Created: November 26 2012

Rocket platform


Well it has been almost a year since I started working on the editor and it is now pretty much ready for initial release. There are still many improvements and features I would like to add, but it already has vastly more than I had originally anticipated for the first offering. The original estimate I made for a three month development time looks naive now, but that was based on the assumption that it would be basically the same as the free version but in a user-friendly Qt shell, and that I could re-use a lot of code from the free version.

Neither of these came to pass, mainly due to the overheads of making everything scriptable, whilst keeping the scripting working together with a comprehensive undo/redo system. I also had not really planned to support images so early either.

But enough of that, you're here about the rocket platform thing aren't you... this was a little diversion that I had been thinking of trying for a long time, many years in fact, and finally got around to it.


The little rockets at the bottom simply look at the angle of the platform and push one way or the other to keep it level, unless it is spinning around very fast in which case they just try to slow the spin. The larger rockets push the platform towards the goal position, by scaling the thrust relative to the dot-product of their direction and the direction to the goal, and that's about it really. There are a few obvious constraints applied, for example the rockets can't fire backwards etc. and there is a limit to how much stronger one can be than the other, but overall it turned out to be quite stable for such a simple set of rules.

Binaries: iforce2d-rocketplatform-bin.zip (includes Linux, Windows, Mac)