Dominos

I don’t know what the formula for increasing momentum would be or how to add it.

Gravity would slow it down like going up a ramp.

http://www.birdshow.net/unity/Dominos.html

-SB-

It seems to work fine. What’s wrong with your player as is?

It’s the physics, not the player, as each domino falls it should pick up speed accordingly to the center of gravity, slow down as it goes up hill, speed up as it goes down hill, somehow each domino has to know the forces of the domino in front and behind I would think.

The way it is now I think the dominos should fall faster gradually until it reaches the end.

-SB-

But real dominoes don’t do that…

I’m pretty sure that dominoes pick up most of their speed right at the start and don’t really get any faster. The only problem I see with your dominoes is that they fall way to slowly. Perhaps you need to give them less mass.

… or less rotational drag.

Actually this test gave me an idea for a simple game. Have a series of surfaces that the user can draw a line of dominoes. Maybe have hills and ramps, etc. and as their mouse “draws” on the surface, instantiate a series of dominoes. Could get pretty physics intensive pretty fast, but it might be a fun little project…

Typically, if you physics feel too “slow”, it is because objects are too large; with the default settings, a default cube is 1x1x1 meter, so dominoes can get pretty big pretty quickly.

The quick-and-dirty solution is to increase gravity - that way, they’ll fall faster and hence, feel smaller. Modifying mass will not do anything in itself

Here’s another try. I lowered the friction on all the pieces. I’d like to be able to switch cameras and follow the dominos as they fall.

http://www.birdshow.net/unity/Dominos2.html

Still no cigar.

-SB-

I think this look better, but …

Is it possible to keep the domino-to-domino friction where it is currently at, but return the domino-to-floor friction back to what it was?

David

You should model the dominoes at actual size if you want them to behave properly. Otherwise, you have to fiddle with various parameters to get them to look right, like gravity or timeScale. (Mass doesn’t affect how objects move; it only affects how objects react when colliding with other objects.)

–Eric

I tried making them smaller and I had trouble with the camera. All the dominos have a wood physics material on them and I lowered the Dynamic and Static friction and that is where I am now. How would I measure the dominos?

-SB-

When I play your web-player, my dominoes always stop somewhere. I think you need to move them a little closer together.

1 unit = 1 meter. So make them about .052 units tall. The only thing is, you have to make the collisions more accurate when dealing with small scales, so reduce the min penetration for penalty in the physics settings. But if it’s too small, then objects start jittering, so probably somewhere around .0005 through .001 would work.

–Eric

Thanks, I’ll give it a try.

-SB-

… or, as Nick suggested, just scale up the gravity. If your objects are 10x too large, try scaling up the gravity until you like the effect.

I like that idea for a game. When I was a kid I used to have some kinda dominoes kit with ramps and other mad things to waste hours with- think it was called Domino Rally. Would be good to create a virtual version.

A while ago I actually did a prototype of a game very similar to what bigK described. Since only a relative few dominoes are in motion at any given time, there’s no performance worries. The only problem was figuring out what to do with the actual game once the mechanics were in place, so that’s been on the back burner…

–Eric