ago, Caeruleiae said:

That took a bit to clean up too because rogue eggs are insane. 

Note for the future: my trick is to drop a listener script into things when I  do this, and I have a simple HUD with a kill button.

I did the same when I was making the Twisted Protocubes. Much easier to hit that red button that trying to catch 200 of the runny (and teleporting!) little blighters in a sandbox.

Edit: of course, it's always obvious after the event.

Edited April 8, 2023 by Rick Nightingale

[Caeruleiae]

30 minutes ago, Rick Nightingale said:

Note for the future: my trick is to drop a listener script into things when I  do this, and I have a simple HUD with a kill button.

I did the same when I was making the Twisted Protocubes. Much easier to hit that red button that trying to catch 200 of the runny (and teleporting!) little blighters in a sandbox.

Edit: of course, it's always obvious after the event.

Oh that's a good idea thank you!

Mostly I keep my experimenting in some empty sandboxes so it minimizes the damage I cause.  This person happened to teleport in as I was building up in the air. Poor guy had no idea what was about to happen-neither did I until I deleted the wrong prim. 

Live and learn-right? 

[benchthis]

In case anyone is interested in how physics works in second life. Here's little simple experiment. On your land or in a sandbox rezz a cube from the build tools; you may need to right click it and press edit for the build tool window to open. 

With the build tool window open find the tab that says object and place a check mark in the physical field box. Now when you bump the cube it will move. Before it would not move. If you would like to make it heavier or float go to the features tab and adjust the gravity setting. Note: negative numbers will cause object to float. Start very mimimal with negative gravity does not take much. If you set gravity to 0 it give you better idea of what it's like without gravity, it will not do anything after settings are changed unless you physically push the object, if gravity set to zero. If gravity set to -0.1 it will move. 

Fun to play with and experiment. I used to build contained containers to work inside of so my pieces would not fly all over. Sometimes containment would not work so had to have double containments.  Fun times. 

 

[Caeruleiae]

It's also fun to use scripts that not only make these things physical but make it so they straighten themselves back up when you're done messing about with them.

That's what my whole egg thing started out as. If it wasn't for my meddling clicky clicky fingers I would have succeeded. Back to the drawing board on that one-but I have to admit it was a lot of fun and pretty darn funny too. 

Edited April 8, 2023 by Caeruleiae

[Marigold Devin]

On 4/7/2023 at 1:40 AM, Gopi Passiflora said:

What are some fun things to do or stuff that you've seen done with the Physics engine in Second Life? (I don't just mean breast physics of course!)

 

7 hours ago, Caeruleiae said:

I've been messing about with physics lately in some things I've been building thanks to a friend who helped me work on a couple scripts and understanding how physics work in sl. My builds I've used for it are all just basic prims. I've had to learn my lesson a few times on going a little bit too far with my experiments and the potential effects. 

I did accidentally drop a bunch of blinking physical  egg prims that changed color and made a noise every time they hit something-on someone's head the other day though. That wouldn't have happened if I hadn't accidentally removed the prim I was standing on. I'm really glad the guy didn't get mad and took it in stride while I rained down a whole mess of ridiculousness on him. That took a bit to clean up too because rogue eggs are insane. 

I bought some cushions and changed them their physics so a friend could walk through them and they'd move like he was kicking them so it may have helped him vent his annoyance at something, then I swapped the cushions for 3D women and changed them to physical and they bounced off the sky platform I was working on and fell to the ground. That was fun, apart from the blighters had bounced all over the place, some had even gone "off world". I'll probably meet some of them again if I ever bother to undo the coalesced cubes cluttering up my inventory.