Help Create rope attachment points on gameobject

[vedders]

Hi all,

I'm new here so go easy.

My plan is to use Obi Rope to string together lobster fishing pots and have them fall off the back of a fishing boat.

In Unity I would create a prefab of the lobster pot and have an empty gameobject as my connection point to make connecting the rope system to each one easier and hopefully automated. 

Something like this :
┬--------┬--------┬---------┬--------┬
☐       ☐        ☐        ☐        ☐

From what I understand, with my 1 hour of playing with it, is the rope connects to an object by its location instead of pointing it to an object and have it automatically join to it.

Is my understanding correct?
Can it be made to work like described above with it automatically connecting to an object I tell it to rather than manually positioning the rope for each connection?

Finally, is this the best approach or will one of your other products, such as Filo be a better option?

Thanks in advance
Vedders

[josemendez]

From what I understand, with my 1 hour of playing with it, is the rope connects to an object by its location instead of pointing it to an object and have it automatically join to it.

Is my understanding correct?

Hi!

Correct, it's done this way so that the object doesn't get "launched" towards the rope, or the rope "launched" towards the object when the attachment activates. Neither result is visually pleasing (or make any sense in a physical context since it involves teleporting objects). See:

http://obi.virtualmethodstudio.com/manua...ments.html

It's important to realize that attachments do not move the particle group to the position of the target object, nor the target object to the position of the particle group. Moving the particle group to the target's position would collapse all particles into a single point, and would result in a kickback effect once the particles spring back to their original positions. Moving the target could cause a whole palette of issues depending on your game logic.

Instead, particles in the group are attached at their current position relative to the target object. This makes it simple to work with multiple particles, and ensures smooth attachments with no initial "jumps" or sudden motions.

If you want particles attached at a specific position other than their position at the time of creating the attachment, you can set their position at runtime before creating the attachment: see scripting particles.

Can it be made to work like described above with it automatically connecting to an object I tell it to rather than manually positioning the rope for each connection?

Depending on the exact outcome you want, you may either programmatically move a point in the rope to the object, the object to the rope, both to their average position, etc. Or, if you've got a sequence of objects/points that you want the rope to pass trough, you may want to create the rope entirely at runtime. There's many different ways to do this.

Finally, is this the best approach or will one of your other products, such as Filo be a better option?

Depends on what you want the rope to do, if it's important for it to bend and swirl realistically, and how you want to interact with it, if at all.

If it's just eye candy, Filo will do fine and it's considerably cheaper from a performance standpoint.