Ok, I think I’ve had enough of the physics. All I want to do is have a player ship and allow it to attach another mesh component, but the degree of difficulty is insane!
I managed to figure out how to dynamically spawn and attach the objects. It was a bit tricky (ie why is weld off by default??), but I got there, and it didn’t cost me too much time.
Then I noticed that I couldn’t set the mass, or at least it wasn’t responding. Tracked that down to a bug in the PIE Collision code, that took a day or so.
Then I noticed that even though my attached object had a mass of 0.0kg - the center of mass was moving. You can’t set that in UE4, and COMNudge didn’t work. So I disregarded most of the UE4 code and ended up working with PhysX instead.
Then I was getting this odd behaviour if I applied a right handed torque my object would translate. left handed torque was ok. Tracked that down to a slight overlap in collision between the player ship and the attached component. Some sort of warning would have saved me a lot of time.
Now I have the equipment attaching, and I can set the center of mass and moment of inertia. Works fine on the main ship. Problem is even though my attached equipment has a mass of 0.0kg vs the mass of 3000kg of my ship, the player ship can’t budge a 30,000kg asteroid on collision, while my 0kg attachment sends it flying off the screen.
I’m not sure I can take this anymore. We’re early in our project and I’m strongly considering switching to a different engine. This is a CORE component, it really shouldn’t be so hard.
My current plan is to try and write my own physics code. It will be quicker and sufficient for what I need. All I want now from UE4 is just basic collisions. Surely that works… right?