Hi there! I'm currently working on improvements for linked groups. The way of using them brings a lot of power to the gameengine (e.g. build up reusable libraries, hide implementation detail) but also lacks some missing features.
1) first part: group references At the moment, you can't detect at runtime if the object controller owner is part of a group. The duplicating object also doesn't know about its group members. There is no (easy) way to get the necessary references. My proposal is to provide an improved interface for KX_GameObjects. Here you can find the complete proposal: http://de.wikibooks.org/wiki/Benutzer:Moerdn/_Blender_2.5_Feature_Proposal I've already implemented this small feature and it would be nice if the BGE devs could take a closer look. This page also contains patches, a windows build and some links to youtube that demonstrates some of the possibilities. As you can see in the videos, it makes live for BGE artists and programmers a lot easier. (e.g. parent instances together or use properties as 'constructor' to parametrise these instances to allow creating different behaviour for every single instance) 2) second part: working rigid body constraints for group instances At the moment it is not possible to use constraints with instanced groups. They are completely ignored during the process of replication. It would be nice to get this missing feature for blender gameengine. Here you can read the full feature proposal: https://gitorious.org/bge-sandbox/pages/GroupCons I've also implemented this feature as a quick demonstration. Almost all of the physic constraints demos works well so far (simple hinge, trampoline, complex ragdolls ..) All relevant links to files (builds, videos, test blendfiles) and a discussion is posted to blenderartists: http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?220666-BGE-proposal-group-references-and-workflow-improvements-%28discussion-testbuilds%29 All of my coding stuff could also be visited on gitorious: https://gitorious.org/~moerdn/blenderprojects/moerdn-bge-sandbox relevant branches at the moment: group-ref group-cons I'm very interested in improving BGE with some smaller things to get closer to the code base. It would be very nice to get some feedback. Thanks for reading! best regards, moerdn _______________________________________________ Bf-committers mailing list Bf-committers@blender.org http://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-committers