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Show posts Menu(Edited by Entroper at 5:24 pm on Oct. 23, 2001)
http://www.seriousfortress.com/images/SeriouslyForums/BridgeBuilder/riptower/scsht000.jpg" border="0">
At the beginning of the simulation (note that "pause" is activated), the tower looks like this:
http://www.seriousfortress.com/images/SeriouslyForums/BridgeBuilder/riptower/scsht001.jpg" border="0">
Immediately after unpausing, the tower looks like this:
http://www.seriousfortress.com/images/SeriouslyForums/BridgeBuilder/riptower/scsht002.jpg" border="0">
Now, it occured to me, as I'm sure it will occur to many of you, that perhaps the tower is too heavy to support its own weight. But you would think it would have to "settle" first, and then only the bottom links would be destroyed. I further studied this by creating a simple box in midair, so that it would freefall toward the ground, and should have no stress whatsoever. Results:
http://www.seriousfortress.com/images/SeriouslyForums/BridgeBuilder/riptower/scsht010.jpg" border="0">
http://www.seriousfortress.com/images/SeriouslyForums/BridgeBuilder/riptower/scsht011.jpg" border="0">
http://www.seriousfortress.com/images/SeriouslyForums/BridgeBuilder/riptower/scsht012.jpg" border="0">
Perhaps this is some sort of quirk in the physics? If I were to take a stab in the dark, I'd say that floating point errors are accumulating... I had the same problem in a 3D program I wrote, where a series of rotations screwed up a model's orientation, and really funky things happened to it on the screen. Maybe if too many beams are putting pressure on each other at once, the same sort of thing happens, and instead of putting insane stretches on a model, it puts those stretches on the beams, causing them to snap almost immediately.