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The Physical Object Editor
Objects in Physical's physics engines are made up of atoms and
links, as described earlier. Polygons are stretched across those atoms and links
to texture objects. Objects of this kind are of course not exactly industry
standard, so a tool had to be created to help game designers create them. That
tool is the Physical Object Editor (POE).
Object creation using POE generally follows this path:
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First, an artist draws the object using image editing
software, saving it as a TGA. (Even MS Paint will do, if you can convert its
output into TGAs.)
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Then, either a programmer or the artist uses POE's "Auto
Generate from Image" functionality to import the image. This creates an atom
and link lattice based on the image, interpreting alpha levels of 0 as
transparency in RGBA images and the color magenta as transparency in RGB
images.
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The atom lattice automatically generated provides only a rough
outline of the object, so the programmer must then manually tweak the atoms to
provide a closer fit to the image.
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Finally, the properties of the atoms themselves are edited in
the object editor. These properties include the masses of the atoms and the
strength of the links. Atoms and links can also be assigned to groups, which
can be used in the code of the game to assign the atoms or links to various
roles (engines, etc.).
The easiest way to understand the object editor is to look at an
already created object. I suggest opening the spaceship from the Physical
Asteroids demo game. To find out more about creating and editing your own
objects, see the Reference section.
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