Algodoo

ALGODOO ONLY (apparently)

"A" to go left
"D" to go right
"Enter" to become/un-become moonbase.

Because there is nothing much else to do at this particular moment and I am spectacularly bored, I will write a a few paragraphs on the development of this guy.

I need to be interested in a scene I am making, and I can't force the interest. For several days I occasionally messed around with Algodoo, trying to find something to spark my interest. When I don't know what to make I generally play with water, stack hundreds of objects together repeatedly, or fiddle around with suspension.

I was quite bored at this point so I had a try linking together a whole bunch of basic suspension units. It turned out they look kinda cool when rolling over something. I drove this little creation back and forth over small obstacle courses until I realised he had difficulty climbing a small ledge. I had a mini-epiphany at this point, and realised that I could place the suspension at different heights on the edges of the vehicle so the wheels could get a grip on any higher objects. With this accomplished, I merged all the suspension units to reduce the geom count.

What I now saw was a kindof "moving bowl", and this sparked my interest for several reasons.
1: It looked vaguely tank-like, thus the potential for destruction existed.
2: It had a nice hollow to put mechanisms in for whatever I wanted to accomplish (I didn't know yet)

I was reminded about the lack of suspension on my Turtle-Bot and thought HMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM.

With that in mind I thought of a new system (to me) of lifting the wheels off the ground. The problem with the Turtle was that the legs would rub against the ground as it was lifting up, which was a problem if I wanted a fair amount of friction to keep it in place.
The new mechanism was basically a piston which would bring the legs straight down to the ground; no rubbing or sliding involved.

I already knew how to activate it and do half/quarter turns using single key presses so the activated was not the problem.

With the legs sorted out, I could focus on the "shell". I decided on the simplicity of the sides being attached to a stick, which was the activated by the piston, that was simple enough.
The roof, however, was more difficult, and I'm still not satisfied with it. The early design caused it to slide from side to side, even when not deployed. The addition of the antenna (the red thing) I made it stop. Despite this, I would rather have found a way for the pistons to raise the roof directly, instead of using the sides as a lifting force.(maybe I'll work on that later, meh)

And THEN, oh joy, oh rapture, came the fucktarded process of making it as reliable as possible through a shitload of calibration.

But then when it was finished and all was well.

So the lesson learned today, kids, is that recoloured "gold" can also serve as a stone and metal texture quite admirably.