Ziggy project: Orbital Lemmings with Niagara
Ziggy was another experiment using Niagara particles. I used to love the old Lemmings games and thought it could be cool if you had to rescue them from tiny little unstable solar systems, using orbital mechanics, gravitational slingshots and simplified rocket physics.
I didn’t go very far beyond generating procedural solar systems where particle/planets were populated from data tables, and then orbital mechanics were simulated with each planet body having gravitational influence on its neighbours based on mass and distance etc.
Turns out it IS rocket science, and it’s bloody difficult.
procedural solar systems with stars, planets and moons. a brief settle period was run so that highly unstable planets could be killed off, only leaving the bodies with semi-stable orbits.
I also wanted to create rockets and spaceships that could dock together and be rigid, so I experimented with some SUPER clunky XPBD particle constraints all written as custom HLSL snippets in niagara. I really had no idea what I was doing.
dynamic grids of constrained particles, with their neighbor hierarchies stored in integer render targets
Some sort of stress test, distance constraint only I think