So after playing some newer games with my new rig (which runs like a charm), I started to do some coding again. And I decided to pause developement on PjW for one or two weaks so that I can finally finish up version 1.53 of the [Newtonplayground]((/creations/newtonplayground/).
This was something sitting on my neck for too long now, as I already stated in the newton forums that a new version of NPG was almost finished but somehow I always got distracted and just forgot about that. But not this time! This new release won’t bring a lot of features, and I mainly want to release it because newton has made some good steps since the lastly released NPG version (1.51). It’s more stable and a lot faster, so many of the samples that were slowing down with newton 1.51 now run smooth with 1.53. But there will be one totally new feature to NPG : Skinned ragdolls. I finished this feature over the last two days and they’re now fully functional, you can also even attach springs and joints to them, which makes up for some interesting things to do. NPG uses the Milkshape fileformat for skinned ragdolls and sadly I was only able to find one model whose bones (after altering them by myself) are useable directly with newton, most of the models around the net have their bones made for animating rather than for physics and often have over twenty bones. So this feature is kind of limited, but not due to it’s implementation but rather availability of models on the net. Maybe for another version of the NPG I’ll also add other file formats to load the skinned ragdolls from.
And last but not least I also made a small video showing off the new skinned ragdolls in NPG. You can grab it here, it’s a 4 MByte WMV file.
Edit : Here is another video, it’s kind of a “poor” trampoline made with the spring feature of NPG and shows a skinned ragdoll falling down on it.